Just a matter of time

It's not math. It's not fishing (unless you presuppose that the bait you choose is all important).

Writing quality is fine, not 100% necessary, but a good step in the right direction. Plot, interesting characters, originality, high concept all count for more than writing quality IMO. I'm not saying I LIKE it, but that's just the way it is.

Certainly you should query your work widely. You never know when that 100th agent will come along who really sees the potential. Aside from which, 90 of the other 99 didn't read past the query letter, and the other 9 probably didn't read the whole manuscript.

There is certainly an amount of randomness to who picks up and who doesn't. It depends on how busy they are, whether they have clients with similar projects already on the go etc. But you still have to have a book that can sell for an agent to take it seriously.

My guess is this woman did not submit her manuscript sixty-two times. Sixty-two queries, maybe, and possibly sixty two synopses, but not the manuscript itself.

A bad query or a poor synopsis means agents and editors never get to see the manuscript itself.

Nor is there any way of telling how well she matched her submissions to the agents. The best query/synopsis/manuscript in the world will be rejected by an agent if it isn't something she handles.

And did she submit to one agent at a time, to twenty at a time, or what?

Anyway, there's never a way to make sense of such numbers. With so many variables, it's impossible.

But I will say that if you just take the approach of querying as many agents as possible and let it go at that, it will take a lot longer.

How long it takes to find an agent is determined by how well you research the agent, how well you write a query, how well you write a synopsis, and, ultimately, by how well you write a manuscript.

I agree with James.

When I first needed an agent I contacted three or four and got two offers.

When I next needed an agent I contacted about four and again, got two offers.

(I've not checked these numbers so my memory might be out by one or two here and there, but there's not a wide margin for error.)

It's a matter of writing a good book and then finding the best agents for it and for you.

I assume he's talking about The Help, which has been in the news lately, along with the author's story of how she wrote and queried and revised and queried and revised and queried over the course of 2-3 years (that time frame may be off) because she believed in the project.

She was writing a book which was likely to have a smallish audience compared to the "blockbuster" style novels that tend to dominate the best-seller lists and movies. There wasn't as big a demand for this kind of book, so it was more difficult to place. Eventually, she found someone who thought it worth taking on and who knew which editors were more likely to respond to it.

It's not luck. (Circumstances can play a part in it, though, if you account for the agent's schedule and mood, the current market, etc.)

If you scattershot queries to everyone with an inbox, you might get a bite or you might not. You might also end up querying a book about middle-aged women to Highlights magazine.

There's too much information available on-line to take a passive approach to querying. Find the agents that rep your genre. Find the ones whose personalities you mesh with. Query them, and, if the writing's sound, you should have better "luck" and "timing".

I don't know, I sent a lot more than sixty on two separate books before I found an agent. To my credit, though, the agent I signed with was one of the earlier ones I sent to. I sent the rest while I was waiting to hear back on the full manuscript.

I'm a big fan of the query widely philosophy. Not to people who don't take the genre or whatever, but to everyone who will that looks good. I think it's impossible to know based on the little two sentence snippets describing what an agent is looking for whether or not you'll mesh and they'll like your book or if your personalities are compatible. It might be that one of those dozens who says nothing more than "I'm looking for a good book with great writing and interesting characters" is the best match for you.

At the same time, if the work is good enough it'll attract a lot of interest. I could tell with the second book that I was close judging by the responses I received. The reason I continued to send it out was because I had such positive feedback. The first I gave up earlier because the feedback wasn't as good and I could tell it wasn't going to make it. The only reason I sent to so many there was because I had multiple versions of queries and opening pages, etc. that I experimented with.

tricon7 said:

I don't think I can discover an agent's personality just by the kind of manuscripts he's looking for, or a brief "about me" tag. At least, I haven't seen this so far. I'm not sure why I *shouldn't* appeal to as many agents as possible until I find one. I haven't seen a compelling reason not to, anyway.

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Those aren't your only resources. There are blogs and Twitter and Facebook, etc. Some even make occasional posts here. If you're interested in an agent, and said agent has a presence in social media, then you should be following them.

kaitie said:

I think it's impossible to know based on the little two sentence snippets describing what an agent is looking for whether or not you'll mesh and they'll like your book or if your personalities are compatible.

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Of course it is. But why would anyone stop researching after reading those snippets? That's where the research starts, not where it should end. That makes as much sense as stopping you research on which college to based on one line in the recruitment brochure that says, "We teach journalism. We also have three Coke machines in every dorm."

I'm glad your shotgun approach found you an agent, but that's a seriously piss poor way of landing an agent fast, or of landing the best possible agent out there.

