First "thanks... but no"

[NouvelleMamanNouvelleVie]

...has just plopped into my junk box.
It doesn't contain any direct reference to my work so I guess it's just a template email.

The rejection says they specialise in commercial fiction for the mass market.

I think that means they think I wouldn't sell well 😂

Anyone else had a rejection lately?

Plenty of them here, don’t worry! What genre are you writing in?

Young adult I'm afraid to say!

As a general rule, if it doesn't say anything specific about your book, it's a form rejection .

If you get a personalised rejection (for example 'we liked the 70s setting of your work but didn't feel the protagonist Emma had a strong enough voice') that should be taken as a sign that you're on the right track but not quite there yet.

Many agents don't reply at all in my experience. The last actual rejection I had turned up 8 months after I'd sent them my book. Just a form rejection. I'd moved the agent to the rejected column on my spreadsheet months before anyway.

@NouvelleMamanNouvelleVie

...has just plopped into my junk box. It doesn't contain any direct reference to my work so I guess it's just a template email.

The rejection says they specialise in commercial fiction for the mass market.

I think that means they think I wouldn't sell well 😂

Anyone else had a rejection lately?

The comment about specialising in commercial fiction for the mass market might suggest they thought what you sent in was a poor fit for the kind of work they represent -- too niche, or literary rather than commercial. How carefully did you choose your agents before sending?

Good question, thanks -

their website says

We are always on the look out for exciting, inspiring and original children’s books. For novels aimed at Young Adult or Middle Grade readers, we want a strong voice, excellent characters and a plot that keeps you turning the pages late into the night.

....

loves to discover memorable new characters, bold and unique voices, strong concepts and gripping storytelling.

Obviously, I'm not objectively placed enough to tell you anything other than I felt my book fit that criteria! :-)

Thanks Weetabix, yes I think you're right :-(

@NouvelleMamanNouvelleVie

Good question, thanks -

their website says

We are always on the look out for exciting, inspiring and original children’s books. For novels aimed at Young Adult or Middle Grade readers, we want a strong voice, excellent characters and a plot that keeps you turning the pages late into the night.

....

loves to discover memorable new characters, bold and unique voices, strong concepts and gripping storytelling.

Obviously, I'm not objectively placed enough to tell you anything other than I felt my book fit that criteria! :-)

Can you think carefully about what published YA authors your work most resembles, and look up their agents to see if they're open for submissions?

I know less than nothing about YA, but have you had many people read your MS and give feedback on voice, plot, concept etc? I mean, people who regularly read YA and whom you can trust to be both informed and honest?

I've given it quite a bit of thought... It's so hard to say who my writing resembles because I can never have read enough for that. I think I could say it's a magical realism adventure.
I'd better do some more research!

When you read a book in your genre that you enjoy, look at the author's acknowledgements - they usually credit their agent!

That may be your issue. I think you need to read an awful lot in your genre, or if you're genre-crossing in an unusual way, in both genres that you're working in, both so that you can absorb what works, and so that you can see what's already been done to death.

My sense (and obviously this is only my uninformed opinion as I neither read nor write YA) is that YA is more dependent on plot and 'concept' than some other genres, especially as it's often so series-driven, so if you're trying to sell, I don't know 'sexy teenage werewolf gang in rivalry with sexy vampire gang, triangulated by love triangle with a Chosen Girl Who Doesn't See Her Own Beauty', and it's been done endlessly, it'll get tossed no matter how good you are.

An agent looking at your first three chapters or your synopsis is primarily thinking 'Can I sell this?' and 'How can I sell this?'

Also, is your synopsis as good as it can be? Some agents will only actually read the extract if they like the synopsis, and some are the opposite and will check the quality of the actual writing first before reading the synopsis. So both need to be good.

I agree - you have to absolutely know your genre. They always need to know where to place it in a bookshop and which readers to target with advertising.

Think of Amazon and how it'll say, "People who bought X also bought Y." If someone bought your book, which other books might they buy?

It's really important to take note of what any rejection email says, tempting though it is to ignore it!

Yes, form rejections here several months back. My book crosses genres and not commercial enough. I hope to self publish later this year.

Got one this afternoon . Still, better than silence.

Friday is a common day for them - I think the agents must clear out their inboxes or something.

I do think they should respond. Replying to an email with a standard rejection email only takes a few seconds.

But agents often get hundreds of authors writing to them every month and a lot of them won't have taken any notice of their requirements. They wouldn't have time to do any other work if they replied to everyone. And you have to think, if you had an agent, would you want them spending hours and hours sending out rejection letters to other authors?

