The Waiting

Agents, as we have previously established, agents get too many submissions to be able to properly assess them all. Estimations vary but from what I can gather, an agent at a good sized agency can recieve over a thousand submissions a month. This means that the odds of getting picked are very low, but it also means it can take ages to hear back from agents, if you ever hear at all.

I want to be clear: I’m not complaining about agents taking a while to get back to me. Agents have an extremely difficult job - sifting through the mountain of submissions they recieve every single day, trying to assess each one as well as they possibly can. It sounds like a nightmare. The submissions never stop coming. If I was an agent I probably would have burned out in my first year.

That being said, I find waiting to hear back from agents deeply frustrating. Some agencies are fastideous about sending out a rejection email as soon as they’ve considered your work. I love angencies like this, because it means you can strike them from the list and move on. Other agencies never get back to you, and you have to just assume you didn’t make the cut. Again, given the number of submissions agents recieve, this is an understandable policy to have, but it gets very frustrating when such agencies have a very long consideration period. The agencies I have submitted to have the following wait periods:

4-6 weeks

6-8 weeks

6-12 weeks

Three months. This sort of thing is why, previously, I’ve just submitted to every agent I wanted to in one go. What you’re supposed to do - what I’m doing this time - is carefully select agents and submit to them in small groups. I’m currently waiting to hear back from three agents before I can send my next batch of four out. All this basically means I’ll probably be carrying out the submissions process for this book for, I don’t know, eighteen months unless I get extremely lucky.

This is why I’m glad to have publicity for Not in My Name to do (reviews have started coming in, they’re pretty good), as well as the next book I’m working on. Still, the waiting is frustrating.