Eight Hard Truths about Agents and Two Suggestions

I’ve been privy to some recent conversations regarding agents and the querying process and thought it would be a good time to put together a post that addresses some misperceptions I see fairly frequently.

Having spent time reading and editing submissions for a literary agent (two-and-a-half years and 1,200+ submissions) as well as being a writer myself, I’ve developed a pretty good understanding of what happens on both sides of this equation. One of the reasons I became a submissions (or slush pile) reader in the first place was so I could gain a better perspective on what agents actually see from querying writers as well as have insight on my competition for an agent’s attention.

 

So here are eight hard truths about agents, querying, and what really goes on after you hit send.

 

1.     The slush pile is an agent’s LOWEST priority.

This is a basic truth I consistently see writers ignore or of which they are completely unaware. An agent’s highest priority—and the thing that takes up most of their time—is representing the work of their existing clients, and their to do list reflects that. Prepping manuscripts to go out on submission, networking with editors, conferring with clients on existing contracts and the issues that arise during the publishing process, reading and editing manuscripts, managing the submission process and client commitments…the list is endless, but all of it is what pays the bills for an agent.

The slush pile, on the other hand, represents the greatest amount of work with the least amount of return. It’s time consuming and never ending. Agents are not kidding when they talk about their inboxes – they’re jam packed with queries. That’s especially true right now because so many people have had a LOT of extra time to write. Most agents have seen a significant spike in the number of queries they receive.

 

Which leads me to the next hard truth…

 2.     The slush pile odds are astronomical—like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

This is a hard truth for both agents and writers. In the two-and-a-half years I read submissions for the literary agent, I probably recommended she read about 5% of the 1,200 queries (the agency’s guidelines requested a query letter, synopsis, and the first fifty manuscript pages). That’s roughly 60 queries. Out of that number, she requested full manuscripts from maybe a dozen, and out of that, she only offered representation to ONE author.

Before you think I was cutting some worthy contenders out of the running, let me add, as a writer, my bias was ALWAYS to give the manuscript the benefit of the doubt. I usually read more pages than most agents would and gave the agent recommendations about what was working and what wasn’t if the first fifty pages seemed promising. She used my edit notes a number of times to give feedback to writers on requested manuscripts or queries that showed promise but weren’t quite right for her. So a 5% read recommendation rate is actually generous, and leads me to the next truth about the slush pile.

 3.     The vast majority of the manuscripts being queried aren’t ready.

I know. Believe me, I really do know. After working on a manuscript for years, especially as you get close to the end and feel as if you will rip your eyes out if you have to read it one more time, you want to believe it’s finished and ready to go. But the very, very hard truth of the slush pile is that at least 80% of what I read was simply not ready to be queried. Most of this number was made up of manuscripts that were exceptionally raw and unpolished. As harsh as this sounds, writing is one of those activities that people often think they can do without practice or study. No one thinks they can play pro sports the first time they try to play the game, and yet they apply a different metric to writing without recognizing that publication by a traditional publishing house is very much like playing in the major leagues.

 Of the remaining 20% of the queries, I recommended the agent read roughly 5%, as I said before. That 15% in between were the ones that almost made it, but needed another round of revision to be truly polished and fully realized (see my posts on revision if you want more of my thoughts on what a fully-realized novel looks like) or needed more editing than an agent can provide.

 

Which brings me to hard truth number four.

 4.     An agent’s job is to sell a manuscript—they’re not your critique partner or editor and don’t owe you feedback.

Yes, agents provide feedback or work with clients to edit and refine their manuscript prior to sending it out on submission, but it’s not their job to provide that kind of feedback for your query letter or pages. Sometimes, they simply can’t give you a solid reason for passing other than the manuscript isn’t right for them, and the sheer volume of queries (remember, the slush pile is the lowest priority and has the least amount of return for the time it takes to complete the task) means that they often don’t have the time to spend thinking about it too hard. I can honestly say, I sometimes spent more time coming up with reasons I was recommending the agent pass than I did reading the manuscript because, while it was obvious within a page it wasn’t what the agent could sell, it took time to articulate why.

