Request for Stats

Litmatch.com is a good place to check; people can report when they query, when they get responses, etc. right on a particular agent's page.


Even if I remembered the length of time agents who didn't end up repping me had my queries, I wouldn't be sitting down to do math. Sorry.


(I'm sure a supermod will be along to move this thread to the correct room asap. )

I'm pretty sure Query Tracker shows you average response time. It even comes with handy-dandy graphs.

Query Tracker.

You're not serious with the math, are you? Agents take a long time. Almost always. Some don't respond. Ever. Just query and keep writing.

Trying to figure the math on query tracking will drive you nuts and an exercise in futility...

thothguard51 said:

Trying to figure the math on query tracking will drive you nuts and an exercise in futility...

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FIFY.



BTW, I have just received a rep that says, bafflingly, that some people like math.

Query Tracker, as Stacia said, is crazy-go-nuts useful for making yourself go crazy-nuts over stats.

But I do recommend the premium upgrade. Analyzing data makes for some really terrific procrastination, because it's almost, not quite, entirely unlike working.

Pony up the $25 for the annual membership.

I think you'll like it. The functionality is pretty basic, but it covers average, median, fastest, and slowest response times, you can sort agents by reply rate, there are lists of fastest/slowest/non-responders, but, and I say this as someone who spent the first month after querying obsessing about the numbers to a dysfunctional level and who now maybe checks QT once every evening, tops: query and forget about it. Then it's a *really* pleasant surprise when an agent with statistically poor numbers asks for a full.

The thing about non-responders is: if they like the book, they respond, and that's all you want. If you don't query, they'll *never* respond.

Take a look at http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=124182 by Clara Bow and http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=124182 by me. Both of these were done before Query Tracker really got going.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

ThunderBoots said:

BTW: Yes, I was serious about the math. I certainly did not mean to suggest, however, that anybody should crunch numbers instead of querying and writing. Even those who (shudder) enjoy math.

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I guess I'm not sure why it's important, having those statistics. Does it really matter? And math can't account for an agent having a bad day, a baby, or a sudden illness, any of which would skew things.

Of course, I'm of the opinion that there is only one percentage: 50%. It will happen or it won't. I'm happier without complicated math.

You're going to find the numbers all over the map depending on the agent, and it also seems like a really good way to make yourself absolutely crazy. Part of the problem is, to get really good numbers, you need a large sample size, and not everyone reports their successes and failures on query tracker or litmatch or whatever.

So I love maths and have been known to create complicated excel spreadsheets for pretty much everything in life (surprisingly, I am relatively normal in person). But, with agent responses, I don’t see any pattern for my own submissions other than an increase in full requests/personalised rejections with each book. Some of those came in within minutes, others took months. For form rejections, again they differ so widely that I couldn’t put an accurate average on response time without it be completely meaningless (the calculated P value would be close to 1...)

But if anyone is interested, I will happily create them an excel spreadsheet for automatically creating graphs for full request rates for different books/queries. There’s nothing like a pretty bar chart to raise spirits after another rejection, right?

ThunderBoots said:

Yes! And it also can give one the pleasant (although completely divorced from reality) feeling that you're DOING something rather than just waiting for an agent's response.

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you could get that from writing, or reading, and either one would probably be more useful.....just sayin, if you find math a hobby, fine, but this is a raw number with so many variables it is a useless exercise in terms of any predictive merits....you're just shuffling numbers. During time you could be working on your writing craft.

So yeah, if you want to do so, fine, but it is abou the equivalent to watching television or whatever anyone else does for theri "down time"....just a useless side hobby. So long as you accept that and don't try to use it to predict, or as a procrastination tool, convincing yourself you're doing "writer-stuff" there's no harm in it, but no real use, either.

The math will change for every query, and for every manuscript. Average applies ONLY to your queries, and to your manuscripts.

The better you writer, the more the math works in your favor. The worse you write, the more the math works against you.

Even if you crunch all the numbers, it's not going to clearly give you an idea of how agents will respond to your work. Some will reply quickly. Some will never reply. You only need one. Depends on your query, your genre, your writing, your book, their relative workload, what they had for breakfast that morning. Query Tracker is good for seeing if you're overdue a response, but otherwise, you're better off letting it go and working on your next book, in my humble opinion.

I say this as a librarian/informatic geek.

After I finished the very intense experience of writing my book and its treatment, synopsis, query, and proposal, I dove into the geekological side of selling it. I'm another lover of stats, reports, graphs, Outlook alerts, all that jazz. I did a lot of online management of my query process in the course of landing my agent. I paid for the Query Tracker membership and used that site to death -- columns, sorts, dates, categories, all the cool tools it offers. I also used it to research hundreds of agents and visit their websites. I read tons of comments and got a much MUCH better feel for the business end of getting published.