Fewer agents requesting fulls and partials

I was at a writer's conference about a month ago. A lot of the people I talked to got a request to see the first 50 pages, which I think counts as a partial. I did only talk to one person who got a request for the full manuscript, though. This was the 3rd conference I've attended, but I was too nervous and shy to talk to a lot of people at the first 2, so I'm not sure if the amount of requests went down. I get the feeling that agents receive so many queries these days, that when they go to conferences, they are a lot more likely to request just partials of manuscripts than the full due to time constraints.

In general querying (conferences are different, I will explain later) I've found that agents are requesting MORE fulls and partials than ever. The obverse is that they are taking longer to get back to you. (One agent requests a full from everyone, groan)

It used to be that you were almost guaranteed a full request at a conference even if you had submitted the 1985 Ohio phone book or 500 pages of Lorem Ipsum. I remember an agent once saying that it was really to get the person out of their hair, or just because one never knew how good a WRITER one was from a VERBAL pitch.

Now the partial request is the norm, as OP said, because they are inundated. Another thread mentioned organizers having to install security at Frankfurt Book Fair due to the amount of people trying to sell manuscripts to publishers. The rise and subsequent fall of self publishing's gold-rush (now it's as hard as everything else) has probably flooded the trade pub market with writers a bit.

Treehouseman said:

The rise and subsequent fall of self publishing's gold-rush (now it's as hard as everything else) has probably flooded the trade pub market with writers a bit.

Click to expand...

I read recently that a self-published book is published on Amazon every five minutes.

I'm of the mind Amazon needs to start seriously vetting what is uploaded. They seem to be slowly and boorishly lurching in that direction (though with lots of mistakes) but if they want to keep making money as opposed to merely spending it for bandwidth they have GOT to step up and implement some quality control. I click into self-pubbed books occasionally and I've been shocked at what I see. At the very least they should have some humans looking over things and giving books that are at least half-way decent and formatted correctly a "stamp of approval." Something!

Kindle Unlimited has been shockingly underpoliced.

There is a pool of money allocated to the entire KU for a year, and it is divided by “page” reads, so if there is a million bucks allocated (it’s more, lol) and 2 million pages are read, every one of those pages gets 50c.

Obviously it’s more like 0.0000001 per page, so page-stackers and scammers publish phone books with links that go to the last page INSTANTLY so it looks like 1000 pages read. If you’re a legitimate writer, suddenly the pool is very much reduced, as well as your earnings.

I’ll give you two guesses if Amazon polices this, but you’re only going to need one.

This gives me hope.

"Fewer agents requesting fulls and partials"

I get it why there might be more competition for said agents' attention. But requesting fewer MSes? What does that mean, less books are being sold? I don't see any evidence of that.