A positive letter from an agent :-)

Ali

Ali

I'm pretty excited today, had a letter from London Independent Books (who I sent a query letter, synopsis and sample chapters to back in December) asking me to send the whole manuscript of my novel.

My black ink has now, of course, run out half-way through...

I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much; does anyone know (very roughly) how many manuscripts agents request verses how many they actually take on? I'm guessing they probably ask for quite a lot more than they eventually accept.

Ali

Jaycee

I can't answer your questions but congratulations on getting a positive response.  That is an achievement in itself.  I hope it leads to more success for you.

josiehenley

Congratulations! It's very heartening when someone wants to see your work. It does happen that agents request to see work and then don’t take the person on, but be positive about it anyway because you’ve got this far, which means the agent must think you’re worth considering.

montholon

That's happened to me too, but it was very useful. The agent had read my manuscript, made some very useful notes in the margins and wrote me an A4 sheet of suggestions on how to improve the story. On reflection, I agree with just about everything she wrote and I'm going to do a huge rewrite.

josiehenley

It happened to me in that the agent was interested in taking me on for my children’s novel, but then asked to see some of my ‘other work’ and I sent her an adult novel I wrote that was quite graphic in violent and sexual content. I warned her that I hadn’t considered her to represent me for that, but she wanted to see it anyway, and as predicted she didn’t like it! She was complimentary about the writing but said that the content was not her kind of thing at all, so she turned me down because she said an agent has to be 100% behind the writer with all their work. She said it was a shame because she’d really liked my children’s novel! What I learned from this was to keep my adult writing and children’s writing totally separate and pursue different agents for both. But I’m not sure about the legalities of this. I still keep her initial letter that was really positive about the first book she saw, and still see it as a positive step because it wasn't a flat refusal.

Stirling

Carole Blake says she takes on six to eight new clients a year, and out of them one to three will come from unsolicited manuscripts.  I suppose that her slush pile will consist of tens or even hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.  Blake also says that the acceptance rate of unsolicited manuscripts is about a half percent.

I hope that helps you (with out depressing you too much!).

Jay Mandal

Well done in getting so far. Fingers crossed ...

Carol

Hope it goes to the next stage, good luck.

Butterfly

I've been asked for full manuscripts and am still waiting to get editorial notes back from an agent, but I've had the same from a publisher and I've done a rewrite since and resubmitted and am waiting to hear about that. I suppose the up shot is, each agent/publisher is different and will decided if the whole work is polished or just the first couple of chapters. I can't help any further than that, I'm still getting there, but I think the agent asking to see the whole thing is a big step in the right direction. Good luck with it and I hope you get positve feed back if not representation.

Ali

Thanks for all the good luck wishes, and for sharing your experiences -- interesting to hear how many people had manuscripts requested but then eventually got a negative response.

Josie -- thanks for the cautionary tale, it's a shame the agent didn't want to represent you purely because she decided she disliked the work which you warned her was quite different. A really good point about keeping adults'/children's fiction separate, I'll bear that one in mind.

Good luck to you all! :-)

Mad Doctor Dribble

Well done Ali.  Let us know how things turn out.

moira

Hi Ali,
congratulations on the interest in your work. Just something for everyone to keep in mind - nobody who ever had a request for a full ms which is eventually turned down should consider this a 'failure' or 'rejection'. Consider the thousands of people who get a standard rejection slip/letter on the basis of their initial enquiry and the relatively few and far between who generate interest. If you got this far, it means you have managed to write a synopsis and sample chapters an agent thinks would be worth following up, not many people do, but you did. Major success. You're on the right track, keep it up. Well done on your success.