What's the longest you've had to work on queries before one succeeds?

Dr Mindermast · Jul 22, 2018

Feeling increasingly discouraged, looking for some commiseration and maybe perspective. I finished my first picture book in December, spent a few weeks working on the query and then having a couple people help me polish it up (both of them are writers who do have some success under their belts), and then started sending out queries at the beginning of February. Since then I have sent out 30-40 queries, most of which have produced either rejections or nothing. The only exception is one agent who made some positive comments and gave me helpful feedback, but never went as far as actually asking for a resubmission or otherwise expressing interest (I've discussed that whole issue in a separate thread). So now it's almost six months later and I'm at the point that it's getting hard just to keep reading through agent profiles to see who else is worth querying (never mind working on book two like I should be doing).

I guess I don't really have a question here, besides maybe the one in the thread title, but I could use a little encouragement...

cornflake · Jul 22, 2018

First, it's a picture book. You couldn't pick a harder market.

Second, once you get 50 substantial posts under your belt, you can run the query through Query Letter Hell here, and see what more people think.

Third... it's a picture book. Heh.

Fuchsia Groan · Jul 22, 2018

Weee-eeell ... I queried one book for about five years before that book got representation. Mind you, I also revised the book enormously over that period, even changing it from adult to YA. I sent about 75 queries total. When something isn't working, be it query, pages, or both, I hold off and revise.

For the book in my sig, I sent about 26 queries over three months, but again I was tweaking the query the whole time.

Picture books are special cases — I don't know much about them, but you include the whole text of the book in the query, right? So the wording of the query part probably doesn't weigh as heavily as it does with longer books, where you need it to entice the agent to start reading.

I second the recommendation of Query Letter Hell, scary as it is! It helped me.

Jeneral · Jul 22, 2018

It took me almost exactly two years of querying to sign with my agent. During that time I massively rewrote the book three times and changed up the query a few times as well.

blacbird · Jul 22, 2018

Since the Cambrian.

caw

Sage · Jul 22, 2018

Do you consider "succeeds" here to mean getting requests or getting an agent/published?

Bryan Methods · Jul 23, 2018

Well, at the very least it's not unusual for it to take five years or more. Ten years or more. Some people try much longer than that without success.

ChibiUsagi · Jul 23, 2018

Picture books are a really tough market! Don't beat yourself up.

It took me two years. But of serious querying, once I tweaked it and treated it like a full time job, about six months.

Shoeless · Jul 23, 2018

Going to echo Sage, here, it really depends on how we're defining success. If you're talking strictly getting responses to your queries asking for more materials, that's very different from the query turning into an offer of representation.

And yeah, picture books ARE hard, especially if you're the writer. My wife comes at it from the other end, she's an illustrator, with representation at Bookends, so for her, it's actually more of a "wait until an interesting project is offered to her, then decide whether to take it on or not." So from what I've seen, artists, if they're in demand, definitely have the less stressful side of the equation.

Harlequin · Jul 23, 2018

My first query i wrote hastily and fired off. I worked on it a bit more, while revising the ms, but never got a single agent request (a couple small pub ones that all ended in rejection). About 130 rejections before I quietly trunked it.

The most recent query was a labour of seven or eight months. I started before a single word of the actual book was written and tinkered with it every few weeks. Went through lots of versions and shopped it through a lot of venues (QLH, query shark, QK, online crit group, local group). That one a request and offer within two weeks.

Dr Mindermast · Jul 23, 2018

Sage said:
Do you consider "succeeds" here to mean getting requests or getting an agent/published?

Good point. Let's go with "actual offer of representation" for this.

And it does help to know that the "standard" timeline is worse than I had realized, so thank you all for sharing that particular pain.

Kats · Jul 23, 2018

I got an agent recently with picture books, and it definitely is a tough market! For me, it took about 9 months. I queried with a few different PBs and revised in that time as well - I ended up getting my now agent from the first query I sent for a newly revised PB. You never know which one is going to hit. Keep going! And for encouragement, my now-agent wasn't even an agent yet when I started querying, so keep looking out for good options.

