Submission thumb twiddling and wondering

[MrsMaryMystery]

I submitted to my first four agents over the past six weeks. As I wait for my rejections, I can't help but wonder out of curiosity what proportion or percent of submissions get taken through to a request for a full. And then how many would typically get signed.
Does anyone know by any chance? Rough figure? Obviously going to be low! And variable!

I think I once read that your overall chance of being signed by an agent (purely on statistics, of course, not taking into account the quality of your work) is about 1 in 100,000.

I would estimate I've sent at least 150 agent submissions (across several novels and several years) and only ever had one full request and one 'partial' request (where the agent required a US style query only as the first approach). Neither went any further.

There will be variance by genre - from what I can tell, SFF and YA fiction are particularly heavily subscribed so your chances may be lower with something like that than, say, a historical novel.

It's hard not to obsess over these things, but all you can do is make your work the best it can be, research agents to target them meaningfully, and don't give up too quickly (but if your sub is getting no interest, be prepared to revise it between submission batches).

Wishing you luck!

A hundred thousand? Wow. I wasn't expecting that! Unfortunately my work is YA. I hope you aren't too disheartened after 150 submissions - well done for keeping at it!
I just listened to a podcast today which was saying how little you earn through trad publishing vs self publishing anyway so not sure what I'm even trying to achieve! :-)

I inevitably get disheartened from time to time, then I am hopeful again when I start a new project. I enjoy the writing process much more than the submission process, and (for obvious reasons) I enjoy re-reading my own work, even if no agents did so I am building a library of my own work for my old age .

I have a full-time day job - I'm realistic enough to know that even if I had a book published it would be very unlikely to earn me anything near the minimum wage, let alone match my current (modest but pays the mortgage) salary.

I sometimes wonder why I put myself through the submissions process but I can't shake the feeling that somewhere there's an audience for what I write, I just haven't quite got the knack of selling it.

Until you get your work out there you can't really know whether you're on the right track - if you are, it doesn't matter how crowded your market is, your work will stand out and you'll get agent interest.

The 1 in 100,000 stat will include many people who are clueless. If you read agents' blogs they always mention very basic errors such as using bizarre fonts or getting the agent's name wrong which you can't imagine anyone who's done even 5 seconds of research would make, so the statistic once you have eliminated the non-runners might not be as bad.

How well did you research the agents, OP? When I first started to submit to agents I used to send the submissions out willy nilly, really, but then later I did a lot of research and that did the trick.

Thanks for asking Hollow :-) I picked agents based on
-are they accepting submissions
-are they looking for YA
-do they have somebody already whose work I like (two did)
-do they look friendly in their picture

I didn't really know what else to go on.

Those are good reasons!

As far as how many are accepted, it's very difficult to tell. I know that nowadays they do get a lot of submissions - in the past when people had to pay to post a large document to an agent it must have been a much lower number and even then the slush piles were high. A lot of people send their submission to every agent in the country, without a thought of whether they deal with that type of book. You've obviously thought it through and so you're at an advantage.

When my friend and I (met on here) were submitting, we'd have it sent out to a dozen or so at a time. When someone rejected us then we'd send it out to another. Obviously you have to bear in mind what the rejection says, though.

I write YA, MrsMary. I think it’s quite oversubscribed. But you write what you write! Someone suggested targeting those agents who are building their lists; newer agents, associate agents, smaller, newer agencies. Good advice I guess (although didn’t work for me).

Thanks Stella,
I have no real knowledge but I did wonder if newer agents would be as good at getting "in" with publishers. I'm probably wrong.
I didn't set out to write YA, it just happened! I feel like it's a bit of a catch all category. Hmmm.