“On average, approximately 99% of submissions to publishers and literary agents get rejected, especially if you’ve never been published.” –P.S. Literary Agency
“Now, the more realistic number of queries I received and answered and considered in 2016: 3,053.Total New Clients Signed in 2016: 3”– Sarah LaPolla, Literary Agent
“1) Agencies like mine [U.S. agencies] typically reject 99.5 of everything they see. Out of close to 500 queries a month (electronic and surface mail) we receive, we invite perhaps 50 proposals for review. Out of that fifty, perhaps one or sometimes two is ready to be delivered to publishers.
2) Editors take projects from agents. There are about 1600 agents in the USA, and only about 25% of us are actually actively selling books. There are only about 20 editors tops for any particular subject in the major New York houses – all totaled! These same 20 people receive projects from hundreds of agents. Do the math and consider how many they see in a year!
3) An average, overworked editor publishes a maximum of 24 books in a year, thanks to budget and staff cuts. When I began 14 years ago, it was an average of 12. They have little time for editorial development. That job belongs to the agents and their staff now.
4) Good agents (in which group I humbly include myself) tend to sell about 3 out of every 5 projects they represent.
5) According to reliable sources, we publish only about 65,000 books a year. 2/3 of that group are text books, professional books and fiction. That leaves approximately 12,000 books available for you to become one of.” — Wendy Keller, Keller Media [U.S. statistics]
So, yeah, the odds of ever getting published seem overwhelming.
BUT, publishing (as many helpful writing websites continue to remind me), is not a lottery. Yes, there are thousands of submissions to literary agents in the U.S. every year, but many of them may be poorly written, or for novels that are not yet complete, or for genres that a particular literary agent doesn’t represent.
Which gives me some hope, because that means I have more control. I can land a literary agent (and hopefully a publishing deal) if I only knock the socks off an agent. That’s all I have to do. Wow him or her in such a way with my writing style and premise that he/she absolutely needs to read my book and believes in it as much as I do.
I know how to do it: write a wicked query letter and find the right agent.
It’s the execution that I seem to be struggling with at the moment…
So far I’ve been soundly rejected by 7 agents (all in the U.S.; I am holding off on querying literary agents in Canada for the moment). What this tells me, especially getting feedback from some of them, is that I don’t yet have a killer query. It’s possible I don’t yet have an amazing manuscript, but I haven’t even gotten to the stage where an agent has asked to see it.
Which means, I need to do a better sell job on my premise.
So I’ve been revising my query letter. Here’s a version of my original:
Two weeks before her June graduation, 17-year-old Lyra Harmon is blown up in a suicide terrorist attack on her high school—carried out by her boyfriend Jonah in the name of religion. It’s all the more shocking because they live in the First World, a non-religious country where a belief in God is considered irrelevant.
Lyra wasn’t supposed to survive, but she did because of a condition she didn’t know she had: phoenix cells—cells that always regenerate. It seems her body heals itself from any injury or illness.
That’s why Annie Wisteria, a spy with the First World Intelligence Agency, wants Lyra to assassinate the mastermind behind the spate of terrorist attacks. Simon Moto is a warlord from the Second World, a country on the brink of civil war, torn between traditional religion and a desire for a more progressive, secular society. Moto now manipulates disillusioned youth like Jonah to bring religious terror to the First World.
Annie intends to inject Lyra with Hecate’s Plague, the deadliest virus on Earth. No one who breathes the infected air survives. Except Lyra. With the help of David, a boy whose own brother died in a Moto attack, Lyra can infiltrate Moto’s compound, breathe out the contagion and kill Moto—all without leaving any First World fingerprints.
Lyra agrees to the dangerous mission. She lost her whole family in the school explosion and wants to protect others in the First World from her suffering. But as she’s thrust into the unstable Second World, she begins to question everything she knows about religion and power. She even questions whether killing Moto is the right thing to do.
But with Moto planning imminent attacks on more First World students, Lyra must decide where her loyalties lie. And what she should believe in.
Phoenix Cells is a completed 100,000-word young adult novel. I chronicle my writing process for this book on my blog, www.jenbraaksma.com.
I am a graduate of Humber College’s Creative Writing program—I worked with YA author Richard Scrimger—and I’m a high school English and Writer’s Craft teacher. [Here I include personalized information about each agent, based on my research.]
This is a multiple submission to literary agents.
Thank you for your consideration.
Jen Braaksma
Some feedback I’ve heard: good writing (yay!), but it reads too much like a synopsis–too much of a summary about what happens rather than a hook to draw you in.
So I cut the part about what Annie intends to do with Lyra–details that a reader will learn while reading.
I also clarified the focus of religion a little more.
I changed the opening, to punch up the personality of the protagonist and get to the crux of what makes my story different (Lyra’s phoenix cells).
Here’s a revision:
It seems 17-year-old Lyra Harmon can never die.
She wishes she could.
Lyra learns she has “phoenix cells”—cells that always regenerate, no matter how bad the injury or illness—after she survives a suicide terrorist attack on her high school.
A terrorist attack carried out by her boyfriend Jonah in the name of religion—which is all the more shocking because they live in the First World, a country that has no use for religion of any kind.
Lyra lost her whole family in the attack. When she tries to escape her anguish (screaming into the wind on a rusty railroad track with a train barreling down on her seems like a good idea), she meets Annie Wisteria, a spy with the First World Intelligence Agency.
Annie has a preposterous proposal for Lyra: assassinate the mastermind behind the spate of terrorist attacks. Lyra has heard of Simon Moto, a warlord from the Second World, a country torn between traditional religion and a more secular society, but she didn’t know Moto manipulates disillusioned youth like Jonah into bringing religious terror to the First World.
Lyra reluctantly agrees to the dangerous mission; she has nothing else to live for. And maybe she can stop the evil spread of religion in her country and spare others her suffering. But as she’s thrust into the unstable Second World, she begins to question everything she knows about religion and power. She always believed religion was synonymous with violence, but now she’s learning they are not the same, and that religion has its own value. She even questions whether killing Moto is the right way to end the violence.
Yet with Moto planning imminent attacks on more First World students, Lyra must decide where her loyalties lie. And what she should believe in.
Phoenix Cells is a completed 100,000-word young adult novel. I chronicle my writing process for this book on my blog, www.jenbraaksma.com.
I am a graduate of Humber College’s Creative Writing program—I worked with YA author Richard Scrimger—and I’m a high school English and Writer’s Craft teacher in Ottawa. [Personalized info for each agent]
This is a multiple submission to literary agents.
Thank you for your consideration.
Jen Braaksma
Is it better? Guess I won’t know unless I hear back from an agent to whom I sent this version…
In the meantime, I’ll keep at it; rewriting and revising and researching agents.
Anything to increase my odds.
