Articles Tagged with submissions

Submissions Update

It’s the Season of the Witch, and pumpkins abound. As do, unfortunately, book bans. Penguin Random House has created a wonderful resource for anyone interested in joining the resistance to these bans, click here.

For those of you following my submission stats, I’ve officially narrowed the inbox down to full requests. I opened to submissions for three months this past spring and had 1,850 submissions. I ended up requesting 19 full manuscripts and so far have made 3 offers of representation.

Now that I’ve caught up on queries, I’m opening to submissions for the remainder of the year and will likely close again in the new year to catch up, as settling in at the new agency and this little one is keeping me busy.

Mary C. MooreSeptember 11, 2023

One of my favorite independent publishers is hosting an auction. Levine Querido is doing amazing work in the kidlit publishing space, so I’m happy to support them with a donation of two query letter + five page critique. To bid on one of my critiques click here! (If I have already reviewed a submission of yours, you can still bid.)

Or check out the rest of their amazing offerings at the auction here.

Wonking Out on Query Stats

I will be closing to submissions at the end of the month to catch up. For those of you who like to wonk out on #querystats (thank you Patrick for the easy to access stats on QueryManager), this post is for you.

I opened at the end of March and have already received nearly 1500 queries. Although the largest amount came in on the first few days of opening, it’s since averaged out to about 20 a day. If the trend continues, when I shut down my query box on May 31, I will have received over 2,000 queries.

Rainbow’s ploy to get me to stop working.
  • I’m usually able to filter out about eighty percent within a few days:
    • Most aren’t ready for me, about 10-14 or ~sixty percent of daily submissions
      • Often the pitch is not focused. It relies on vague rhetorical questions for tension or makes grandiose statements like “this will be an instant bestseller” or it’s just confusing. Whether it’s due to a lack of resources, inexperience, or laziness, I know these authors aren’t in a place for me to partner with, and when I give the sample a quick glance, this is confirmed. But as these authors are often vulnerable first-timers, any feedback I give may do unintentional harm, so these get a form pass.
      • Sometimes the pitch is fine or even great, but the sample isn’t quite there. These will get a note that says the concept intrigued me, but the sample didn’t pull me in as I had hoped. The tricky thing about this response, is I hope it inspires the writer to keep going, polishing and honing their craft, not discourage them. So I try to use it when I think the writer can handle the response, i.e. has a bit of experience, they are about to level up, or would appreciate knowing their sample isn’t quite working.
    • 2 to 4 are not my taste or not in my wheelhouse, ~fifteen percent of daily submissions
      • These are most often picture books (PB). There is understandably confusion about this, as I do represent authors who write PBs. But I only sign projects in the upper age range, and sometimes said clients also write picture books. So 99% of PBs will be quickly passed on.
      • Sometimes these are nonfiction proposals. I’m newly exploring the idea of representing nonfiction, again because I have clients who write in the fiction space and are crossing over. But I’m extremely selective and will either pass the submission on to one of the agents at KC&A who do a lot of nonfiction, or will send a form rejection as I’m not comfortable enough in the genre to give feedback.
      • Sometimes the sub is simply something I’m not interested in. There is no way for the submitting author to know this, and if I state it, an author may interpret it as a professional take, i.e. how the market is leaning. But I don’t represent the entire market and there are other agents that will feel differently, so these get a quick form pass from me as well.
    • 1 or 2 are inauthentic, ~five percent of daily submissions
      • Writers who exaggerate their resume to an extreme, falsely claiming to have had best-sellers, big name support for their book, film and multiple agents interested. They are more interested in being famous than writing. Form pass.
      • Market chasers, writing in a genre because they think it’s easy money, not because they love and know the genre. Form pass.
      • Writers attempting a take that requires nuanced experience they don’t have, i.e. someone writing magical realism without understanding the cultural significance behind the genre. These are tricky and tend to take more time to review, but they also get a form pass.
  • That leaves twenty percent that stay in my inbox, which at this point is 250 submissions and if things stay on track, 400 submissions when I close at the end of the month. This is not yet my maybe pile even. For now I’ve kept them for one of the following reasons:
    • the writer intrigued me
    • the concept/pitch intrigued me
    • the sample writing caught me
  • A submission has to hit all three of those factors to go into the maybe pile, and the rest will be passed on, hopefully with an encouraging note, but not guaranteed (timing-wise, on average, one of these passes requires the same amount of time filtering the ~14 quick passes does). This stage will leave about ten percent of the submissions in my inbox, ~200. Half of these will be further narrowed down:
    • Too close to something I already represent
    • Passed on to colleagues
    • Upon further reading the sample doesn’t hold up as well as it did in the beginning
    • The promise of the pitch ultimately isn’t met in the actual manuscript
    • I know the manuscript needs work, but have no vision on how to steer the editorial
    • I don’t have a clear picture on who the target audience is, comp titles, how to pitch it to publishers, and it didn’t gut-punch me enough to take a chance on it anyway
    • The author gets an offer of representation, I tend to step aside on those because I don’t want to rush my decision
    • The author gets an offer of publication from a smaller press, I tend to step aside on those or pass them on to my colleagues
  • That still leaves ~5 percent, which in this case is around 100 submissions, whew. Wish me luck!

