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Hey querying world,

I am taking a summer break from submissions. The pile has grown way up above my ears, and I'd like to be able to catch up on everything, and requested manuscripts, AND client work. So...

From August 1st to September 1st, I am not accepting queries. I'll update this on the submission page as well.

What will happen if you query me during the month of August?

Easy. You'll get a nice auto-response and the query will be moved to the trash. Please feel free to resubmit in September if you still think I'm a good fit for your project.

Thanks!

A few months ago, a lot of you guys yelled at me for switching things up on you by saying that I wanted to be notified of an offer even if you'd only queried me. The rational (I believe) for why so many people were pissed at me was that so many agents want things different ways, and how on earth can you be expected to get it straight? (I still think that's lame, by the way.)

Well, today I was contemplating adding another form rejection (I have a few I use for different reasons) that would be sent to all queriers who seemed to have missed the boat on how to submit to us properly to begin with. But I am hedging on this one. Mostly because I'm not sure it's my job to do your work for you.

I think I'm part of a group of agents who goes ABOVE AND BEYOND the call of duty in terms of educating the writer community. We blog, we Twitter...we go to conferences galore. But is this good will or genuine responsibility? I think it's a little from Column A, a little from Column B, personally. More from Column A though.

So I am going to ask YOU, my faithful readers, and hopefully some not-so-faithful readers who like having opinions to answer the following questions:

1. Whose responsibility is it to make sure you submit properly? Mine or yours?
2. Where does my responsibility end? 
3. And more specifically: should I bother with an extra form rejection for Those Who Do Not Seem To Get It?

Dear readers,

After the balagan (Hebrew for "utter madness") that arose this week after I suggested it might be nice to let agents with queries know you've gotten an offer, I thought it might be helpful for me to give you a rundown on how I tackle my query pile. Especially because several people mentioned that my 2-3 response time on queries just isn't fast enough if I want to stay on top of the hot projects. (I think that's totally unfair, by the way, but I'm not arguing with you anymore.)

So the first thing you should know about how I read is: I read everything in the order it comes in.

There are almost NO exceptions to this rule. It's the only way to make it fair and democratic, and to keep myself organized. This way I don't lose track of requests, I can easily label things, and clear things out by date. (Sidenote: We here at CJLA use Google Apps, which has the BRILLIANT label & filter system of GMail. I have distinct colors for QUERIES and REQUESTED. Every email with the word "query" or "submission" in the subject gets automatically filtered into the QUERIES folder. And emails are threaded, so I know if I have responded.)

  The only time I will jump ahead is if I see a name that is referral, or if someone is letting me know that they have an offer on the table. Those are special circumstances. Everyone else goes exactly in the order in which they came. Everyone gets treated the same.

When I had fewer queries coming in, my habit was thusly: every morning, over my cup of coffee, I would read the queries from that same day a week earlier. So on a Monday I would read last Monday's, etc. Now I'm a bit busier so this doesn't happen as often. But I'd like to get back to it since it kept me timeline. Now I most often read 30 in a batch, which is a little more draining. But I am still within 3 weeks on response on queries, and nothing exceeds that. If it does, then it got marked as spam because you did something silly like send it to me and 50 of my nearest and dearest agent friends. 

When I open your letter, I usually do a quick eye scan for both format and keywords that look interesting. These are speed reading tricks. The more cleanly formatted emails are more pleasing to the eye and are usually more inviting for closer reads. The jumbled ones are less so. If there is an attachment, you are most likely going to get a rejection letter, because I explicitly say don't do that, and it's 2 extra steps for me to read what you sent, plus you could be trying to poison me or my precious laptop.

Once I kind of have that initial sense of what I'm looking at (and haven't seen that it's clearly not for me), I read the letter more closely. Unless it's a genre I don't handle in the slightest, I move down to the sample pages. (Unless there are no sample pages.) The sample pages are a real deal clincher for me. If the concept looks good, those first few pages better match up. And if there are no sample pages, well, that concept better be freaking AMAZING for me to request it. It has happened.

Every now and again, there's something interesting about a query, but I'm not sold, so I set it aside for a few hours or another day. But I hate seeing lingering things, so I get back to those quickly.

Now, once I request something, I smack that extra label on that email, so those are tracked also. And I tackle those by the same chronological order as the queries. The timeline is less strict here, because my request-rate varies, but if I see that a manuscript came in 2 weeks ago and I haven't looked yet, I'll speed up. 

I have a feeling you would probably like some stats. I do not have any at the moment. I am, however, doing the following: I am keeping all March queries and responses, and I will do a round-up of one month's worth of queries and detail stats in early April.

Cool?

~Elana