In this new year, I’m hoping to be more transparent about the querying process, including where I’m at in reviewing queries. I also thought it may be interesting to offer the categories and genres I get the most queries for. I may find an improved way to post this in the future but for now, querymanager makes it easy to share.
Scroll down to skip over my rambling & just see the results!
As of today, Friday March 5, 2021, (clearly late, but hey it’s a start!) I have 77 undecided queries and 4 submissions to read. I receive about 50-70 or so queries a week and I try my best to respond within at least 2 weeks. Below is the screenshot of my queries as of today. (Note: Not all of the submissions I am considering are included.)
As you can see, my submission reply rate is lower than my query reply rate for obvious reasons! It takes me longer to evaluate an entire manuscript than it does the query and sample pages, but I am excited to read them all the same! Sometimes though, I do hold on to queries longer.
I still have some queries from January, I will be looking over soon. Sorry for making you wait!
This is can be for several reasons. Just some examples: I want to reevaluate it at a later date, I have a lot of submissions to get through, or even I can’t make up my mind quite yet. I don’t wish to discourage you by my response time. Sometimes I hold on to projects I’m unsure about and other times I send a quick pass on projects that are excellent but might not for me. Because you really deserve the best champion for your work!
Truly, there is no better feeling than connecting with an author’s writing! I bet if you asked any agent, they could say the same.
Now as far as February, below is the chart of queries I received, have unanswered, and requested.
And if you’re really into data, here is the breakdown of categories and genre of queries I received over the past year.
As you can see Picture Books lead the pack, which is awesome because I LOVE a good picture book! Surprisingly, Young Adult and Middle Grade are pretty close with 233 and 287 as of today. I find this interesting because for a while, Young Adult would have been leading that poll, but Middle Grade is gaining popularity!
I hope this helped! I’m going to keep working on adding to my blog with resources for querying and continue to update (maybe monthly? what do you think would be most helpful?) on my query stats so stick around if you’d like! I’d love to be able to post helpful blogs for you, so let me know below what you’d like to see more of and I’ll work on it!
Also, I am open to queries as of this post so if you think we’d be a good fit, check out my WISHLIST page for more on what I’m looking for, my #MSWL, and how to query me!
-Andrea
Children's Book Editor 