By the way, I am not saying that the app hasn't taken their requirements into account.

Yes, I did take the requirements into account. But I think perhaps I misclassed my genre. I think I might be more magically real than bog standard YA. I'm lost in a bit of IRL work, but I had an initial look and there are some people looking for this kind of thing.
I think I might need to inject a bit more light-hearted "fun" into the opening bit. It currently goes,

1. In media res - character is falling
2. back in time a day or two - long chapter in which the character is doing his job and meets the baddy.

3 etc. moving on from there.

So I think I could add in a 2a - character and friends having lots of action and fun doing the magically real thing that the book is about before it gets into the drama

[I appreciate that makes for a very confusing read!!]

But yeah, only had the one reply and nobody else has answered.

Keep going, OP.

Similar to PPs, I think reading intensely in the genre is essential.

Based on your recent post, does the first page make you stand out from the crowd (that you know as you read in the genre) and a reader have to carry on? Start somewhere interesting, not at the 'beginning'.

I feel there is a tension as agents want to know where you sit on the bookshop shelf next to which best seller (and on Amazon) but not exactly the same, just different enough. Too far and most don't want to know (hence Harry Potter's rejections) and too close and it's a copy of that vampire/werewolf love triangle a PP mentioned.

Good luck.

1. In media res - character is falling
2. back in time a day or two - long chapter in which the character is doing his job and meets the baddy.
3 etc. moving on from there.

So I think I could add in a 2a - character and friends having lots of action and fun doing the magically real thing that the book is about before it gets into the drama

Have you read Save the Cat Writes a Novel?

If not, I would read that (as well as widely in your genre.. YA definitely has 'trends' and while you shouldn't rewrite the entire book to fit a trend, you should also check you're not trying to sell a variant of what was trending last year and is 'old news' this year).

From what I see right now things are moving away from fantasy set in the real world and into completely made up worlds (but check your specific branch of YA). Again, it's probably not practical to rewrite but if you see the trend has shifted and if (for example) the story moves to a fictional world in this book, you might want to make that clearer by introducing that possibility right at the inciting incident, (or if it's a series, and it should be, look for ways to move the book 2 into a fictional world).

For novels aimed at Young Adult or Middle Grade readers, we want a strong voice, excellent characters and a plot that keeps you turning the pages late into the night.

This, to me, is just a fancy way of saying pulp fiction... which in 2021 (imo) means fast paced 1st person 'easy' writing, cliffhangers at the end of as many chapters as possible, and a tight plot packed with tropes.

Does your book tick all three of those boxes? Pull up the MS, write a list of chapters, and tick each one that has a cliffhanger at the end. If it doesn't, sometimes it can be easily fixed by deleting the last 400 or so words. Then make a list of the tropes you have and highlight the ones with fresher takes. (Ideally you want a balance of giving readers what they want and surprising them with things they didn't know they wanted).

The summary (especially with adding in another chapter) seems quite slow paced to me. Going by Save the Cat the inciting incident (Catalyst) should happen at roughly 10% (so 6k words in a standard YA) but it's worth taking account the changing genre fiction market.

Half your readers will be young adults used to TikTok and serialised Wattpad fiction, the other half adults increasingly 'conditioned to seek instant gratification'.

So while I learned the Save the Cat rules, I've found much more success throwing that rule away and focusing on character depth + interesting situation intros to quickly ground the reader, then straight into the inciting incident before the end of chapter 1.
Long chapter 2, how long is long? In the YA / NA books I've done, the goal was 1500 / chapter and anything over 2k had to be reaaaaally justified.

I always find it a bit surprising when people are surprised not to get an offer from an agent. Or when they declare, with great confidence, that they've decided to get published the traditional way. Apparently, in my genre, only 1 author in a hundred gets an offer from an agent. And that figure was before Covid - it must be a much smaller percentage now. Even if you're a good writer, you're surely unlikely to get an offer. I'm going ahead with self-publishing. I have to say that it's very challenging and time- consuming and is unlikely to be remunerative and may even result in a financial loss. So I wouldn't do it if I wasn't enjoying the process in a way.

OP and everyone else do come and join the waiting on agents thread, a few of us there at this stage or nearly there.

Like pp have said though agents get hundreds of submissions so I think it's fair they don't always get back to you, I think silence after a few weeks means it's a no go (though I once got a full MS request after 6 months - very much an outlier though).

Good luck op - I'm just starting my first round of submissions for my new novel, summoning up the courage to press send...