I spent the day querying literary agents. The process of querying deserves an entire post by itself, but I’m not quite up to it today. No, I am going to talk about the way some agents seem stuck in the 1980s with their querying process.
When I look for agents to query, there are two immediate things I look at to see if I am interested. Firstly, does the agent represent the genre of work I am shopping. Second, does the agent accept e-mail queries.
You may be thinking, “Wait, this is 2008! Surely everyone uses e-mail nowadays.” And this is mostly true. The great majority of literary agents do have e-mail addresses. However, a good portion of them (I would say at least half) do not accept queries via e-mail. I can’t really understand this. It seems to me that an e-mail query would save the hassle on both sides.
For the author, the benefit is obvious. For one, it saves money. There is no need to print anything out, which can be especially helpful when talking about agents who want the first 3 chapters or first 50 pages or other similar metrics. Second, there’s no need to mail anything, so no buying envelopes or stamps. Many new authors, especially, don’t have the benefit of having a large budget, so saving a few dollars on paper, printer ink, and postage goes a long way.
Second - and this applies to the agents as well - the lag time is significantly reduced. There’s no need to wait several days for the post office to deliver anything. You can cut one or two weeks off the lag time between each communication, meaning that agents can communicate faster with prospective clients and vice versa.
The benefit to agents seems obvious to me as well. For one, there’s no need to stuff an answer into the SASE supplied with the query. You just fire off an e-mail and are done with it. Second is the lag time benefit as mentioned about. Third, there’s the whole organization thing. With an e-mail, there’s little chance that you lose the query letter, writing sample, SASE, or whatever. It’s all electronically stored for you.
There’s only two logical reasons I can think of why an agent would reject e-mail queries. First, it doesn’t put the onus of printing things out on the author, it puts it on the agent. For an agent who wants to read a physical copy sitting in their comfortable chair at home, this means they have to print things out themselves. But eating these costs or biting the bullet and reading on a computer screen seems like a minor sacrifice, especially when you consider that books are soon going to follow the trend in music, TV, and movies with electronic distribution.
The other reason I can think is that it cuts down on submissions the agent receives. People like me don’t send them queries, so they don’t have to deal with them. Which I suppose is fine for someone who wants to remain small time, but doesn’t seem like an ideal strategy to remain relevant in an increasingly digital and online culture.
But even with the inconvenience and extra cost that not accepting e-mail queries causes me as an author, those aren’t the main reasons it turns me off from an agent. No, the real reason is it gives the impression of being technology-adverse.
If an agent is unwilling to use e-mail to communicate with prospective clients, why should I believe they are willing to communicate with me through e-mail should they actually represent me? Or worse, why should I believe they’ll use e-mail to sell my manuscript? Even if hard copies are still the predominant medium in publishing, why would I as a writer be alright with cutting off any prospective windows?
And how long will printing remain mostly in the realm of physical copy? eBooks are becoming more and more popular and - while not quite reaching the level of MP3s and online video - will one day soon become the main method of reading books. And as eBook readers become easier to use, cheaper, and more ergonomically designed, the format will only become that much more popular.
Am I to believe that someone who does not use e-mail will be able to adequately represent my interests when it comes to negotiating digital rights?
So while restricting myself mainly to agents who accept e-mail queries and submissions may cut me off from a number of prospective avenues towards getting published, they aren’t really avenues I’m fully comfortable walking down anyway.
