So, we know that agents get hundreds of cold queries a day. The impression I got was that some % of those cold queries were emailing her authors (who they did not have a relationship with) for information about her before she’d even asked for a partial. If 10% of 100 a day do this, that’s 10 emails a day that each of her authors are getting. I can easily see how that would become a problem and cause enough frustration that the authors would complain. I personally can’t imagine emailing an author I don’t know to ask about their agent when I haven’t even queried said agent yet. I think with you, particularly after you’d been published already, were in a much different position, as opposed to people like me, who may query hundreds of agents before succeeding (or never succeed). And Janet Reid is really high-profile, so she’s probably getting a much higher volume of queries/interest than most agents. Basically, it feels like I would be wasting a lot of author’s time (and it just seems rude to do that). Of course, I’m also desperate enough that I’d sign with almost anyone at this point anyways 😉
I’ve been talking about this with a *lot* of author friends, including people who have much higher profile agents than Reid. Everyone has commented that they get MAYBE five inquiries like this a year. And if they’re busy, they don’t reply. I haven’t talked to anyone who agreed that this is a real problem.
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So, we know that agents get hundreds of cold queries a day. The impression I got was that some % of those cold queries were emailing her authors (who they did not have a relationship with) for information about her before she’d even asked for a partial. If 10% of 100 a day do this, that’s 10 emails a day that each of her authors are getting. I can easily see how that would become a problem and cause enough frustration that the authors would complain. I personally can’t imagine emailing an author I don’t know to ask about their agent when I haven’t even queried said agent yet. I think with you, particularly after you’d been published already, were in a much different position, as opposed to people like me, who may query hundreds of agents before succeeding (or never succeed). And Janet Reid is really high-profile, so she’s probably getting a much higher volume of queries/interest than most agents. Basically, it feels like I would be wasting a lot of author’s time (and it just seems rude to do that). Of course, I’m also desperate enough that I’d sign with almost anyone at this point anyways 😉
I’ve been talking about this with a *lot* of author friends, including people who have much higher profile agents than Reid. Everyone has commented that they get MAYBE five inquiries like this a year. And if they’re busy, they don’t reply. I haven’t talked to anyone who agreed that this is a real problem.
And you’ll get your agent. I believe!