Do Literary Agents Read Submissions?
You’ve sent your work off to an agent. What happens next? Will it languish forever in a ‘slush pile’. Will it even get read?
The short answer is yes, but the slightly longer answer is…it depends. We receive between 50 and 100 query emails a week, and once we have filtered out the genres we don’t represent (eg fiction, screenplays, children’s books, academic texts and graphic novels), only a fraction will feel at first glance a potentially good fit for us, and these will get an intense and careful read. In non-fiction - as you are pitching an idea and may not have a complete manuscript - it should not take an agent long to make a decision, even if that decision is that they would like to talk to you, or see more material. A full manuscript, particularly if it is a memoir, will take longer and if it feels like it’s taking a long time to get a response from an agent, this might be one reason – although if we are seriously considering a manuscript we will contact the author to let them know where we are with their work. The truth is that deep reading takes time, and this is on top of the day to day agent business of meetings with publishers, negotiating contracts, developing ideas and reading existing clients’ work. At some particularly busy times of the year we halt our submissions and say so on our website and socials. The bottom line is that good agencies will read your query letter and at least the first 50 pages of every single submission that fits the broad criteria of their lists. Which is why it is worth doing your research before you click ‘send’.