I second James, on this one. The information is out there, if you are willing to research it a little more. I can't do the scattershot approach, because I need an agent really familiar with my genre. But even fine-tuning the search, I ended up with over a hundred agents on my to-be-queried list.

I found an awful lot of agents that had very little info out there. Sometimes I could look at some books they'd sold and that helped to a degree (helps more if I'd read them). I mean, obviously if someone had sold only romance I wouldn't bother to send to them. But a lot of agents don't have a big web presence.

I spent a ton of time going through each agent on my list, searching for them in various ways. Sometimes they'd get crossed off, but there were a lot, a whole lot, that I found very little on. Maybe my google-fu is just off, but I'm generally pretty good at this sort of thing.

kaitie said:

I found an awful lot of agents that had very little info out there. Sometimes I could look at some books they'd sold and that helped to a degree (helps more if I'd read them). I mean, obviously if someone had sold only romance I wouldn't bother to send to them. But a lot of agents don't have a big web presence.

I spent a ton of time going through each agent on my list, searching for them in various ways. Sometimes they'd get crossed off, but there were a lot, a whole lot, that I found very little on. Maybe my google-fu is just off, but I'm generally pretty good at this sort of thing.

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My experience exactly. You took the words right out of my mouth, kaitie. I'm a huge researcher and I can't tell you how many hours I've spent on Google and all the publishing/agenting websites and blogs I can, plus twitter, trying to get a sense of who the agents are and what they're looking for. In some cases, maybe most, I have enough information to feel comfortable querying someone. In others I've had to decide whether to query or not, depending on which way the scales seem to tip. Sometimes I just take a chance and query, as I have nothing to lose.

Every agent worth having has a BIG footprint. You can learn who their clients are, you can learn what books they're represented, and you can read enough of these books to learn just what kind of writing the agent likes.

You can also find out what her clients think about her, what kind of reputation she has, on and on.

While it isn't usually necessary, it's also possible to meet with many of the agents out there. Most of the good ones attend conferences, workshops, and seminars, and you can be there, as well.

It's just not that difficult to learn all you need to know about an agent. Trouble is, darned few writers make any real attempt to do so.

James, I know of excellent agents who you can't find by Googling, and who aren't included in publishing directories or on places like Query Tracker. I know of dreadful agents who are all over the internet (The Writers' Literary Agency, anyone?), and who do appear in the directories.

You're right, however, that a lot of submitting writers do bugger all to find out about the agents or publishers they're submitting to. That happens a lot. It's very foolish and foolhardy of them and it's very pertinent to the subject under discussion: if a writer doesn't do any research and just submits to everyone they can find they've got no idea whether anyone who responds is going to be able to get them a good deal, is going to sell them down the river, or take them for every penny they've got.

Which kind of answers the OP's question. If you just keep sending out submissions to all and sundry you're going to get an offer or two sooner or later. The real question is, how can you improve the chances of getting good offers from good agents?

tricon7 said:

As long as one's writing is good quality, I wonder how many times a person has to submit before getting an agent (much less getting published).

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I think it depends. If the work is of good commercial quality, then it is probably a number's game, hoping there is room and the market is hot enough and that it hits the right person on the right day. But if the work is good but not so commercial, then it either has to be rewritten to be more commercial (to appeal to more people) or submitted to smaller places that handle works that have less commercial appeal.

But don't give up, whichever method you chose, just know what you want and adjust accordingly.

Jodi

I know for a fact that there are some very good agents out there with no web presence whatsoever who only take snail mail queries. The most you can find is a listing with their address.

I know, Kaitie. I've found most of them by searching through their client lists and client interviews. But because they still take paper submissions only, they're way down my list. I might get around to querying them, when I've gone through all the e-submitters.

I tend to think of agents like that, along with the ones who take no new clients without a rec, as out of my league, anyway. They have a full client list already.

Seriously, I got no bites from the agents I'd researched to death and who had similar clients, writing similar books, and who had put out calls for the kind of material I was querying, even down to the age and sex of the MC and the sub-sub-sub-genre.

No bites.

All my bites came from agents I knew relatively little about, and the agent I chose? I started out knowing just his address, that he repped general fic and YA, and that his agency was probably waaaaay out of my league.

I wouldn't call my approach scattershot, however. I'd call it an Uzi with endless ammunition.

Phaeal said:

I wouldn't call my approach scattershot, however. I'd call it an Uzi with endless ammunition.

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I like this. Scattershot to me is just sending out to everyone without paying any attention to what they represent. My technique is to send to everyone who is a possibility, which is anyone who hasn't said something that outright rules them out or who isn't shady with questionable experience.