Time allowed after offer?

Questions for the resident (former) agent
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firsttimer
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Joined: January 3rd, 2013, 12:04 pm
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Time allowed after offer?

Post by firsttimer » January 3rd, 2013, 12:16 pm

Hi Nathan- I am an unpublished, first-time novelist and have been in the query stage for the last 8 months. Here's my situation:

My full manuscript is out with several agents (a great thing), but I just had to reply awkwardly to a dream request, because she wanted an exclusive read. Even given the agent's fantastic reputation, I couldn't justify pulling from the others, just to have her consider me. I did offer, though, to send her the manuscript, stop querying more agents, and, if anyone else wanted to represent me, I would give her 3 weeks from that point to read my work and either pass or represent me. This is the long way of asking, is 3 weeks too much time to make another agent wait? 2 weeks seemed like a standard wait time, so I wanted her to see that, though I couldn't give her exclusivity, I am so very much interested. At the same time, representation from any of these agents would be a great thing.

Thanks for your thoughts. Your site is incredibly helpful.

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Nathan Bransford
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Joined: December 4th, 2009, 11:17 pm
Location: Pasadena, CA
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Re: Time allowed after offer?

Post by Nathan Bransford » January 3rd, 2013, 7:54 pm

firsttimer wrote:Hi Nathan- I am an unpublished, first-time novelist and have been in the query stage for the last 8 months. Here's my situation:

My full manuscript is out with several agents (a great thing), but I just had to reply awkwardly to a dream request, because she wanted an exclusive read. Even given the agent's fantastic reputation, I couldn't justify pulling from the others, just to have her consider me. I did offer, though, to send her the manuscript, stop querying more agents, and, if anyone else wanted to represent me, I would give her 3 weeks from that point to read my work and either pass or represent me. This is the long way of asking, is 3 weeks too much time to make another agent wait? 2 weeks seemed like a standard wait time, so I wanted her to see that, though I couldn't give her exclusivity, I am so very much interested. At the same time, representation from any of these agents would be a great thing.

Thanks for your thoughts. Your site is incredibly helpful.
That may be a bit generous, but it's already out there - if you have another offer in the meantime you can just let them know that you need to give the others a chance to consider but that you will try to wrap things up as soon as you can.

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