Greene_Hesperide1990 · Jul 24, 2018

Still pending on that the successful part of the query, btw Kats great profile pic!

Sage · Jul 24, 2018

So I have thoughts about what makes a query a "success" compared to what this thread and the "Successful Queries" thread say is a success, but I'll hold off.

I started working on the query for my first book back in April 2006. It failed, with good reason. The query that got me an agent was my sixth book (I queried 2 other books in between). I started working on the query in July 2008, but I don't know when I started querying with it. My querying process at first was slow, but in March 2009, I got more confident and sent out a bunch while I was on vacation. By the time I finished with that vacation, I had an offer.

That query was my first one to really garner a positive response, so by all definitions of "successful," that query meets it. It appears that I worked on that query in QLH for 3 days, but that doesn't mean I didn't work on it longer on my own or with other authors. (I will admit that I had a lot of help on that one with another AW author before QLH, and give her credit for teaching me how to write queries). I parted ways with that agent, rewrote the novel, changed the query to match, and was published by a small press with the same novel in 2012.

I have had several queries since that are successful in the sense that they garner agent and editor interest, even if I was rejected in the end. But the query was successful in these instances. The QLH portion of getting these queries together seem to range from 2 days to 2 months. I also have had queries that were not as successful at getting requests (fewer than 10%), and those are harder to track because I might come back to QLH with them time and again (I think there are 3 that I revisited QLH with), in which case, you could say I worked on them for years.

The thing about asking whether a query was successful due to the author getting represented is that the query isn't why an author gets represented. The book is. Some agents go off pages rather than the query. Some agents participate in contests where it wasn't the query that got their attention. Will a good query increase your chances of getting agented? Absolutely. But if there's some problem with the book, or it just isn't something they can fall in love with, a perfect query isn't going to get you representation. So "how long did you work on queries before you succeeded?" is a loaded question to me.

cool pop · Jul 24, 2018

What do you mean by succeeding? Do you mean an agent requesting more of your work or getting an agent off a query or submission?

There is no answer for either because every circumstance will be different. Some writers can send out queries for years and never get more than a few offers of agents asking for a partial while some writers can land an agent on their first batch of queries. It's beyond anyone's control.

If you really want an agent, you're just going to have to keep plugging at it and hoping something is good enough. Whether it takes 1 year or 10 or never, no one knows. That's just the truth.

That might not be what you want to hear but I am a realist so I give it to you straight without sugarcoating or head petting. You might not ever get an agent no matter what you do. This is the simple truth and fact. No matter how good of a writer you are, you might not ever land an agent much less a chance with the big five. That's just how the cookie crumbles. Publishing has always been a high risk gamble and that will never change.

You have to decide how to approach the reality. Are you going to continue to fight for at least a chance of what you want despite the odds or give up? And, nothing is wrong with giving up, but these are your choices. If you want to keep at this focus on getting your work out there and not the rejections or anything else that brings you down. Hopefully it becomes true for you that every no is a step closer to a yes.

If it becomes something that drags you down and you no longer feel fulfilled by the process then that's when you have to rethink your goals, etc.

Trying to get an agent is anything but easy in fact it can be harder than landing a publisher but doesn't mean it can't and won't happen.

Treehouseman · Jul 25, 2018

I'm sure I'll be hitting the big 22 years shortly on a passion project.

What's the longest you've had to work on queries before one succeeds?

Dr Mindermast

cornflake

practical experience, FTW

Fuchsia Groan

Becoming a laptop-human hybrid

Jeneral

Cat wrangler

blacbird

Sage

Supreme Guessinator

Bryan Methods

ChibiUsagi

Shoeless

Harlequin

Eat books, not brains!

Dr Mindermast

Kats

Greene_Hesperide1990

Protecter of the Garden

Sage

Supreme Guessinator

cool pop

It's Cool, Miss Pop if You're Nasty

Treehouseman