Pet Peeve: When No Reply Means No Interest

I just see it as typical business practice. I sent my resume for a normal job last month. I emailed to confirm they got it, which they did. After that, never heard back.

As an actor I only hear if I have a callback.

Honestly, I know it's annoying, but it's pretty standard business practice and I'm always surprised that for some reason when it comes to the publishing world people suddenly expect a different response.

Except that, in some (rare) cases, no reply may mean something quite different. I had a "no response" response to a query some years ago, and took it exactly as "no interest". EIGHTEEN MONTHS later, I got an effusively apologetic letter from the agent, saying he'd lost his positive response to my query on his "ex"-assistant's desk for all that time. Could I please send him the manuscript, if still available?

Well, of course, it was still available. So I sent it.

And got a "no response" response.

This person was, and remains, a highly-respected and visible top-tier New York agent.

I've learnt to live with it. After a certain amount of time passes, I write them off.

grizzletoad1 - This is not a new complaint. It's been hashed and re-hashed in this sub-forum, as well as in the Ask the Agent forum. Authors and agents have posted opinions on this particular practice, and there are very good reasons for agents to have a "no reply = no" policy.

Does it always seem fair to the hopeful writer? No. If it frustrates you, don't submit to agents with this policy.

I find it very rude as well. I keep a record of all my submissions and I never know when to mark it as a rejection if it's been a long time without a response because for all I know the lack of response could mean they are still considering it.

I sent a very short query, just a few lines, to a publisher earlier this year. I didn't hear back for about three months and got all depressed because I started doubting if my manuscript was ever going to sell because it had an unhappy ending. Then one day I got a reply asking for the whole manuscript. They ended up rejecting it in the end. But I didn't care I was just happy that I got a request for a full.

I think its unprofessional for agents and publishers to reject submissions with not responding. The author never knows what is going on. All is takes is hiring someone extra to handle sending rejection emails out. Let the author know they have been rejected so they can move on and not torment themselves with daydreams of someone reading their manuscript. It's cruel to leave them hanging. That's my opinion anyway.

Send hard copy query letters if you can. I have a 90% response rate with snail mail

I do wish they had an auto-reply set up to say the e-mail was received, at least.

Luckily, with the one query I sent that never got there, I knew because the agent posted they had replied to all queries up to X date. I sent again from a different address I have and I got a reply within her stated time period that time. But I only knew it never got there because 1) she always sends a reply, and 2) when I didn't get my reply by X date, I knew it was lost.

So it would cause a lot less anxiety to have an auto-responder say it arrived. After that, their policy is their policy.

Agents get hundreds of queries.

Plus, I've seen more than a few agents blog or tweet about receiving nasty or peevish responses to rejections and they get a bit fed up of having to deal with those.

Unfortunately, no response is generally the new R. Sad fact of life that a writer has to deal with. The entitlement mentality among some new writers makes life difficult for agents. They haven't the time to personally respond and tell an author why their story doesn't work for them.

No big deal.

*shrugs*

grizzletoad1 said:

How much time can it take to simply send a simple, one sentence, "Sorry, but this story is just not right for me," reply to a query?
Is that too much to ask for?

John

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Not long, but to get the real answer, multiply that time by at least several hundred, and perhaps a thousand. If an agent responds to your query, she also has to respond to all the others that don't interest her. After you subtract all the other things pulling on an agent's time, of course. Never mind the usually time sinks such as handling a whole bunch of selling writers, but don't presume that your non-response means all rejected writers receive the same.

And writer's bitch just as much about form rejections as about no response at all, so the agent or editor can't win.

Even those agents who don't respond when not interested often do take a lot of time with the very few writers who come close, but aren't quite there yet.

I never have understood why so many get annoyed with a non-response. There's nothing new about it, whether with agents or editors. It's old hat, and it saves both parties time and trouble. You just wait a given length of time, and then you move on.

There's nothing rude about it, and every agent and editor I know who does this states that they do it upfront. If you don't want to deal with a non-response, don't submit to these agents and editors.

It's only rude if they say they will respond, and then do not. It's just business, and good business, at that.

As Wayne says, if you want a much higher response rate, use snail mail.

Or, of course, you fiddle with your query until you have one an agent can't refuse.

An agent who has enough time to write a gracious letter to writers who send queries she isn't interested in either has waaayyyy too much time on her hands, or she makes enough money to have an assistant who does all this for her. Most agents have neither.

I prefer a response, however auto and form, but hey, I've learned to live with the no-by-silence rejections. It's a part of the business I can't control, so I don't waste psychic energy on it.

