Should I Query in December?

  • By: Jessica Faust | Date: Dec 03 2020

The question about whether or not to query in December is the probably most-asked in all of publishing.

Quick answer–no.

Take this to heart because anyone who follows the blog regularly will tell you that I don’t often tell authors not to query.

During the so-called summer slowdown, I say query away. We are all looking for great beach reads and with so many out of the office, agents often have time to read.

The middle of a pandemic, I told authors again and again to keep querying and your persistence showed. BookEnds agents took on just shy of 100 new clients in 2020. You only got there if you queried.

December though, December is different. BookEnds, like many agencies, closes the last half of the month and by close I mean close. We shut it down to read OPB (Other People’s Books), to make and eat cookies, and to recharge. The time we are in the office is spent finishing up client work, year-end reviews, and setting our goals and intentions for the next year. If we are reading queries, it’s mostly to clear our inbox to prepare for the new year.

So skip querying in December. Use this month to polish your work and your query letter and instead hit us up in January (even better if you wait a week or two into the month of January). Because come January we’re going to be rested and ready. We’ve got a new set of goals and we need authors to achieve them.

2 responses to “Should I Query in December?”

  1. Daniel J Klein says:
    December 3, 2020 at 11:29 pm

    Thanks for this honest advice. It’s December 4, and I had just sent out queries as late as yesterday.

    But wondering, if the solid advice is to NOT send out queries, and most do not, maybe mine might not get sifted through and instead be caught and discovered in the screen after the turn of the crank? Then again, we’re all probably thinking this because we *want* to query. We want to have eyes on our pitch every month, every day, at all times of the day.

    Will I? Or won’t I?

    Again, thank you!

    Lost In Los Alamos. Lit fic.

  2. Andre Bergevin says:
    December 5, 2020 at 11:23 am

    Thank you for the heads-up!
    Querying is stressful at the best of times. And January, always full of promise, is around the corner. Research agent backgrounds and hone queries instead. That will be my modus operandi.
    I’ve enjoyed your many YouTube videos and found them very informative. Thank you.
    Wishing you and yours my very best wishes for the Holiday Season and all of 2021.
    Sincerely
    Andre Bergevin