It has been a rough month but, it wasn’t all bad news. As I said, there is a much thinner folder of agent requests to read the whole manuscript. Though fanning the rejections folder makes a nicer breeze, the thinner, actually much thinner, request folder is reasonably breezy.

 

The first phone call I received was a hoot. The agent, from The Author’s Clearing House, stated that she hated the title and that there were transition problems. She said to send it via email to her address. I did. That was three weeks ago. Not a peep out of her since.

 

The second response, from Andrea Cirillo of the Jane Rotrosen Agency, was a request for the complete manuscript and, when the manuscript arrived, a curt letter saying that she would not be considering my work because I queried another agent with her firm. I called to attempt to straighten out the misunderstanding. Her assistant called me to tell me that the agent would be calling me back. The agent never called. I requested the return of the manuscript and crossed both of those agents off my list.  

 

A third request for the manuscript from The William Morris Agency required that I sign a release. I signed it and sent it. The fourth and fifth requests came with conditions. I am waiting to hear back from the two agents who are reading my book before I respond to the ones with conditions.

 

When I mentioned my dual agent death in my favorite writer’s chat room, the computer screen lit up with a scrolling response from nearly every writer . . . Simsub.  After a minute I figured it out.  Simultaneous submission.  This, I gather, is a bad thing.  It looked like a scene from The Shinning where the little boy writes on all the walls redrum, meaning murder, spelled backward.

 

But why is simsub a bad thing? I asked.

 

"Agents hate simultaneous submissions. They want to be the only one considering a work."  

 

I am summarizing the avalanche of responses that popped up at a scroll rate that could power a small house in California.  I hit a nerve in the group.  What is amazing is, they accept this as the way things are done in the literary industry.

 

I can’t imagine looking for a job in this manner -submitting my resume to one potential employer at a time and then waiting for a response before moving on to the next. The law of averages says that from a hundred applications you can reasonably expect one interview. I think I read this in What Color is My Parachute. There are eighteen agents that still haven’t responded to my query one way or another.  What if I had chosen those eighteen for my initial list of agents to query one at a time? I would be dead of boredom or stress before I managed to get published.

 

Here’s the question that keeps me awake nights.  If no agent is willing to take me on, do I go directly to the publishers? Or do I pack it up and try again with the next novel. At least with the second work, I have a much more selective list of agents to query.  Until next month when the crushing weight of rejection letters finally force me to move on to the next book,  Cindy C

 

 

This agent saved paper and just wrote a quick note on the query letter I’d sent her!

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Nothing Personal … Conclusion