Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Got an offer of representation from my top agent today! So freaking excited!

Don Zolidis wrote:Got an offer of representation from my top agent today! So freaking excited!

Congrats, Don! Did you accept, or are you giving the others a chance to finish reading, etc.?

Here's how it worked:

In January, a colleague of mine, who's a mid-list (on occasion best-selling) author, put me in touch with an agent friend of hers. Agent #1 was excited and said she'd get back to me in two weeks... Two months later - I had nudged her twice, but nothing, so I figured she wasn't interested, and began to do the querying thing - I rattled off 65 queries, and got 10 requests for fulls out of that. (I got 9 in the first six days or so, but then almost nothing until two days ago) - then, without any more nudging, Agent #1 got back to me and said she loved the book and wanted to talk. I did a little research - found out that she was ranked #1 in Publisher's Marketplace in Children's Fiction, that, and with the recommendation of my author colleague, made me call off the search.

So now I get to write a rejection letter to the agents who are looking at my fulls. It's really hard not using language like "after careful consideration" and "I didn't fall in love with your agency" - trying to be super nice cause you never know who you might need later on down the road, and these were people who were interested in my book.

So my final stats looked like this:
Queries: 65
outright rejections: 27
fulls: 10
partials: 2
rejections after full: 1
rejections after partial: 1
Still out when the search was called off: 9
no response (after 4 weeks): 26

Wow, Don, that's amazing! Congratulations!

I've just started querying MS #2. Here are my stats so far:

Queries sent: 11
Rejections: 2
Partial requests: 2
Full requests: 1
Still waiting on: 6

Super-excited!

Well, I just joined the gang headed down this road.

Queries sent: 10
Rejections: 0
Partial requests: 2
Full requests: 1
Waiting on: 7

How, exactly, do you keep from going totally insane while you wait?

airball

My first full! My first full!

Give in to the insanity, airball! There's no stopping it now!

Here are my slightly-updated stats. Conference season is in full-swing, so my inbox has been pretty quiet lately!

Queries sent: 17
Rejections: 4
No response means no: 2
Partials: 3
Fulls: 2
Still waiting on: 6

CafeCliche wrote:Conference season is in full-swing, so my inbox has been pretty quiet lately!

This means something, right?

Forgive me, I am ignorant.

airball wrote:

CafeCliche wrote:Conference season is in full-swing, so my inbox has been pretty quiet lately!

This means something, right?

Forgive me, I am ignorant.

Yep, it means something! There have been a lot of writing conferences lately, and agents usually end up requesting a lot of material from live pitches. Between that and travel time, the query backlog tends to pile up.

Stats (Oct 2009 - March 2011):

Queries sent: 302
Partial Requests: 25
Full Requests: 17
Telephone calls received: 2
Agents who wanted to take the book in a direction I didn't like: 1
Agents who wanted to represent me then disappeared off the face of the earth: 1

Outstanding Partials: 2 (both over 1 year)
Outstanding Fulls: 3 (all over seven months without a peep)

Stats (Apr 2011 - May 2011)

Blogs commenced: 1
Non fiction books written: 0.6
New Short Stories written: 1.5
Self-published e-books: 1
Agent contact re e-book: 1

I just re-read that and it sounds a little dramatic.

It was only an email, a suggestion to turn a short story (the e-book) into a novel. Nothing more. Still good, but not...oh, you know what I mean.

Ready to puke here.

One of the agents who requested a partial liked what I sent, and asked for a full. She's said she'll have an answer for me on Monday.

Hoo-boy.

Best of luck!

airball wrote:Ready to puke here.

One of the agents who requested a partial liked what I sent, and asked for a full. She's said she'll have an answer for me on Monday.

Hoo-boy.

I'm not surprised at all. I remember your query. Your novel sounds really cool. Good luck! And that is a really fast turn around. I wish they were all that fast. :)

Down the well wrote:

airball wrote:Ready to puke here.

One of the agents who requested a partial liked what I sent, and asked for a full. She's said she'll have an answer for me on Monday.

Hoo-boy.

I'm not surprised at all. I remember your query. Your novel sounds really cool. Good luck! And that is a really fast turn around. I wish they were all that fast. :)

Thanks DTW - I love your blog, by the way! And you give great advice here, too.

*Takes another deep breath*

Well I took the plunge and started querying. So far, it's not been good. Sigh.

Queries sent: 22
Rejections: 7
No response: 10
Partials: 0
Fulls: 1
Rejection of Fulls: 1

So my full didn't pan out. Big sigh. I *think* the market might be playing against me--Civil War historicals are not selling right now. Or rather I hope the market is playing against me.

In any case, I've got two more betas looking it over and after a final round of revisions, I'm going to start querying again.