Wayne is right -- you'll get a higher response rate with paper subs. The agent's request for an SASE is an implicit promise to reply, and most do.

The receipt autoresponses that many agents now send, saying "I got it, consider it rejected if XXX weeks go by," are helpful. At least you know the email went through. I note the XXX response time in my database, but I generally only mark an unanswered query as a no-response rejection if six months have passed and I feel like querying another agent at that firm. Otherwise, it's no skin off anyone's butt if I leave the silent queries open and gaze at them with wistful hope once in a while.

Jamesaritchie said:

Not long, but to get the real answer, multiply that time by at least several hundred, and perhaps a thousand. If an agent responds to your query, she also has to respond to all the others that don't interest her. After you subtract all the other things pulling on an agent's time, of course.

And writer's bitch just as much about form rejections as about no response at all, so the agent or editor can't win.

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Quoting and bolding because it cannot be repeated enough.

Grizzletoad,

I know. It's especially hard to send a full and get a form response. But you do what everyone does...you send out more queries and hold your breath.
My Mom always said not to worry about what we can't change. Deal with it and move on.
It's hard, I can attest to that, but look at the alternatives. I'm not about to give up. Apparently I had the wrong agent. My bad. So I'll try again.
If no response means no interest, so be it.
My dream.....One day, when they do get back to me and I'm already represented, the joke will be on them.
Now to take my own advice and get busy!

Jamesaritchie said:

And writer's bitch just as much about form rejections as about no response at all, so the agent or editor can't win.

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Not me. "Definite" is a better outcome than "indefinite", even if it's a negative "definite".

My view is that any agent who specifically asks for snail-mail submissions AND an enclosed SASE owes a response to the submitter who plays by those rules, even if it's a form-rejection.

I respond to all of my queries, but we also have a general submissions address that collects most of them. Interns do some of the heavy lifting. And there is a lot of lifting. Thousands upon thousands of queries.

I've been averaging ten a day, everything from AWers, to forwarded queries from the agency, to referrals from other clients, etc. Even this modest amount is a fair amount of work. I don't generally see the really bad stuff, so almost everything that comes my way requires some attention. A few minutes, at least.

So imagine if you've got five minutes to consider a query and sample pages and decide whether to reject it, ask for a partial, or take a chance on a full. A partial will take twenty minutes or so and a full will take somewhere between a half hour and 20 hours, depending on if you lose interest or read to the end of a large novel, take notes, make an offer, etc.

You've got to reject most of the queries or you'll drown under the work load, but it's not an easy thing to judge a query in five minutes for a project that took a writer months and months to write.

Now imagine if you're an agent who does all her own query reading and has to wade through five hundred queries a week. She can't spend five minutes per. She probably can't manage more than a minute per query.

Keep in mind that you're doing other work, too, the kind that actually will bring you money. For example, I'm currently on the second day of my self-imposed two day goal to work on the latest by an existing client, which is 125,000 words long. I can't just read it, I need to make notes, check for continuity issues and the like. Query work is in addition to this sort of work and it's all speculative in nature.

It's no wonder so many agents don't bother responding to unsolicited queries. It's almost a surprise that so many do respond.

I have no explanation for why an agent wouldn't respond to a requested full. There really isn't a good reason.

IMO:

Agents often take so much time to respond anyway that the non-response is no more annoying. Waiting eight weeks for "No" is little different from waiting eight weeks and then concluding it's a "No."

grizzletoad1 said:

But what is it with these agents that reject you simply by ignoring your query? In my book, that's just plain rude. How much time can it take to simply send a simple, one sentence, "Sorry, but this story is just not right for me," reply to a query?

..
All I'm asking for here is a little common decency. Is that too much to ask for?

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I'm curious - do you follow this 'common decency' in your own correspondence?

For example this week I've received a request to donate to a charity, a request to apply for a new credit card, a suggestion to use the new Indian restaurant down the road, a pizza restaurant menu ... the list goes on.

If you received them, would you reply with a 'this credit card is not for me' to the credit card company? Would you reply (with feedback) to the restaurant down the road?

Why not? Why do those businesses not deserve the simple decency of a reply (even if 'your Indian food is not right for me') .. if a business (such as a writer) deserves a reply?

Business wise they are all the same. They are sending mail to others who might buy their products.

If you actually take the time to reply to all of the business requests you get stuffed in your letterbox then you are consistent - and a rare human being. (And that's before all of the business opportunities that I seem to get from Nigeria)

Mac

I understand that I am not an agent, and so it may very well be that while some agents are able to send a form response, others just can't. I'd rather have the form, but I accept that this is just the way it is sometimes.