 An agent’s job is to sell publication rights to publishers (they don’t actually sell the manuscript, they actually sell the rights to publish the manuscript under specified criteria). If you want feedback, find a writing group, find critique partners and beta readers, hire a developmental editor. If an agent does give you real, specific, concrete and actionable feedback, rejoice! that means you’re on the right track.

 5.     Yes! Agents really do read queries that fast.

This is probably one of the most disheartening, frustrating hard truths about agents. They really can assess your query and pages that quickly, and no, they’re not being lazy.

 Agents know what they can and can’t sell and will only read to the point where they know they can’t sell something. Sometimes that happens in the opening line of the query (why it’s important to know your genres and subgenres), sometimes it’s on the first manuscript page. I personally know one agent who draws a line in the margin every time something ticks his “not for me” meter. Three lines, and he’s done. It doesn’t matter if he’s on the tenth page, the first, or even in the first paragraph. Three ticks, and he passes. This same agent often responds within an hour of receiving a query. And we’ve all received insta-rejects that make us wonder if our email even got opened. Doesn't mean they didn't, it just means that you probably targeted an agent who can't sell what you wrote.

Which also doesn't mean there's something wrong with your book. Agents do miss out on terrific manuscripts because of the sheer volume of work they're trying to get through, or because the writer revised after they queried a certain number of agents, or because the agent simply doesn't know the right editor to show the work to. There are lots of reasons agents pass on work that went on to have incredible critical and financial success. Every agent has a story about the bestseller that got away because they didn’t recognize the potential or they were too slow responding or they didn't have the right editorial contacts to make the sale. 

 

But the truth is, agents do not use AI to scan for keywords like companies do with resumes; they do not throw darts at queries to decide which ones they’ll read; they do not do any of the hundred things I’ve heard writers complain must be happening to their queries. What they do do is read until they know they can’t sell the project, reject it, and move on to the next query.

6.     This is true even if an agent has requested a full or partial manuscript.

I’m setting this hard truth on it’s own because I often hear writers complain about how quickly a requested full or partial garnered a rejection. “There’s no way they read the entire book!” You’re right. They might not have read the entire thing because they are only reading until the point they know they can’t sell it. And, yes, it’s frustrating when they give you feedback that makes it clear they didn’t read the whole thing, but what that feedback tells you (if you hear it a couple of times) is something is missing from the beginning of your book.

 7.     Your query letter does not sell your manuscript.

I’m probably going to get push back on this one, but…No matter what an agent or other writers tell you, your query letter does not get an agent to sign you. The only thing that gets an agent to offer representation is having a project they believe they can sell, and that means having a solid manuscript, with a dynamic premise, that hits the publishing marketplace at the right time (I often tell my clients, if Jane Austen were a debut writer in 2021 and submitted Pride and Prejudice as it was written in 1813, she’d most likely garner a slew of rejections for the simple reason that the contemporary marketplace has different demands for a 21^st century manuscript).

A query letter has two jobs:

• ·       Succinctly present your book’s premise and its central conflict/problem in a dynamic way that catches the agent’s attention.
• ·       NOT give the agent reasons to reject before they read your pages.

Q   Query letters often act as a red flag to agents for the problems they’re going to encounter in the manuscript. Long query/long manuscript usually means the book needs extensive editing or the premise isn’t fully developed. Vague summary of the book can mean that the writer hasn’t figured out what the story is really about yet. A query heavy on the set up probably means the story doesn’t really get going until after fifty to a hundred pages.

The query letter often acts as a mirror for the manuscript (which is why it is a valuable exercise to write a good query letter). After reading those 1,200+ queries, I can tell you I NEVER saw a fantastic query letter paired with a mediocre manuscript. I saw lots of so-so queries and so-so pages. I also saw so-so letters with really good pages.

