How do you know if the idea isn't marketable?

I feel your pain.

I can also relate. I have sent out fifty email and snailmail queries and had about 25 or so rejections. I had a request for a full, and they turned it down (see my thread labeled "Is this a positive rejection?"). I have also not received any rejections in two weeks. I still have faith in it, though.

Before I wrote a single word, in my head the story sounded pretty good. So I asked three different posters on AW for their opinion of the story to see what they thought: is it a good story? compelling? interesting? And the reactions were all positive so I wrote it. Now, with fifty subs in the works, I can't seem to motivate myself to send out any more until I get more rejections or maybe a positive response.

Soooooo, ask others for feedback. Tell someone the story. Try to compare it to something already published. See what readers in that genre think of the story. And if they like it, maybe it'll ease your doubts.

allen

Idea

Two things. First, it isn't the idea that is or isn't marketable, it's what the writer does with teh idea. Any idea is marketable IF the writer handles the idea well enough.

Second, stop sending out so many queries. If you are doing something wrong, you've lost eleven chances to fix it, and if the last twelve agents respond the same way, you'll have lost twenty-four chances to fix the problems, and will also have lost the top agents.

The best way to receive concrete feeback is to send out well-researched, personalized, queries to one agent at a time, and never to more than two or three agents at a time.

It simply is not possible to bulk mail queries, and still have those queries be as good as they should be, as well-researched as they should be, or as personalized as they should be.

And even if you could bulk mail queries and receive concrete feedback, you've still blown right through all the top agents before you have a chance to put that feedback into use.

Sending out a dozen or more queries at once is the worst possible way a writer can find an agent. Lightning does strike on rare occasion, but it's no wonder it takes writers longer to find an agent than it does to write the novel.

Even if you write the best novel in the world, bulk mail queries are highly unlikely to place it with an agent.

Some helpful ideas here. However, what if you do send out personalised, well-researched queries/ submissions to two or three agents, and yet they simply send you a standard rejection letter with little or no feedback, and they are not open to discussing the rejection with you further? That means that you have used up potentially 3 or 4 months worth of waiting time when other agents could have been looking at your work as well. Perhaps, since agents are subjective, one could also have been interested in your work during that time but you wouldn't have known until possibly half a year or more has passed because you limited it to only less than a handful.

marlowesnoopstein said:

Some helpful ideas here. However, what if you do send out personalised, well-researched queries/ submissions to two or three agents, and yet they simply send you a standard rejection letter with little or no feedback, and they are not open to discussing the rejection with you further? That means that you have used up potentially 3 or 4 months worth of waiting time when other agents could have been looking at your work as well. Perhaps, since agents are subjective, one could also have been interested in your work during that time but you wouldn't have known until possibly half a year or more has passed because you limited it to only less than a handful.

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No, this means you have a severe problem with your query letter, and you need to get advice, do a complete rewrite of the query letter/ synopsis, and then try again.

Everone looks at time the wrong way. Yes, you may have lost three or four months, but you should have gained some knoweldge. Want to get thos emonth sback? Send out bulk queries and get all your rejections at once. About 99% or the time, this is exactly what happens. Great, now you've been rejected by fifty agents in record time. How does that help?

I said 99%, but the actual numbers are much worse than this. Writers really need to completely illiminate the word "time' from the submission side of tehir vocabulary. Impatience is a ruthless killer, and patience is the ultimate virtue.

The only time time matters is when it comes to writing time. While those three or four months pass, you should be hard at work on another novel.

It isn't how much or how little time it takes that should worry a writer at all. What should worry the writer is whether or not teh agent says yes or no, and the odds are tremendously higher of getting a yes with personalized, well-researched query letters sent out one at a time, or two or three at a time at the absolute most.

If you do want to think about time, then think about it in terns of acceptance and rejection. There are thousands of writers out there who have been bulk mailing queries for years, often up to five or six years, without receiving any useful feedback, and without getting a "yes" from a single agent. And this is a good use of time?

Far more often than not, time comes down to fast rejection or slow acceptance.

Don't worry about the time it takes, worry about the end result. And use whatever time it does take to write a second novel.

Jamesaritchie said:

Don't worry about the time it takes, worry about the end result.

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Easily said, from someone who had his first novel accepted by the first agent queried, and sold to the first publisher approached.

caw.

queries

blacbird said:

Easily said, from someone who had his first novel accepted by the first agent queried, and sold to the first publisher approached.

caw.

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That has nothing to do with it. If you're halfway smart, you don't look at the exceptions, but at the majority. You look at the facts and the figures.

But you'll also notice I practiced what I preach. I submitted one query to one agent, and I landed that agent. I did not subbit multiple queries, and I did not submit a query that could have been sent to a dozen agents just by changing the name and the address.

DeadlyAccurate said:

Thank you for your responses, everyone. I admit to some confusion regarding your post, James, on two fronts. Pretty much everyone has said you don't just query one agent at a time, because you'd be old and gray before you got anywhere. If you wait on each agent to respond before going on to the next one, you'd never be published (read that just the other day on this board, in fact, though I can't find it now).

