Agent for a Day
I was torn about joining in Nathan Bransford’s Agent for a Day game because I was so burned out on the whole #queryfail and #agentfail debacles. (And yes, in my humble opinion, they were debacles.)
Having thought before that being an agent’s reader would be a dream job, I thought I’d go ahead and try my hand, and see how it went. I did decide, by the way, to put my real name on my responses. I don’t trust myself to be anonymous. I find that anonymity brings out the worst in some people, and if I will only say something if no one knows who I am, then I really shouldn’t be saying it.
So, what have I learned so far?
Well, not that I didn’t know this before, but writing up personal responses to 50 queries is hard… and time consuming. Expected that, but since I’m a writer and not an agent, I did decide the least I could do was say WHY their query didn’t grab me. An agent wouldn’t, of course, be expected to or have time to do that. But as soon as I would finish a set of two or three, two or three new ones would come in. Eesh. No rest for wicked faux-agents either!
The thing I found most helpful about the exercise is that having read through 29 /50 queries so far today, two facts stand out:
#1 The biggest problem I’ve had with queries I’ve “rejected” so far is that they’ve meandered or had muddled plot hooks. Sometimes the hooks just went on and on. And on. This made me realise I need to take a look at my queries and hooks and such and make sure they’re concise and punchy, otherwise they’ll get passed over pretty quickly.
#2 The second issue that I didn’t expect was being selective. Out of 50, we’re only allowed to send “requests” for 5. It doesn’t sound that hard, considering how dire most agents say their query email is, but out of 29, I’ve already found 7 that I liked. I sent “requests” for two, rejected two (telling them they would make my top 10, but sadly not my top 5), and I have three on hold, waiting to see what comes in during the rest of the day.
I really hadn’t expected to have to turn down queries that actually were well written and promising. I’m sure part of it is that the quality in this setup is much higher than the normal slush. People wouldn’t submit their queries to be used in the game if they didn’t feel pretty confident they’d have a good shot.
I would encourage everyone to play. It’s one thing reading a critique of a query letter, but it’s another altogether to actually have to choose projects. It’s not too late to play along. The queries will be open for comments (and therefore the game) for one week (from today). To read the star post go here and this is Query #1. Just go forward from there! All 50 queries will be posted by the end of the day. I’m just setting myself the extra challenge of trying to get through all of them in one day (although because of the time difference, I’ll have to pick up the tail end in the morning.)
Are any of you participating? Did you learn anything?
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haha I made it to query four and gave up… I am so not cut out to be an agent!
1) You’d better catch my attention very quickly. The minute my eyes start to wander or glaze over, I opened up the comments to post my form rejection. When I gave critique, it was as a fellow writer, and I completely understand why agents don’t.
2) Opening comments in a new tab, pasting in a form email, typing the CAPTCHA, and hitting submit doesn’t take that long. Hitting Reply, Ctrl-V, Send would take even less time. So, I have not deviated from my belief that not responding is rude.
3) I would definitely close for submissions on occasion, just to give myself some breathing room. I know I can do all fifty, simply because there’s an end in sight. Maybe two months out of the year or something. I wouldn’t care if I lost a chance at a novel that was so amazing Rowling came out looking like a pauper in comparison.
I haven’t popped over to Nathan’s blog yet, but I will sometime this week. I don’t know if I’ll participate in the posting, but I’ll gladly read & lurk.
Deadly Accurate, from what I’ve gathered the reason most agents don’t respond is not the time it takes to respond, but the danger of getting a response to your form response. As in, psychos who write you back cursing poxes on your house (using much more colorful language than this); excited, clueless wanna-bes who write back asking for detailed feedback so they can re-submit; hurt little puppies asking why. Too many aspiring writers take the form rejection as an invitation to dialogue, instead of realizing it’s a form rejection (and is that for a reason). It may be rude for agents to not respond, but unfortunately the system has created a situation where agents either have to be politely rude (they do tell you up front they won’t be responding) or they have to be hassled and be much harsher and ruder.
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. My hat’s off to you for even trying this. I have not even looked. It’s a great idea, but the time and effort required is more than I want to deal with.
Kudos for using your name. I think there are good times to post anonymously, but a critique isn’t one of them, even if it’s just a form rejection. The “why” is also a classy touch.
~jon
[ Follow me on Twitter: jmstro ]
This morning I woke up to find 63 unread items in Google Reader (as opposed to the usual 5-15). Then I thought, “Oh right, it’s Nathan’s ‘Stop complaining about agents when you’re not one’ Day.”
I think I’m going to do it, but probably not all in one day. Also, I’ve already read Nathan’s comments on the comments. Sounds like this will be another debacle, at least in part. I know if it were me, I wouldn’t allow anonymous comments on stuff like this (also on #agentfail). Invariably the anonymous comments are the mean ones.
[ Follow me on Twitter: adamheine ]
Thanks for your comments on #20 (mine). On humor: smacks forehead. “She’s right!”
Is that typewriter a “Halda”? (Swedish make; I had one years ago, typed all my college papers on it, letter-perfect, of course.)
Great pics. Since you’re “in the neighborhood,” swing out to Skellig Michael (Google it–web, images, video) you won’t be sorry.
Thanks again.
Thanks for your comments on #20 (mine).
Yours is a perfect example of a query that simply needs to find the *right* agent (assuming it’s not one of the published ones). It really was quite well done.
MA: Skellig Michael looks lovely, but it’s in a different country, on a different island, and several hundred miles away. Might make it over someday, but it’s not really a day trip from here. =)
More about Agent For A Day:
In the end, I found it really hard to pick just five, but I did it. I ended up picking books *I* would read though, and not necessarily ones I thought were published. So… I’ll probably lose, but I wanted to save my votes for authors who appealed to me.