I was putzing around on querytracker.net today and came across an author who'd recently been offered representation. They posted their stats and because I found them interesting, I thought I'd share.
Received two offers of representation on 4/15 for my 83,000 word romantic comedy/chick-lit novel from D4EO Literary and Book Cents Literary.
For those of you interested, here are my stats:
Began querying: 12/1/09
Offers of representation: 4/15/10
Queries sent: 115
Positive Responses = 16
Negative Responses = 99
I think it's important to remember that finding an agent takes time. You send out tons of letters, and you get results like that. It's really important to remember this business is subjective. You'll get rejected, it's guaranteed. What one agent likes, another won't. If anything, this process is going to teach me patience. I'll always be thankful for that.
Stories like that (and the Meg Cabot one Savannah mentioned) always give me hope. Once I start querying, I'm going to have to print all these out and paste them all over the walls to remind me NOT to go crazy checking my mail or when I get rejected. If this person can query for four months and send out 115 queries (though...that does seem like a lot for four months...) without giving up hope, so can I!
ReplyDeleteExactly! I really need to print off all the letters I've received. I was going to wallpaper my room with them, haha, but since I'm moving to DC for the summer and subletting my room, I figured that might be an idea to save for later ;-)
ReplyDelete