 

In 1,200+ query letters, almost every single one of them was an indication of what I would find in the pages. What this means is that I read the pages with the idea that I was looking for reasons to recommend the agent pass. If the query was good and solid, the book generally was too.

 

I might do an entire blog post on this topic, but for right now, I’ll say the reason I think the query letter has become so dominant in conversations (both from writers and agents) is that it is something agents can give feedback on quickly and easily. “Query letters that worked” is a really popular topic in interviews and workshop sessions with agents. Invariably, though, what I see in the query letters most often chosen by agents to discuss as "effective" wasn’t so much the letter that made the agent request the manuscript. Often it was the referral from an existing client or someone in the publishing industry, the writer’s extensive platform or special expertise, or a prestigious award or fellowship the writer had received that would have tipped the balance even if the query were written in crayon on a napkin.

 

Last hard truth…

 8.     You do not have a relationship with an agent simply because you queried them or they requested your manuscript.

I frequently see writers act as if an agent owes them something because the writer has queried or received a full request, and I do understand the temptation. Writers invest a lot of time and energy into developing a list of agents to query. We research them, stalk them a little bit on social media, read their clients’ work, and develop specific and realistic reasons for querying a particular agent. We become invested in thinking that a particular agent is THE ONE, and it sometimes feels as if we know them. When the agent doesn’t reciprocate, writers sometimes feel frustrated even though the agent is just doing their job. Even a revise and resubmit doesn’t mean you have a relationship, it just means you’ve got plans to go on a second date.

The point at which you have a relationship with an agent is when they sign you. Up until that point, don’t take anything personally. And, yes, I know exactly how difficult that is.

 

And now the two suggestions about how to increase your slush pile odds:

 1.     Write the best manuscript you can. Edit. Revise and rewrite. Give it to beta readers and critique partners and ask them, specifically, to tell you places where they wanted to put the manuscript down. They don’ t need to tell you why (if they can, great), but the idea is to get an idea of where an agent will do the same.

 2.     Know your genre and the genres an agent represents. Just because someone is an agent, doesn’t mean they represent any old kind of book. They specialize, sometimes only representing subgenres of a particular genre so that, even if romance is a category the represent, they may specialize in Regency era romance. This is why, to the best of your ability, do your research and look at the specific types of books an agent has sold.

 3.     (a bonus suggestion): Follow an agent’s submission guidelines to the best of your ability. Every agent or agency has their own guidelines. Follow them. Exactly as they are written. Want to play in the major leagues? This is the first step in demonstrating that you are a professional.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is it Done Yet - Part 5: What the Story (also) Needs

This is the fifth installment aimed at helping writers know when their novel is ready to query. It's based on the presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in April of this year, "Is It Done Yet? How to Know When Your Novel is Ready to Query"

Part 5 – Stages of Revision

Stage 3: Telling the Real Story

While Stage 2 dealt with the macroview of the manuscript (what’s working), Stage 3 looks at the microview (how is it working) with one important exception. Stage 3 is guided by your novel’s premise, the thing around which everything else in the novel turns, the thing that drives the action of your novel forward, that guides your characters’ exploration of the novel’s essential questions, and the thing that provides the narrative arc to your story.

Understanding your novel’s premise is absolutely crucial for writing a succinct and compelling query letter. It’s the number one issue I saw with query letters (and submissions) in the two and a half years I read submissions for a literary agent. As much as no writer wants to hear this, the simple truth is if you have a solid understanding of your novel’s premise, the query letter becomes fairly easy to write. I think most writers have problems with query letters because they haven’t pushed far enough into the revision process to get to this stage (let alone the final one that focuses on the reader’s experience of your story).

I’m going to repeat something I said earlier: the revision process isn’t about the number of drafts you’ve done, it’s about how close to query-ready the manuscript gets. There’s no magic number of drafts that will do the trick if you aren’t asking the right questions of the manuscript.

