What Do You Consider a Reasonable Response Time?

A reasonable response time is when the real response time matches what it says on the agent's website is their response time.

I think a "reasonable" response time is almost as subjective as our personal taste in books. And it depends a lot on the agent being queried. If you're querying a former-assistant-turned-agent who's trying to establish themselves and actively building their list, you might expect a faster response to your query. If you're querying an established agent with a full list who stays open to queries just in case that special one stumbles across his desk, but who isn't actively signing new clients, you don't expect as fast of a response--queries aren't a priority for this agent.

As for the speedy response time question, I don't necessarily think a fast response is the agent blowing you off. What if you just happened to query as the agent is getting to the bottom of their query queue, so they reply to yours as well as those they've been sitting on for three weeks? It isn't beyond the realm of possibility.

I agree with ChaosTitan, it all depends on the agent, that being said, I also agree with waylander.

In this industry, though there is a lot of nail-biting, anxious jitters, I think we've also learned to be a bit patient and have the understanding the agent will get back to you when they can, it could take days, weeks, or even months.

It doesn't matter to me, except I like when they do respond during whatever time span they have created. I also like when they put at their website that they respond during a certain time only if interested. I like straight forward and honest.

ChaosTitan said:

I think a "reasonable" response time . . . depends a lot on the agent being queried . . . . If you're querying an established agent with a full list who stays open to queries just in case that special one stumbles across his desk, but who isn't actively signing new clients, you don't expect as fast of a response--queries aren't a priority for this agent.

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On the other hand, I got my all-time fastest response ever (7 minutes) from Robert Gottlieb, the head of Trident Media Group. Go figure.

As long as it takes to get a yes. I'm always busy, so I never have worried about response time for anything.

Personally, I like a month for queries, 6 weeks for partials and 8 weeks for fulls. But if an agent has a posted timeline or has specified a timeline in correspondence, that's fine, so long as he/she sticks to it.

All rejection stings, whether it comes in 30 minutes or 30 days. Personally, I preferred quicker rejections so that I could move on. I think the only time I felt blown off while querying was when I received form rejections on fulls.

hillaryjacques said:

Personally, I like a month for queries, 6 weeks for partials and 8 weeks for fulls. But if an agent has a posted timeline or has specified a timeline in correspondence, that's fine, so long as he/she sticks to it.

All rejection stings, whether it comes in 30 minutes or 30 days. Personally, I preferred quicker rejections so that I could move on. I think the only time I felt blown off while querying was when I received form rejections on fulls.

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That's low