Okay...so I followed the guidelines and sent off five query letters to agents. I thought my query was professional and I followed standard guidelines (one page, address the agent, do some homework on the agent/clients, etc). I promptly received five rejection letters. It's very frustrating to be rejected without anyone reading my actual work!!! So...what is the best way to get an agent to look?

It seems to be the eternal question. In the past I've phoned an agent to ask if they are currently considering submissions. On getting a "yes, send us the sample chapters..." etc, I put my pitch together and pop it in the post. Four days later I get a letter saying, "Sorry, but our client list is full and we can't consider new work"

Aarrrgghhh.

Colin

It’s because they can’t resist the possibility of having a surprise blockbuster thumping onto their doormat. Every agent, no matter how overloaded they are, will not be able to resist a potential money-spinner. So they won’t tell you their books are closed until they’ve had a look at your work.

That’s OK. It’s cool. They’re in the business to succeed, same as we are. It just makes you wish you could have saved yourself that hopeful moment when you push your big envelope into the postbox.

I’ve been wondering for a while now if there’s a need for another level of the filtering system. At one time, writers could send work to publishers with a reasonable expectation that it would be read and considered. When they became inundated and started to use agents to filter the submissions, the slushpile shifted to the agents. Now they’re all disappearing under their own personal paper mountain.

Perhaps some of us who have been on WW for a while, and learned how to recognise something with potential, should get together and offer a filtering service for agents?

Dee

I find that query emails are far more effective than query letters via snail mail (effectiveness measured by the queries that lead to having the actual work rejected, rather than just the letter). I suspect that a lot of letters never make it to the addressed agent, whereas emails often get through the admin barrier.

Following submission guidelines to the letter usually just makes it easier for them reject.

If you send an email query, as short and as catchy as possible, you'll get more personal responses, and more requests for material, IMHO.

This coming from one of the unpublished masses ...

If you're looking for email addresses, and haven't found this site yet, try everyonewhosanyone.com. Great site, very funny.

Paul.

...just an aside- I don't know if anyone has seen this site, but I thought it was good fun! www.rejectioncollection.com. It's good to have a laugh in our frustrating sphere of activity...

Lately I've been thinking that maybe I should just give up on trying to find an agent and concentrate on publishers instead. Maybe I don't need an agent, anyway. Some successful authors get by without one. Anyone else feel the same?

Marie

It's banging your head against a brick wall that one. A lot of publishers simply don't waste time on the slush pile. They just stack them up for a while and post out standard rejection slips saying, "Get an Agent"

Colin

this is a good idea in theory Dee but it's having eth agents recognize you and trusting you that's the trouble.

Got four brown envelopes in my mailbox today (sent off last week) curled-up like hiberanting hedgehogs. None of which had been read. One snotty-arsed card attached says that they don't accept overseas submissions. One came back with no covering letter at all. The third came back with some arsey, rabid scrawl on my letter saying: "We have not, since the W&A Yr Book 2002-03-04 & 05, accepted unsolicited submissions"(so why are you in the year book?) Another came back with a message scrawled on the envelope (saying: Die in unpublished-hell, fucker)- which I think secures me the record for the rudest rejection yet. (not true, but the rejection- 'not for us' was scrawled on my envelope)

On the up-side, I did get an e mail from a fabulous, incisive and discriminating London agency within 24 hours, asking for more - I love these people. I really do.

Best

Sion

Can I just say, Scottwil, your message completely cracked me up!
Sorry, that's my only point!

Sion,

How I laughed when I read your post! Thank you. I'm still re-writing but have certainly had my share of hibernating hedgehogs in the past and no doubt will have many more! I'm glad you had one nice response though. I hope it works out for you!!

Sue
x

Dee - I think you're absolutely right about a filtering process. All the agents and editors I know (and that's a few) say that 90% of the slush pile is rejectable by the end of page 1, 9% is worth a longer look, and 1% is actually somewhere near worth reading properly. It's the 90% they're drowning under: an awful lot more writers think they're publishable than actually are, and the worst writers are the ones who least know it. It's brutal, and maybe not altogether in the spirit of WW, to say it, but while there are some wonderful writers who don't deserve the struggle they're having, there are also plenty of writers who ought to allow it to cross their minds that they're just not good enough for commercial publication. I know what that's like in another world - it took a whole Drama degree before I learnt I wasn't a good enough actress to make it, but I did, just before I starting cluttering up auditions.

I think it would be a help to have some sort of filter, if it then meant that agents and publishers went back to accepting unsolicited submissions from the filtered, instead of rejecting all submissions in the interests of sanity and being able to walk across the floor of their offices. Maybe we just have to accept that it'll cost us money as well as effort get noticed. A Masters, a bout with The Literary Consultancy, a hatful of competition wins... Anything reasonably impartial that agents can learn does produce the goods, and trust to filter out the dross before it reaches their groaning in-tray.

competition wins? what about good old fashioned quality journal publications? on the whole mainstream good accessible win competition but arrely anything 'tricky' or harder to comprehend on the first read. journals imo are where true literary worth is found not trying to please the staid old ladies who are often the blessed comp first readers in pink cardigans that you're Sebastian Faulks!

Jai, yes, journal publication is another filter, of course it is. I was talking about book agents and editors, who certainly ought to regard a writer who's been published in a journal as having been filtered, and therefore worth looking at properly. The good up-and-coming ones do keep an eye on those mags. Though in defence of competitions, my fellows in the 2004 Bridport anthology are a very exotic mixture, not at all pink-cardiganed (except on a mad, weird Alzheimer's victim getting on an Australian bus, perhaps) and company I'm proud to be in.

I think my point is that realistically, we can't whinge - well, not very much, anyway - if agents and editors are pretty cursory with work that comes to them with nothing attached to suggest that the writer knows what she's doing. 90% don't. Agents don't like being beastly to neophyte writers and they can't get involved in correspondence about why they won't take the book, so they say 'the list's full' or 'sorry, not for us' when they mean: 'I know there's a drop of your life's blood on every page, and it took you years to write, and you do know something about putting the right words in the right order, but I can tell from the first paragraph that IT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH.'

Maybe the price of getting agents back to reading unsolicited submissions seriously, and editors back to reading them at all, is that all aspiring writers allow themselves to be filtered - do the MA, pay for an editorial service, plough away in the short fiction magazine/competition furrow - BEFORE they expect the book trade to take any notice of them.

But writing's too important to restrict it to those who will make money for a commercial publisher. The other thing we need is many more non-competitive outlets for what we create, I think: the equivalent of the photographer who puts her work up in the local cafe, or the singer who borrows the parish church for a recital. It is tough for writers, because it's much harder to do that kind of private enterprise. WW comes about the closest - communication, feedback, support, so three cheers for it and its bretheren.

Oh, it's turned into a rant. Sorry. It's a diversionary tactic, to avoid revising for the viva for my MPhil!

Best
Emma

I've just had my third rejection :-( .
This time they "didn't love it enough to take it on" - fair enough.
I followed the standard letter, synopsis plus three chapters. It took four months, but they had informed me early on by e-mail that this would be the case.

Not sure if it's actually been read - the pages look pristine to me. Ah well - on to the next batch.