Hi Friends,
I have been open for queries for a year this week. No, I haven’t gotten 500,000 queries, thank god. But I have gotten roughly 1% of that, and it’s still so many.
And that’s wonderful! I’m not complaining about people sending me their hard-won work, hopeful that I will like it. I take it as a compliment. I want to like it, too! I know many of you are in my Query Tracker inbox because you read this newsletter and honestly, I’m grateful for all your time and attention.
But also, I’m about 11 months behind in reading queries. I KNOW. I can’t stand it either. It’s unconscionable. It’s horrible. I am currently very bad at this part of my job. People complain about how ridiculously slow agents are at responding to queries—to anything—and hi it’s me I’m the problem it’s me.
I’m also at a loss of what to do about it. I can dedicate more time to reading queries, which I intend to, and that will slowly but surely remedy this issue. But slowly. I know people want answers faster, but that time has to come from somewhere, and I don’t know where it would come from. Sleep? This newsletter? I can shave off minutes here and there, but reading queries takes hours.
I’m going to pull out that query math again just to show you want I mean. If I spent five minutes on every query in my inbox it would take me over three months of full-time, 40-hour a work-week to answer everything, and that’s if nothing new came through in the meantime. And reading queries is not my only job.
I can get help, yes. I have help! I can be highly selective—but of course I already am. I can close to queries again, which I’ve considered, but I do like the thrill of the hunt and chase and the opportunity to read new, cool books. Unfortunately, the only solution I can come up with is time and patience, from both of us.
You can be mad at me though. You can tell me I’m a bad agent and horrible at my job and wasting writer’s time by saying I’m open for queries when my response time is unacceptably high and you would be right. I am not very good at reading queries at this time. (I’m still very good at the other parts of my job, though.) You can judge me on this metric, pull your query from my inbox, and never query me again. That is 100% your right. You are in control of who sees your work. You don’t have to include me.
You can also try to remember I am one person doing a million things, at home and at work, not a query-answering-machine that sticks to a strict schedule at the cost of other areas of my life and job. You can extend some grace. You can decide I have six months of grace (still a lot!) and not eleven and that’s that. I get it!!!!! I don’t like this either! But know that I don’t consider your submission closed until I respond to it, so if it’s still in my inbox, I’m going to get to it. This isn’t ideal, but it’s reality, and as much as we don’t like it, it’s the one we have to deal with. I’m not taking a long time AT you. I’m not looking though my queries deciding which ones have to wait longer than others because I want to make the authors suffer. I answer them roughly in the order I received them. I’m not sitting here with my feet on my desk eating bon bons and watching your queries roll in. Sometimes I’m sleeping. Sometimes I’m reading something for fun. Sometimes I’m going to plays or hanging out with my family or staring blankly at a wall, because I am a person doing a job and I cannot do that job 100% of the time. Ok, I’m getting defensive now because I feel so bad that I’m bad at this part right now and I would much rather get an A+ on all things, thank you, so I’ll stop.
But. It is what it is. I’m trying. You are allowed to feel anyway you want about it and do anything you’d like with your own work. I will absolutely miss out on great things because of this (lack of) reading pace. But that’s ok. I can’t represent all the things. I am not the right agent for all the things. I might like your work and you might like another agent better and that’s fine! That’s great! I want you to be with the agent you like the best. I know that querying sucks and takes forever and the whole system is bad. Just remember, though, when you’re in the query trenches, I’m right in there with you. I know the power dynamic is not the same. But you have to send a lot of queries to find the one agent you like and I have to read a lot of queries to find that one or two books I like. We’re both looking for needles in a haystack. Except we don’t know what the needle looks like until we pick it up and examine it closer.
I want you to remember that you have more power than you realize. I can’t sell books you don’t write. I can’t offer representation on queries I don’t read. And you get to decide if I read them (eventually) or not. So this is my blanket apology for taking so long with queries, my friends. I’m grateful to all of you who’ve shared your work with me. For the both of us, I hope I love your book. If I don’t, that’s ok, too. I’m not the only agent in the world, and I know it.
OXOXOXO,
Kate
Everyone is doing the best they can. Thank you for being awesome. I’m grateful for rejections because they confirm at least the first line of my query got read (yours is in my rejection bouquet)
And I just got one today from a query sent 9 months ago! Which makes me go - hey! They actually took a look and bothered to respond! Even a rejection is ‘being seen’ to some degree!
Thank you for humanizing the process, Kate. I'm one of those people who has poured her heart and soul into writing a book and I'm now at the query phase. My takeaway from your post is that, although I've never been a very patient person, it's time to develop some of that virtuous character trait. It does help to picture the agents I've queried as doing the best they can with a task that must be overwhelming at times. Thank you again.