The numbers are against us, my friends.

Attend any writing conference where an agent is speaking, and invariably they will let slip how many new queries they get per week. The number you’ll usually hear is “hundreds”, and I’ve heard “thousands” more than once as well. That’s a lot of email to filter through.

An agent I follow on Twitter recently just reopened to queries and was tweeting about her slush pile (that’s the collection of unread queries waiting for their attention). In just a few hours after reopening to queries, she had 150 fresh queries waiting. After she had gotten through those 150 queries, she had requested materials from two. That’s not a great rate of return (and I think 1 out of 75 is kind of high actually). By the second day she had over 450 new queries waiting. Now she probably had a queue of people waiting to send her a query, but still. That’s a lot of work waiting for someone who’s not going to get paid for nearly any of the time they spend on it.

Most veteran agents spend 90-95% of their effort on existing clients. That doesn’t leave a lot of time during the day for queries. Let’s say the agent above gives thirty minutes a day to her slush pile. That’s 150 minutes. Enough for a minute per query, for just the first day’s haul. But for the entire week’s intake, she has less than a minute per query. A lot less. If she’s getting 1000 queries per week, and holds fast to the 30 minutes per day, that’s just 9 seconds per query.

Certainly, stories that look promising will take more time than that. What is the agent to do? Look for anything that makes for a quick rejection. So, today’s lesson is…

Follow submission guidelines to the letter.

Submit your query to the wrong place? Reject.

Get the agent’s name/pronouns wrong? Reject.

Submit when the agent is closed to queries? Reject.

Attach a Word doc when the agent wants copy/pasted text in the body of the email? Reject.

Submit more than the requested sample pages (AKA sending your whole manuscript when the agent wants one chapter)? Reject.

Have weird/bad manners? Reject.

Submit something that the agent doesn’t represent (this is always mentioned somewhere: their MSWL, Publisher’s Marketplace, or the agents/about us page on their agency’s website)? Reject.

Open by saying your manuscript is the best thing ever put to paper and you’re going to make them a trillionaire? Reject.

Get out on the wrong side of bed in the morning? Reject.

Why do agents cull with such abandon? Simple statistics. The odds of them finding something they’re going to love so much they want to represent it are already astoundingly low (see my Lessons from Querying #1 post). The odds that story they fall in love with will have been submitted by someone who breaks submission guidelines? Even lower. Because personalities matter, as well as the writing. A writer who can’t be bothered to follow submission guidelines is more than likely going to be harder to work with, and less likely to get past the traditional publishing finish line. And agents are already busy enough to have to deal with someone like that.

By clearing out all the flotsam and spending next to no time doing it, a literary agent preserves precious seconds per query that are better spent on something that has a higher likelihood, no matter how small that increase, of being something they want to represent.

Don’t make it harder for an agent to fall in love with you. Your story won’t get even a first glance if an agent ends up chucking your query out the window because you couldn’t follow the submission guidelines.

Be thorough. M