- Joined
- Feb 23, 2011
- Messages
- 583
- Reaction score
- 491
I found this on twitter. Take with a big grain of salt because it's not a ton of data and I'm not sure where they're getting the numbers from, but I found it interesting nonetheless.
Request rates/offers across genres
- Thread starter LStein
- Start date
- Joined
- Jul 5, 2012
- Messages
- 14,708
- Reaction score
- 24,672
- Location
- Massachusetts
- Website
- elizabethbonesteel.com
Interesting, but probably worth mentioning all the data on QT is self-reported.
Driving me nuts to see the green table organized by alphabetical (WHY) and not request rate. What's the point of data if it isn't organized in a logical manner????
Anyways, here's the request rate by genre [by request rate, large to small]. Erotica, military/espionage, and poetry all have 0, while upmarket and western have no data? lol okay. Also "adult contemporary romance" has a request rate of 53%, which is absolutely no fucking way reflective of reality. Also there are only 8 adult romance queries? Total? What the heck is the date range of this data set, an hour?
The data is a fucking mess, we have:
Which are all separate rows on the table. And nine rows of "YA Fantasy" exactly as written like that. So it looks like they did 0 cleaning of this data.
I'm sorry to say, this information is useless. Even taking into consideration that QT is self-reported, just the number of queries doesn't make any sense at all, and no effort has been made to standardize/clean up the data. And since what's posted is view-only, and we can see the really sloppy #DIV/0 errors at the bottom, we have no idea how they are calculating the numbers in the green table. Because they are clearly calculating SOME of the data points. But without that transparency, we have no idea how much they're fucking it up, if at all.
So yeah ignore all of this. If you have QT Premium, you can use [this page] to see response rates by agents per genre. You could then download all the data per your genre and then stick it in Excel and math out the average.
ETA LStein I KNOW that you have your Upmarket novel you're querying AND you have gotten requests on it. So the fact that there is no data at all for upmarket request rate in the green table sounds mighty sus. It says there were 46 Upmarket/literary queries sent out. How many of those were yours? How many of those 7 full requests were yours? You are obviously not the only person out there submitting in that genre, so what even is this data? It's absolutely useless.
Data needs CONTEXT to be of any value. This says it's on "totals," but total whats? Total per agency? Per country? Is this data for all time? For a day? An hour? Throwing a bunch of numbers on a table doesn't mean anything if we don't know where it comes from and what's been done to it.
Anyways, here's the request rate by genre [by request rate, large to small]. Erotica, military/espionage, and poetry all have 0, while upmarket and western have no data? lol okay. Also "adult contemporary romance" has a request rate of 53%, which is absolutely no fucking way reflective of reality. Also there are only 8 adult romance queries? Total? What the heck is the date range of this data set, an hour?
The data is a fucking mess, we have:
| Ya Fantasy (queer) |
| YA fantasy (queer) |
| YA Fantasy (Queer) |
| YA fantasy (queer) |
Which are all separate rows on the table. And nine rows of "YA Fantasy" exactly as written like that. So it looks like they did 0 cleaning of this data.
I'm sorry to say, this information is useless. Even taking into consideration that QT is self-reported, just the number of queries doesn't make any sense at all, and no effort has been made to standardize/clean up the data. And since what's posted is view-only, and we can see the really sloppy #DIV/0 errors at the bottom, we have no idea how they are calculating the numbers in the green table. Because they are clearly calculating SOME of the data points. But without that transparency, we have no idea how much they're fucking it up, if at all.
So yeah ignore all of this. If you have QT Premium, you can use [this page] to see response rates by agents per genre. You could then download all the data per your genre and then stick it in Excel and math out the average.
ETA LStein I KNOW that you have your Upmarket novel you're querying AND you have gotten requests on it. So the fact that there is no data at all for upmarket request rate in the green table sounds mighty sus. It says there were 46 Upmarket/literary queries sent out. How many of those were yours? How many of those 7 full requests were yours? You are obviously not the only person out there submitting in that genre, so what even is this data? It's absolutely useless.
Data needs CONTEXT to be of any value. This says it's on "totals," but total whats? Total per agency? Per country? Is this data for all time? For a day? An hour? Throwing a bunch of numbers on a table doesn't mean anything if we don't know where it comes from and what's been done to it.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Nov 27, 2021
- Messages
- 161
- Reaction score
- 180
After carefully consulting this data, I've concluded that my request rate of 0.00% is not good.
I recall a freelance editor compiling self-reported stats into a spreadsheet like this. I think he went so far as to include the query letters in the data. Each row was one writer, which is how this looks too. The conclusions are biased as a result, as Liz points out, because we hear only from a small slice of engaged and talkative writers.
But it *is* useful, after a fashion, as all of this stuff can be, if only to point out how competitive the whole thing is. Thanks for posting it.