Skimming vs Deep Reading Submissions

I quietly opened to queries ten days ago for the first time in over two years. I was closed for so long mainly because my clients were turning in multiple manuscripts regularly. It was averaging 30 manuscripts a year, which meant there was no time nor room in my head for deep-reading fulls in my submission pile. And the idea of opening up to queries was daunting, I’d been hearing from others how there’s been a surge in submissions since lockdown. But a few things aligned that pushed me forward. Most important, I caught up with my clients. On top of that my baby is now posed to enter toddlerhood, so the newborn days are a foggy memory. And lastly we revamped the website at the agency (check out the new Kimberley Cameron & Associates site, it is lovely, professional, and friendly in my totally biased opinion).

My cat Rainbow has a sixth sense for when I’m reading on my tablet.

Once I made the decision to seek new clients, I realized I was ready, keen even, to read subs. When over a hundred submissions rolled in that first weekend, I was surprised, but not overwhelmed, jumping in late at night, as the baby slept curled against me. I tweaked my submission form a few days later to find the quickest way to work through them thoughtfully, and plowed on in the odd hour I could find here or there. I skimmed through some fantastic pitches and lovely samples, all of them had potential, but only a few I set aside for further consideration. This is the easy part, the scanning, skimming, flicking through text. If this was all there was to it, writers would never have to wait long for a response.

But of course that’s not how it works. Many of you probably have partials or fulls that have been with an agent for months, even a year. Sure enough, five hundred submissions later, I’m slowing down. The maybe pile is growing. As eager as I am to find a new client or two, I’m not going to rush this part. Although I can enjoy a quick read, see potential in a few sentences, I’ve learned from experience that I have to truly sit with and deeply read a manuscript in order to absorb it, to have an editorial vision for it, to know if the connection I feel will be enough to champion it through the ups and downs. And that is a must before I take on that manuscript for representation. To find that vision, I have to be in that “Deep Reading” space. There’s a fantastic interview by Ezra Klein with literary scholar Maryanne Wolf on the difference between scanning and deep reading.

Both methods are valid, and indeed necessary when I’m considering submissions, but a deep read is the final step before I would offer representation, and it’s the most difficult to achieve. The research done by Wolf and others of the neuroscience behind the different ways we absorb information, is fascinating and enlightening and helped me further define how I want to work. It has also meant clarifying something I had already sensed, that I was going to take longer than ever to read and consider fulls for representation. But I have to be okay with that, and I hope after reading this, writers will choose to query me (or not) with this deeper understanding of my process.

A Day In The Life of a Literary Agent (Or The Reason They Haven’t Read Your Submission Yet)

Beginning of day. The sun is up, kid is dropped off at school. Time for work.

The plan:

  • Answer emails.
  • Finish reading the last quarter of a client’s latest manuscript, it’s so good, but have some feedback before it goes out to editors.
  • Take another look at that intriguing submission in the inbox.

What actually happened:

  • The final version of that major contract that has been under negotiations for months lands. It needs a last pass before the author can sign it.
  • The first version of an audio contract for another project comes in. Needs to be looked over.
  • An editor expresses interest in a submission. It’s too early to tell, but must nudge everyone else who has it!
  • The cover of a different project has been finalized. It’s super beautiful and there’s all kinds of buzz. Time to alert the subagents and pitch it to audio!
  • A revise and resubmit from a year ago drops into the inbox. And it’s already got 3 other agents reading the full! Read a few chapters, it’s really really good and lands the wishlist. Shit.
  • An audio offer comes in already from the finalized cover project. Inform the client of the happy news and negotiate the deal memo.
  • A client is having a meltdown, need to talk to them asap.
  • Foreign rights sub-agent is asking about the book sales.
  • Did I have coffee yet?
  • An editor responds to a submission. It’s a rejection. Ugh. Have to tell the client.
  • Another editor requests a different submission. Exciting!
  • Another client sends their final manuscript. It’s ready to go out on submission. Have to develop the pitch.
  • Really need to finish the final quarter of that other client’s manuscript and write up my feedback.

End of day. Picked up kid from school, sun is down, still working through emails.

Wait, I was going to read that submission…


Open To Submissions!

