Today, over at kt literary, the Friday Ask Daphne! About My Query post features…

My query letter for BOUND BETWEEN. Eeeeeeeeeep.

Now that my query letter is out there (it was actually revised twice after that), I figured I should finally post my query statistics.

My novel was re-written, polished, and ready to be sent out mid-January 2010. But I was nervous. I dawdled, re-read it, and puttered until both my husband and Kristan yelled at me — literally — to send it out.

I sent my first queries (all three of the first batch) on February 9, 2010. Kate was one of those three. She requested my partial on February 15. She requested my full on March 30. She extended an offer of representation on July 19.

By the day of the offer, I’d received 5 partial requests, 5 full requests (3 from partials), and 16 form rejections — all polite. I also received silence from 10 queries — 2 of which were to agents whose websites said they guaranteed responses, so I had been prepared to re-query. (So 8 silent rejections.) Every request made me grin but every rejection hurt, regardless of how polite or impersonal. On a day when I received two forms in the early morning, later that afternoon I received two full requests. An emotional rollercoaster, querying? Nooooooo. Of course not.

I sent my queries in batches: three, five, eight. When I didn’t feel like I had “enough” out there at once, I sent more. There was never a time when someone wasn’t reading something of mine. From late April to mid-May, when we were buying the condo and moving, I didn’t send any out and was willing myself not to think of everyone reading my book. I tried not to read double meanings into mysterious Tweets. I worked on other things.

Response time was all over the board. Some I heard from the same day, or the next day. Others the same week, or the next week — or weeks later. Some of the partials and fulls took months. Some days. There was no apparent pattern, either; some of the quick ones were both requests and rejections. Some of the longer ones were both as well. So anyone who thinks anything is “normal” — that was not my experience. My experience was that every agent handles queries and requests differently. Simply because one agent requests on the same day you sent out doesn’t mean silence from an agent for three, four, five plus weeks will equal a rejection. Considering the wildly different work habits and schedules of authors, why wouldn’t agents, too, work as differently from each other as authors?

At the time of the offer, I still had some queries in the tubes. To anyone with actual partials/fulls, I sent a polite email letting them know of the offer… but even as I sent those emails, I knew where I wanted to go. The closest comparison I can make, and this will sound silly, was that those days were like waiting for college acceptances: you get accepted by one of your dream schools, but then you have to impatiently wait for the others to come in, so you can guiltlessly accept the dream offer. Well. It took a few days. I don’t think I slept much.

In the days after accepting the offer, ironically enough, I heard back from a few of those queries that were still in the tubes. Internet etiquette is still fuzzy on what to do for the people with “just” a query when you get that offer — do you give them the chance to request, or consider they aren’t invested enough to care? Some don’t want extra emails clogging their inbox, some have specifically requested a follow-up. I emailed those who requested or seemed to want updates or a follow-up. But I didn’t email those whose websites indicated any additional emails were not necessary or desired. I tried to respect the guidelines as best as I could, as I’d tried to do for the entirety of my querying process.

In 2008 I started researching agents on the internet, following them on Twitter and their blogs in Google Reader. I started querying — for the first time — in 2010. I didn’t query any agent who didn’t have a clear, crisp website explaining their agency and their tastes. I queried big and small, new and experienced. I followed every guideline I could find and if there were no specific guidelines listed, or if there was conflicting information on the internet, I held the query, to wait to see if they updated their guidelines or website — and over the course of my querying period, some did. I used QueryTracker, AgentQuery, Predators & Editors, Twitter, and Google, as well as the hardcopy of the 2010 Guide to Literary Agents. (That book was tabbed and color-coded before I sent a single query out.) To say I went into the query process obsessively prepared may be an understatement. This is my career, the path I knew I would follow since I was twelve. Every job I’ve held, every unpaid internship and spare moment of my time, has gone toward learning about the publishing industry, writing, and how to be a better novelist, how to write, how to participate in the business of writing. I would not let myself become one of those queriers.

That said, I still think I am terrible at writing query letters. But I didn’t need to become a query expert. My query needed to do a job. It intrigued agents, got them to read my pages, and some my book — and it found me my home.