The Great Querying Project: Final Stats

I have always believed in transparency and frank talk between colleagues in writing, and this post is in that spirit. I have been warned posting this might mean some agents or publishers will permanently blacklist me, and that sort of attitude is exactly why that frank talk and transparency are badly needed. Also, I don’t really buy they’re organized enough to blacklist someone. And regardless, querying is exhausting and discouraging. The querying process is a machine to grind us down, and we need to hear from each other just how difficult we all find it in order to support each other when we continue.

I’ll skip the long explanation and simply say this: between October of 2023 and August of 2024 I engaged in The Great Querying Project. In this, I used DuoTrope, QueryTracker, and my own research to seek out either a literary agent to represent me or a new publisher. I put out 190 queries in ten months. Here are the exact numbers on how that went.

Before the numbers, I want to reiterate that querying is a brutal, grueling process. The one (1) other author who has been willing to discuss this with me shared that she had a 3% response rate to her queries for a book that was, eventually, picked up and profitably published. She is an author with multiple award-winning books across several publishers. She writes in sought-after genres for age groups that read books like the rest of us breathe air. Her book pitch was going to be a license for a publisher to print money, and yet the querying machine, at every turn, treated her like she should be embarrassed to even try.

I believe there are people in publishing who consider this phenomenon advantageous to them. It reduces the number of queries they need to consider and it means authors are already psychologically battered and eager to please if they eventually make it through the door. There are also people in publishing who consider this “paying one’s dues,” and I’m pretty sure that’s just hazing. If it wouldn’t pass muster in a fraternity, it shouldn’t pass muster in the business world.

I think it’s also important to point out this is not the fault of agents. There are fewer big publishers every five minutes. There are more small presses who do not require an agent to consider a book, too. There are fewer opportunities for them to make a big sale and more authors who don’t need them.

But, like all systems, someone made choices that led here. And in the meantime, as authors, there are fewer and fewer on-ramps to “making it” and there are more and more of us trying to use them.

All that adds up to one thing: it feels impossible to get an agent, and outcomes feel disconnected from the effort put in. It’s hard to feel like the “big” side of the publishing industry is little more than a lottery in which some get lucky and most don’t.

And because of that, I think it’s vitally important for authors to speak frankly with one another about how much time and effort we put in and how rare a positive response is so that maybe, maybe we can internalize that we’re not the only people who feel like this.

Because some agents fall into multiple categories, the individual response types add up to more than 140.

Of the five agents who requested more materials, two turned the book down; one never responded; and two had not responded when I signed a contract with a publisher on my own. When I withdrew my query (for that reason), they both sent me a personalized message congratulating me and saying they hope to see more queries in future.

The agents added to my “never again” list either sent intentionally rude responses (most of them), sent responses indicating they had clearly not read the query letter much less the other materials (for instance, one rejected it on the basis of genre but stated a distinctly and objectively incorrect genre for it in doing so), or fucked up so badly I added their entire agency to my “never again” list. Only one person did that: he sent a request for more materials to everyone who queried him, then an hour later sent a rejection. He had clicked the wrong buttons in QueryManager.

To be clear, I don’t hold any of the rejections against anyone. Agents have to say no, and they have to say no to the overwhelming majority of queries. A polite form rejection is all it takes to move on, and we have to move on all the time. The ability to take the no, move on, and query again is an essential and foundational skill for walking the query treadmill, and in my experience it did get easier over time. The more agents sent a polite (or impolite) no, the more confident I became of the quality of my book. That may seem paradoxical, but more on that in another post. Suffice to say, it’s true.

I have less sympathy for the ones who never even bother to respond. QueryManager/QueryTracker makes it so easy that one guy was able to accept everyone by mistake. Of course, an agent doesn’t decide whether their agency makes use of tools such as QueryTracker and DuoTrope, but if they do, the agent has a lot of tools at their disposal to make efficient work of a simple no.

I don’t have the exact stats on my longest wait from query submission to explicit rejection, but I believe it was eight months and change. Needless to say, anyone who didn’t respond within three months I wrote off as having rejected it. Eventually I started querying publishers who were open to un-agented queries as I continued querying agents.

Interestingly, very few of the publishers I queried were using QueryTracker. A couple were using DuoTrope, many were using Submittable. Some of those publishers had a small reading fee, and a lot of people have ideas and opinions about that and their ideas and opinions are frankly much better-developed and better-informed than my own. I will say I put those publishers at the bottom of my list, and I only got to them by working my way down to them.

Again, a handful of publishers fall into more than one category, so those numbers do not add up to a tidy fifty, but c’est la vie.

I will say this: the publishers who sent explicit rejections almost all sent extremely constructive, helpful, supportive, validating rejections. One loved the book, it just isn’t bloody in the way he prefers to publish. Another, Galiot Press, had an astoundingly fresh and original query and consideration process designed to get fast feedback and quick decisions, and the conversations I had with them made me feel like they have really cracked the code on how to improve querying for everyone. Kudos!

The first offer of publication came from someone on my dream list, Gold Dust Publishing, and I immediately said yes. They’re new and ambitious and creative and are a queer-owned and -operated press specializing in speculative fiction. And because the publisher is from this region, and knows places like the ones in Children of Solitude, he “got it.”

Many, many of the responses I got from agents made it clear they were someone who just didn’t “get it” about what makes queerness central to that story and what makes queer trauma empowering in that story. They either said they couldn’t connect with the main character–a traumatized man using bitterness as a suit of armor to protect the vulnerable child within–or they said they didn’t connect with the “emotions” of the story, which are mostly about how sometimes it’s okay to simply hate the people who raised you.

None of the publishers expressed similar problems with the book. If they said anything, it was substantive and constructive and almost always also kind and complimentary.

The impression I came away with is that agents know they’re going to have to market the book to publishers and it’s going to be easier to market a book about a character who is not personally important to them the way that character is to the author if that character either is likable from the get-go (mine is not) or is a mix of identities that overlap with most readers (mine is not). Again, c’est la vie. All that told me was, the book was not for them. I know for whom the book is written, and it may be a niche audience but I belong to that audience myself and we are desperate to see ourselves on the page for once. I wrote a book I wish I had been able to read. I always do. It’s the only way I can believe in a story enough to tell it well.

The other two offers of publication came later, from other small presses I greatly admire. I would love to work with them in future, but they weren’t fast enough.

The shortest window for an explicit rejection? Eight hours. They were extremely businesslike and professional, and simply let me know it wasn’t their kind of book. No harm, no foul!

The shortest window for an offer of publication? Less than a week.

The shortest window for a request for more materials? Less than 24 hours.

I think that demonstrates that at all levels of the publishing industry, people can respond quickly and they can be polite when doing so. They can make querying a less grueling process for everyone.

So why don’t those who don’t?