However.

When an agent repeatedly drives home the point that he expects highly personalized query letters (on a blog, in interviews, on twitter), and is in fact offended by the idea that his name may just be pasted in to the same query several other agents are getting, I feel it is bad form for that type of agent to choose not to reply to personalized queries.

This is not to say I don't make an effort to personalize whether they ask for it or not. I will continue to do so, as it's in my best interest.

As for the comparison to junk mail, agents (at least the ones I query) INVITE queries. I think this is an important distinction.

And also, I think that comparison was just plain not nice. But maybe that's just me.

K. Taylor said:

I do wish they had an auto-reply set up to say the e-mail was received, at least.

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This. Saying query received and if you don't hear back in so many weeks: no thanks. It's automatic. Agent off the hook, writer knows not to re-send.

I don't have a problem with "no response means no" as long as I am told this from the start. But (I think) all agents allow simultaneous submissions and if I'm working the system correctly I should be subbing to multiple agents anyway. I've only seen "no simultaneous subs" in short story markets, and so far none have taken an NR=No approach.

Wordwrestler said:

I understand that I am not an agent, and so it may very well be that while some agents are able to send a form response, others just can't. I'd rather have the form, but I accept that this is just the way it is sometimes.

However.

When an agent repeatedly drives home the point that he expects highly personalized query letters (on a blog, in interviews, on twitter), and is in fact offended by the idea that his name may just be pasted in to the same query several other agents are getting, I feel it is bad form for that type of agent to choose not to reply to personalized queries.

This is not to say I don't make an effort to personalize whether they ask for it or not. I will continue to do so, as it's in my best interest.

As for the comparison to junk mail, agents (at least the ones I query) INVITE queries. I think this is an important distinction.

And also, I think that comparison was just plain not nice. But maybe that's just me.

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You're comparing apples to submarines. The reason an agent wants such personalized queries is to show that you've done the appropriate research. Not want a query that just has the agent's name pasted on it has nothing to do with any of this. No agent is offended by the fact that his name is pasted in, he's offended by the fact that one more "writer" is wasting his time with a generic query that eighty-eight other agents will see. . .and also reject.

The agent receives hundreds of queries, and most come from writers Who Have No Clue. They need some way to weed out those Who Do Have A Clue, and personalized queries are the best way of doing this.

And, yes, most agents request submissions, but not from you, me, or any other individual. They sure don't request queries from those Who Have No Clue. Most queries aren't nearly as interesting, or as well-written, as junk mail.

It really comes down to this. If you want a response, then only query agents who say they will respond. Or write a query good enough to get a response.

Chris P said:

I don't have a problem with "no response means no" as long as I am told this from the start. But (I think) all agents allow simultaneous submissions and if I'm working the system correctly I should be subbing to multiple agents anyway. I've only seen "no simultaneous subs" in short story markets, and so far none have taken an NR=No approach.

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If you're working the system effectively, you're querying very, very few agents at any given time. Shotgun queries of too many agents almost never work.

August said:

This. Saying query received and if you don't hear back in so many weeks: no thanks. It's automatic. Agent off the hook, writer knows not to re-send.

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Have you ever tried this with your own e-mail? It's not that easy, and it opens you up to all sorts of crap, including tons of spam.

You could always read through the agent's reply procedure and determine if their a no-reply practicer - and not submit to them. If the no means no is something you're that hung up on, you don't have to submit to them. Just a thought.

James, I tried to be clear that I do understand that there I things I don't know about the life of an agent and I accept that Perhaps they are just doing what they have to do.

I also said that I have and will continue to personalize to show that I did my homework.

AND

Some agents have said that online that they are OFFENDED by the idea that they may get their name pasted into a query. One even used the words "hurts my feelings."

And a couple of those agents have a no response=no policy.

THAT is what bothers me.

This is not the norm, James, but it is happening.

And I stand by my point that the junk mail analogy IS flawed. And AGAIN, that's not to say I have a big problem with "no response means no." I am merely pointing out that this is not the same as an agent who puts her contact info out there, gives people explicit directions on how to query her, and says she's looking for queries about XYZ.

You are right; I was not approached at a conference and asked to query (of course such a direct invitation wouldn't require a query, but a cover letter perhaps some actual material) but the agent ASKED FOR QUERIES for particular types of books. This is an invitation.

After all, the purpose of the query is to ask if we can send our material. That's what a query is. And agents are asking to be asked.

So the junk mail comparison just doesn't work, and that has nothing to do with me whining about "no response = no."