Waiting for word from an agent is a nail-biting experience, especially when you know you may never hear from them at all. The agents are extremely busy, and unless they see something they like, they are not going to tell you “sorry.” Most, if not all, agents say so up front.
In this digital age we live in, queries have become a little more complicated. Most agents want to be queried via email, but in some cases their “submission guidelines” are very sparse and leave one guessing. There is no specific contact person so you can’t address it properly. Contact is via email, so putting your actual address on the query doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’re asked about aspirations – how does one answer that? “I want to rule the world”? One has to be really very careful. What do you put as the subject line when you know there are thousands of emails arriving at the same address every day?
Alas, I suspect my opportunity has come and gone. I sent my query and saw the agent’s visit to my website. That was nine days ago, and since then? Nothing. What does that mean?
Well, it might not mean anything. Through researching online, this agents response time could be anywhere from immediate to three weeks. Thus it is possible I might get a bigger bite in the coming days or even weeks. But how realistic is that? I don’t really know, but the impression I get from that same research is that because of the volume they have to deal with, agents are either hooked or they aren’t. The question then asked is should I move on to the next?
That’s a hard decision – there’s a reason I chose a specific agent to go for first. I’ve followed one of their clients whose work is similar to mine, and I like how they’ve handled his career. I’d like a similar experience.
The hardest part of all this is the nail-biting anxiety – it makes it difficult to concentrate on other projects, and I really should be concentrating on them since there is no guarantee, regardless of my confidence level, that OTHAFA will ever see the light of day. It’s entirely possible that I’ve made a mistake along the way – I know the pseudo cover art is unlikely to last into publication, but the descriptive words that also appear – are they just wrong? They seem to convey a story of boarding school, but that aspect is the background. My relationship with my brother and family – that’s the real thrust of the story.
Could it be I screwed up? I dunno. I hope not. Of course my anxiety might be because the wife is away all next week leaving me with the three kids by myself. Hmm…