I also want to add that, even though I’ve broken down the revision process into stages, the stages don’t necessarily correspond to the number of revisions it will take to move the manuscript to query-ready. Some writers, especially ones with several novels under their belts, can do most of this work in a single draft, while others need several. The number of revisions may also vary from work to work. For myself, I’ve got one novel that has taken seven complete revisions and more than a decade to get to what might possibly be Stage 3 (I think I know what it’s about now and can move forward with that guiding every scene), but I’ve also just finished a novel that pretty much wrote as a polished manuscript from page one to the end.

Most of my clients seek help when they’re mired somewhere in the second or third stage and frustrated because they can’t quite get the novel to function correctly or come together as a cohesive whole. Remember, the goal is to create a fully-realized novel that’s driven forward by a central focus or organizing principal.

This is why I call Stage 3 “Telling the (Real) Story.”

This stage of revision is driven by what’s at the heart, the core, of the story you’re telling.

Every writer has something that sets them writing. The poet Richard Hugo in his marvelous book on craft The Triggering Town, talks about this moment of inspiration that propels the writer to the page. Whether it’s a line of dialogue, a situation, a character, something sets you off on this journey to write. If you’re writing a novel, that spark is big enough, intriguing enough, important enough to keep you working on it for months, years even. But, as Hugo observes, something happens to that spark and all the ideas that follow. They begin to take on a life of their own, they change and grow. New ideas, better ideas sometimes, come along and present intriguing alternatives. Sometimes, the book you thought you were writing turns out not to be the one you end up with. Sometimes a plot element or character has taken over the book and thrown the whole thing off course. The story may have all the same pieces you started out with – the same characters, the same plot, same setting and story arc – but something’s changed and the pieces don’t fit together the way you thought they would.

Or, nothing’s changed, but that incredible Franksteinian lightning bolt did not strike and, instead of being a vibrant novel brimming with life, you’ve got a collection of words that flop around in kind of an interesting manner. Sort of. If you squint in just the right light…

If you’ve worked on your draft in Stage 2 with an eye towards fully assimilating all the “ghost marks” of its creation into the forward movement of the story, you should have a fairly streamlined manuscript. All the pieces are pretty much in the right place, the pacing is pretty much on target so things happen in the narrative arc when they should, plot elements build on one another to create complexity, major characters have discernable arcs from the start of the book to the end. When I say Stage 2 deals with things on a macrolevel, this is what I mean.

The microlevel of Stage 3 is about making sure that all those elements and details are the right ones for the story you’re telling. In order to do that, you first need to understand what your story is really about.

In many ways, this is where genre writers have it easier than general fiction writers. Genres not only come with a set of conventions, they’re genres because they tell a certain type of story. Mysteries are driven by someone needing to figure out the cause of something that happened. Thrillers are driven by the need to stop something dire from happening. Romance is driven by the relationship between two (sometimes three or more, depending on your subgenre) people (Please note: this is not to say genre novels are formulaic – far from it. Part of the joy of reading genre is watching skilled writers take a well-worn trope and reinvent it or provide readers with the expected ending (the couple ends up together, the bad guys get caught) in an unexpected way. My point is that genre writers don’t have to figure out what drives their novels forward, it’s built into the genre).

Fantasy and historical fiction are a little more complicated because the stories told in these genres can be driven by a multitude of ideas, but what they have in common is the need to create a realistic world in which certain rules govern what characters can and cannot do.

It’s sometimes a bit trickier to define the premise of a general fiction novel no matter if it’s commercial, upmarket or literary because, to paraphrase Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale, the whole of human existence is the writer’s subject. But figuring out what drives YOUR novel forward is crucial for being able to understand if all of your novel’s elements work in service to its basic premise. Sometimes it helps to have outside readers at this point because they can often see things that the writer is too close to recognize.

