Query Friday
- By: Jessica Faust | Date: Aug 20 2010
I haven’t done a status on my queries lately, I guess because I’ve been closed. But for those who don’t follow me on Twitter, I thought I should update you. As of a week or so ago (I’ve totally lost track of time) I’m fully caught up on queries, although still closed. That means I don’t have any queries left to answer. If you’ve sent me a query anytime in the past year you should have an answer. If you haven’t received an answer the letter was lost in some way or another and you should re-query after September 6.
The weird thing about closing to queries is that for some reason it gives me the freedom to request more proposals. I find that as I’m reading queries and the numbers in my inbox actually go down (instead of stay stagnant) I am requesting more partials than I have all year. I’ve been finding time to get to those too and at this point have roughly 20 left together. Some date back to June, the rest are from July and August.
–jessica
When my blog reader gets too full I find that I start skimming the posts rather than reading them, and that sometimes I miss useful info. So I understand how the pressure of hundreds of queries every week must feel.
Maybe you should close to queries twice a year, or whenever your inbox gets to a certain level of insanity. Writers who really want to query you will wait, while those who just use the scatter-shot method will go away. You'll have more time to give your attention to serious queriers.
I wish more agents would be closed to queries for part of the year.
It just makes sense that you'd need a break from the influx, and like you said, it lets you focus on reading a partial that you might not otherwise have, because of time constraints.
Congratulations on conquering the query inbox beast! I hope that there are at least a couple of winners in those partials.
I agree with the bloggers above me. Maybe, you should only accept queries from the first to the 15th of every month. No one is at their best if they are always being rushed, rushed, rushed.
Please write about how many authors you have signed this year? How many do you sign per year? Does it vary?
Do you ever get so many projects going at once from authors that you can't take on new projects?
Thank you for responding to queries at all! I'm finding that only about 50% of the agents I carefully researched and queried bother to respond.
It takes a second to paste a pre-written "thanks but no thanks" response into an email. We writers are supposed to be professional, but honestly, I don't think it's professional for an agent to ignore a legitimate business inquiry (no problem deleting the spam and unresearched queries).
And I'm not kissing up to you Jessica, as you already courteously declined my memoir query. 🙂
That's wonderful, Jessica. I'm hope you're feeling refreshed from easing up on the workload! I also hope you find a few gems in your partials. 🙂
That's great! I hate having a full inbox. It feels like something I've left untidy.
Maybe when you start taking queries again this break will have made you look at things differently. Instead of being bogged down, space them out and take your time, and leave an open response time so the people querying know it's going to take a long time. It should take a long time; no one should be expected to read all these queries one after the other without taking breaks along the way.
And let's face it, with the state of affairs publishing is in these days, I don't know anyone who isn't waiting for something right now.
Does that mean you are reopening to queries on September 6th?
Jessica, I love your honesty and hope to have the opportunity to query and ultimately submit to you…