As someone who just sent my 99th query (also with a YA fantasy), with nothing in response but form-rejections and silence, I have to say I envy your two partial requests. At least that shows there's *something* in your query package that might spark some interest. It's taken me about a year to rack up 99 queries; I do one or two every few days after researching the agent and trying to adjust my query letter a bit to tailor it to their interests. At this point, I have to admit to myself that, as AVA_writing points out, "something is really off" with either my letter or manuscript (probably both). Believing in yourself and your book is important, but so is accepting the "feedback" from the system (even if that feedback is just the aggregated data of zero out of a hundred agents showing any interest). I do still like some of my own ideas, so I guess the next step is to step back from querying and try to diagnose and solve some of the problems. And yes, I realize I should have figured that out months ago, but sending one more query is just always so much easier than buckling down and planning a major re-write.
djl43516, for what it may be worth, and you've probably heard this elsewhere, I have heard that the ideal word count for a YA debut would be well under 100k. Mine is 81,000. Of course there are examples of longer books that get published, some of which become wildly successful. If you do decide to think about making changes before continuing to query, that might be one thing to consider; on the other hand, I'm hardly the person to be giving you advice, with my 0% request rate... anyway, djl43516, I really hope you do keep trying (whether with or without changing anything); if you've gotten two partials already, I feel like the right agent is definitely out there for you somewhere!
