Hmm, seems innocent enough. I don't see any harm in answering such questions. You already know to run away if anyone ends up asking for money.
I was tidying up my Query Tracker agent submissions today, updating all my email rejections manually, and I thought I'd share some numbers. It's starting to look like the standard rejection practice is no longer the form letter, but silence. Silence sucks! And it looks like I have been getting plenty of it. Out of 142 submissions, all more than 5 weeks out, 96 have received crickets. That's not to say that all 96 are dead queries, but most of them are a few months old now. That stinks !
this new QT tracks no replies as "rejections" i've realized. My "negative response" meter went from 73 to 78 and I didnt know why since I, too, and in agent radio silence. 5 submission went "stale" and QT factored those in. but its as you said... no response doesnt necessarily mean its been rejected.
Yeah I noticed this as well. It seems like the default setting for no replies being converted to rejections is 120 days, but you can adjust this manually when you report your submissions. This doesn't do anything to your query, even submitted via QT's own portal, so it's just a tracking thing. My oldest query, which I thought was maybe being considered, changed to closed, no response, but the status page still says no decision has been made. I'm pretty sure the agent just forgot to reject it and instead removed it from their list first, or something like that. It's fun to go see how many days it's been open though; it's at 210 days now. This agent says, "If I decide to pass on you query you can expect a turnaround of a week. However, if I am interested it may be several weeks. Please do not nudge." So, it's pretty much in submission purgatory.
Your results are disappointing, Set2Stun. Mine too, and yes, silence sucks. More than five years now with a hundred or more queries and 99% silence. Despite the encouragement I've received from you and others on this thread, I've decided to return fire with my own silence. Pretty sure they won't be stunned by my silence. So, I'm back to self-publishing. The haystacks at Amazon and Smashwords are large, and my e-books are small, but I've had 99% more success in those haystacks than with agents.
Well, I'm calling it. I'm finished with the agent submissions. For these two books, anyway. It's abundantly clear that I am not ready for the big show. I've got some work to do. I have learned a ton about the process, and as a result, I'm highly efficient at submitting now. The experiences I've had will be influencing my approach to my next novel in many ways. I still really like my books and I think others would enjoy reading them as well, so I'm going to try submitting them to smaller publishers instead. For a little while, anyway. I might eventually have to consider self-publishing, but I don't know that I'd bother as I don't have social media accounts, don't know a lot of people, and I am incapable of selling myself or my work. So - here's my stats over the roughly 7 months that I'd been submitting to agents: Two Moons - 25 submissions - 10 form rejections, 15 ignores The Souled - 117 submissions - 43 form rejections, 74 ignores Totals: 142 submissions 61 hours spent on the submission process 37.3% response rate, 62.7% ignore rate 0 requests for more material 0 personalized rejections
