One of the things I realized is we never have had a thread about going from partial to full to agent or publisher. There's a lot of info out there on going from query to partial and a fair amount of info on from query to an agent. And individuals have given this information. We've also gotten it from various agents, but that's sort of the other side of the coin. What I'd like to do is get this information into one thread.
The question is what are the chances from a partial to a full, and from a full to an agent or publisher. Needless to say, for an individual piece of work, the only question is whether it is good enough, or not. But overall, I guess I'm wondering if you send out X number of fulls, what should your expectation be.
To give you my experience:
Best of luck,
Jim Clark-Dawe
The question is what are the chances from a partial to a full, and from a full to an agent or publisher. Needless to say, for an individual piece of work, the only question is whether it is good enough, or not. But overall, I guess I'm wondering if you send out X number of fulls, what should your expectation be.
To give you my experience:
- EQUINE LIABILITY had partials to two publishers (publishing expectations would not warrant an agent). One made an offer. The second had an editor who liked it, but couldn't quite sell it to her staff. As it was nonfiction, the book wasn't written until after the offer.
- STALLED DREAMS was originally sent out years ago, with no requests for anything. I realized it had some serious problems, but more to experiment with queries, I sent it out. It resulted in 9 requests for partials, two of which ended in requests for fulls. No offer was made, but as I said, I knew it had serious problems.
- THE NEXT STEP went out with a partial for most of the queries. It had three requests for fulls, one of which resulted in an offer of representation.
- THE PICTURE had more naked queries than THE NEXT STEP. End result was six requests for partials, two requests for fulls. I think its problem is that its a YA book (based on age of the protagonist), yet written as an adult book. I received no offers for representation.
- VENOM is not my book, but I did the querying for it, as well as writing the query. It had six requests for partials, none of which requested anything more. It has a whole heap of problems in the first ten pages, which the writer decided he didn't need to deal with.
Best of luck,
Jim Clark-Dawe