My second point of confusion regards what constitutes proper research? I thought I was doing it for my book, but obviously I'm not since I'm not getting the responses I'd like. My method is this:

1) find an agent using AgentQuery.com.
2) Double check at Preditors & Editors and here to make sure there's nothing fishy.
3) Look at the agent's website if they have one, carefully reading up on the books they represent. If not, Google to find as much information as I can on them.
4) Make sure that, even if they say they represent thriller, for example, most of the books they list aren't too different from mine. For example, if they represent thriller, but their books all seem to be religious thrillers, move on.
5) Follow guidelines to query them, making sure I pick the proper agent within the agency. Make sure I address a specific agent, include the right samples/attachments/whatever they ask for, and mention that near the closing of my letter/email.

If a few rejections trickle in, go back and look at my query letter (I've posted it on the Share Your Work forum, for example) because it's obviously not working. I even worry about over-revising it, because I do so constantly. And of course, I start on the next book in the meantime.

Maybe I need to work on the personalization more. I've never been completely comfortable with that; I'm not the kind of person who gets buddy-buddy with people, so I'm never quite sure how to approach it without sounding cheesy.

I appreciate any additional advice you might want to impart.

I'm still not sure if my novel idea is marketable or if it's simply that my book isn't yet of a publishable quality. I don't know anyone I would feel comfortable asking to be a beta reader, unfortunately; I always feel like I'm imposing. I've tried the "reciprocating critique with another author" thing, but I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone how that tends to turn out, and saying any more on the subject would really be whining.

Again, thanks for listening to me.

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I know what everyone says, but I also know what the numbers say. Lightning occasionally strikes, but the numbers say darned few writers ever find a good agent by sending out bulk queries.

I also know from the agent's side of the business how queries are read and handled. Put yourself in the shoes of the agent. If you open a query, and if you can tell it's a query that could have been sent to fifty agents just by changing the name and address of the agent, how seriously would you take that query?

Now, there are things you can put in the query that can change this, of course, but most writers can't say these things. If you're querying about a mystery novel, and you can put in the query that you've been published five times in Ellery Queen, three times in Alfred Hitchcock, etc., an agent will take your query seriously, even if it is more or less generic.

But generic queries that are bulk mailed, or that an agent can assume are bulk mailed, and that do not have a list of good credits in them, have to be spectacular to get the attention of a good agent. They have to be extremely good just to receive any feedback from the agent.

In all honesty, once you've read few hundred query letters, the generic ones all start looking alike, and your eyes glaze over after two sentences.

You have to do something to separate yourself from the pack. It sound slike you're doing the right kind of research, but how much of this goes into your query letter? It doesn't matter what kind of research you do if the agent never knows about it. If you research ten agents, but write the same query letter for all ten, you may as well have skipped the research. The agent needs to know you've done your homework, and the only way she can know this is if you write her a query letter that obviously could not have been sent to any other agent.

Now, peronalizing a query letter should never, ever mean getting buddy-buddy, and it should never, ever mean flattering the agent. There's never an excuse to get buddy/buddy in a query letter, and never an excuse to flatter an agent, at least overtly. It's professional personalization you're after. It's no more than letting the agent know you've done your reseach. It's letting her know you have read some of the books she's sold, and it's letting her know that the reason you're querying her is because you believe your writing is a fit with other books she's sold, and with publishers she sold them to. You have to keep it professional, and you have to remove any hint of buddy-buddy or flattery. But why do all this research if the agent can't tell you've done it by reading your query letter?

Now, I'm against large numbers of queries, even if you do write the proper type of query for every agent. There are only so many good agents out there for a given genre, and teh last thing you want to do is settle for an agent who isn't very good, even if she is completely honest.

It's true there are some fifteen hundred agents out there, but it's also true most of them couldn't sell ice cubes in hell. I doubt if there are more than fifty good agents in any genre, and some genres have a good deal fewer. When you're sending out large numbers of queries it doesn't take long to run right through all fifty worthwhile agents. You only get one shot at each agent (Unless one asks you for a rewrite), and once that shot is taken, that's it. Many, many writers run through teh good agents before you can say scat, and they're left querying the not so good and the bad until they finally land one who probaly is not high on any publisher's "agents we love to hear from" list.

You stand a better shot with each agent if you send the kind of query that will at least draw a meaningful critique, if not a yes, and if you're able to use any meaningful critique you receive before you query the next good agent. But when you've already queried all or most of the good agents in your genre, what good does a meaningful critique do you, even if you receive one, which you probably won't with bulk mailed queries?

Now, I'm not really opposed to sending out queries to as many as five agents at once, if you can't resist, but make sure each query is unique to that agent. Be professional in every possible way. Use good paper, good envelopes, and type the addresses on the envelope. Appearance does matter, and when an agent has a stack of a hundred queries in front of her, standing out in a good way is never a bad thing.

The fastest way to make a good agent say yes is to have some very good credits. The second fastest way is to write a query that shows her she isn't just one blade of grass in a very big yard.