No Responses

[40battery]

I've sent out about twenty agent queries and have not heard back from any of them; what does it mean? No news is good news? No news is they're not interested Or - No news is ... no news. It has been a month so I would think one out of 20 would at least give me a rejection. Any one else have this problem?

[Sarah Ahiers (Falen)]

No, i don't. But i usually start querying agents who are responders.

What do their sub guidelines say?

And if you become a premium member on QT (which i HIGHLY recommned) you'll have access to the Data Explorer on each agent and that will tell you how often and when they're responding to other queriers.

But, now that we're almost into Dec, things will slow waaaay down because of the holidays

[40battery]

I'm rather new to this so excuse my ignorance but what are "sub-guidelines"?

[Sarah Ahiers (Falen)]

the agent's submission guidelines.
Almost always they'll say whether they respond or not, and sometimes how long it will take

[violet]

I've sent out about twenty agent queries and have not heard back from any of them; what does it mean? No news is good news? No news is they're not interested Or - No news is ... no news. It has been a month so I would think one out of 20 would at least give me a rejection. Any one else have this problem?

My friend is actively querying and she's gotten about 5 requests in the last couple of weeks. So no word at all? Yes, I'd say that's a bit odd. Have you posted your query? I'm guessing that might be the problem...

[MookyMcD]

No responses at all? It could be you've got an IP address issue or something that keeps your query from going through. I'm about to leave town, but if nobody has posted one of the agents who has an autoreply saying they received your query, I'll PM you one. It would be interesting to see what happens (you could be in 20 spam folders).

I can certainly see a query being bad enough to be rejected 20 times, but not receiving even one form rejection seems odd to me.

[Aiala]

It has been a month so I would think one out of 20 would at least give me a rejection.

Well, yes, but that presupposes that politesse still has a place in the agent world, which it does not. The problem is that nowadays nearly everyone believes that they are a novelist, with the result that the agents are swamped by a daily tidal wave of queries that virtually precludes them from responding individually.

Don't take it personally. I suspect that in due course one of them will take the time to actually say "no".  

~A~

[farseer]

20 queries out for a month with no response does seem odd. You don't have to be a premium member to check average response times on the main site. Also looking at the comments others have left on an agents profile might tell you if they respond and if so how long people are waiting.

More importantly - did you follow the specific submission guidelines for each agent?