In any event, whether you’re looking at your own manuscript or asking readers to take a look, you’re looking for those elements that tie the work together, the question that underlies the novel’s narrative arc, the way in which different characters represent different aspects of an issue. This is where the microview reveals the bigger picture. The minute choices you’ve made for language, voice, details, repetition of imagery, balance between exposition and action/narration and scene, choices for point of view, setting reveal the central premise.

Yes, there will be things that don’t work or are slightly off – make note of them as you do your readthrough but don’t try to fix them yet. This is the moment to get brutally honest with yourself and flag those passages or scenes you love but are secretly hoping no one notices that they don’t work or you think “yes, but…” when you read them or you flat out get a sinking feeling in your stomach. Listen to your intuition here and be as honest as you can. You’re not cutting anything yet, you’re just seeking to find those soft places where the novel doesn’t live up to what you envision.

The good news here, by the way, is that most often the problem is one of execution. One of my guiding principles as an editor is: honor the impulse. Nine times out of ten, what I see is that the writer had the correct impulse for a scene or a detail, but the execution was off – the scene happens at the wrong moment, the writer backed off putting pressure on the characters at a crucial moment, a detail doesn’t quite have the impact the writer is looking for to create a multi-layered image, the element only functions on the most surface level rather than resonates with other elements in the story.

In one of my own novels, my main character sees someone he hasn’t seen since they were younger. I wanted there to be a moment of confusion but some way for my MC to recognize this character. Initially, the character had a shortened ring finger on his left hand – the result of an accident when he was young – but I knew that wasn’t the correct detail. It didn’t resonate with anything else in the book, and, this recognition scene was important because it sets up elements that happen at the book’s climax. So, the detail had to be right. When I pushed into, questioned the detail against the central premise of the novel, it opened up an entire subplot that was absolutely perfect, and I realized the detail I needed wasn’t a shortened ring finger (surface level detail that only helps my MC recognize this other character) but a ring (detail that resonates with other themes of the book and has a payoff in the climactic scene). Honoring the impulse that led me to focus on the character’s hands but questioning the execution and making the choice more conscious, led me to the perfect detail.

This is the level of interrogation that needs to happen in Stage 3. You’re looking for the central premise, the question you’re exploring, the element that drives all the action forward. This is the central organizing principal for your novel and the thing that all the other elements work in service to. Stage 3 is about defining it and evaluating all the elements of your story against it.

Another timeline exercise?

Yup. This one is a little different, though. This timeline puts every event that is mentioned in your book (whether it appears on stage or off) in chronological order. There are several reasons for doing this. One, it will help you see where the story might still be bogging down with backstory. Two, it helps you see what backstory is necessary and how those events interrelate (this is especially important if you’re novel is non-linear). Three, when I do this exercise for clients’ books, I often find the very first event in the chronology is important for finding what the book is about and helps guide the writer toward recognizing the essential question.

At the end of Stage 3, you should have a real sense of what your book is about, and every element of the story works to explore, deepen, complicate, understand, and communicate that idea.

In the next post, I cover a necessary and important part of Stage 3: correctly locating and using your novel's destabilizing and inciting incidents to create the dynamic opening contemporary publishing demands. 

If you’d like to receive a copy of my revision flow chart, please contact me

email: diane.glaz@gmail.com

If you'd like more information about my editing services, please visit my website or contact me through email or on Facebook, Twitter, or IG. I specialize in literary, upmarket, commercial, YA, contemporary women's, erotica, and fantasy, and have a diverse and international client base who's work has appeared on the NY Times best seller lists and Amazon top seller lists.

Twitter: @DeeGeeWriter

IG: diane.glaz

(If you follow me on IG, be forewarned: you'll see a lot of pictures of my Airedales and whisky)

Here are the links for the all the parts of this series: 

Part 1: The goal of a fully-realized novel

Part 2: Know your genre

Part 3: What the writer needs - Telling yourself the story

Part 4: What the story needs - Telling the story

Part 5: What the story (also) needs - Telling the real story

Part 6: Destabilizing and inciting incidents

Part 7: What the reader needs