Happy 2019 everyone! New year, new start. I am pleased that I have reduced the number of submissions in my inbox to under 5. In part thanks to to the help of my wonderful assistant, Amber, who is an excellent reader. In 2018, I received over a thousand queries while I was open to submissions during Aug-Nov. Of those I ended up signing two clients. Both in the adult literary speculative space, Veronica Henry and Yume Kitasei. Very excited to introduce their amazing projects to the world in 2019. Both were cold queries, but both had done careful research and knew their projects were exactly to my taste. For neither was this project the first they’d written. So their persistence and research paid off. The query trenches are difficult, but it is where the majority of authors are picked up by agents, despite rumors to the contrary. So don’t give up! Cheers, and I look forward to reading.

Does Your Book Crossover? – Genre Breakdown

I recently had the pleasure of participating in a Q&A on Twitter for authors via the wonderful #ontheporch community. It’s a hashtag for writers about writing run by these two lovely writers:

The theme for the hour was “Writing Commercial Fiction” and the discussion was both fun and fast.

I realized, as I often do during Q&A sessions with authors, how much information I take for granted as a literary agent. I have learned so much on the other side of the desk, and it’s easy to forget how mysterious it all seemed once upon a time. One particular question that appeared to cause a lot of anxiety was whether or not a manuscript fell into the “crossover genre.” Writers were unsure what crossover meant, yet they had heard it was important that their manuscript achieved that status. I’d be pretty anxious too!

So, to clarify. Crossover isn’t a genre, it’s an adjunct of the genre, and it’s used as a label in publishing mainly for marketing purposes. In a literal sense, your manuscript is crossover when it “crosses over” from one genre to the next, e.g. a thriller in an urban fantasy setting. Publishers love crossovers because they can potentially be bought by fans of both genres, i.e. it “crosses over” to different audiences, which means, more money.

Crossover can also pertain to the type of writing, e.g. you’ve written a romance but the language is so elevated it could be considered upmarket or even literary. In these cases the term crossover is often dropped and occasionally the commercial genre label is dropped as well, and instead it’s referred to “upmarket” or “bookclub” fiction.

The most common use of the term crossover (and where the most confusion seems to happen) is referring to the age range of the reader. In particular YA (young adult) novels are considered crossover when the publisher is hoping to reach not only teenage readers, but adult readers as well. For example, The Hunger Games was read widely by both kids and adults, and its crossover appeal is what drove a lot of its popularity. In the technical sense the reverse is possible, i.e. adult books can crossover to kids, but this is far less common, and not used in marketing. When pitching a crossover in age range, it’s always in terms of aging up, e.g. a middle grade that can appeal to young adults, YA to adults, etc.

So what does this all mean for you the author? Knowing if your manuscript is crossover or not, shows a better understanding of the market, which can only further help your submission. Unsure? Then stick to your main genre and reader age. An agent can spot a crossover even if it’s not stated as such. But if you do claim it’s a crossover and it’s not, then that may cause the agent to believe that you don’t understand the market you’re writing for or that you are trying to overcompensate for something lacking in the writing itself. This won’t kill your submission necessarily, but it won’t help.

Hope this helps and happy writing!

Rejections – Slow Personal vs Quick Form – Writers Weigh In

Artwork by Shugo rai

In the life of a literary agent, the submission pile is a never-ending weight on our shoulders. As I write this, I have around 80 requested full manuscripts awaiting my response. But I’m looking to sign only two clients by the end of the summer, maybe three. So obviously 70+ are going to have to be rejected. And in my particular case, I feel a lot of guilt over the manuscripts that I can’t decide on. The ones that sit in my inbox for more than three months. I know what it’s like to be a writer with a novel on submission, how exciting a full request is and how heartbreaking a pass is on that full after months of hopeful waiting. So I can’t bring myself to send a form response to those writers that I’ve requested fulls from, especially when I’ve sat on them for so long. Which means I take even longer to respond because I want to add a personal touch to my response, a reason I am passing but yet an encouraging note over that. I assumed all authors felt the same way. But you know what they say about people who assume…

Almost half voted for a quick form rejection! This made me seriously rethink my strategy. Perhaps there is a middle ground? A form letter that has been tweaked? What do you think? Would love comments and further opinions on this as I continue to evolve my submission pile strategy.

UPDATE: April 14, 2016

Upcoming Conferences

Although I am closed to submissions until September, I will be attending two conferences in that time in which I will be accepting submissions from authors who pitch me at these conferences. The Chuckanut Writers Conference in June and the Pacific Northwest Writers Association in July. I’m looking forward to both these conferences!pnwa

If you are able to attend either of these please come pitch me! For advice on how to approach agents at these conferences read my post Conference Etiquette: Advice From A Literary Agent.