I am two months into querying an agent for my memoir, Can You Hear the Music? My Journey through Madness, and already I am overwhelmed with frustration at the inefficiency of the process. I feel like I am hopelessly sending my work into a void of agents who may send me a form rejection (or who may not respond at all). 

Let me first define some terms and give an overview of the publishing process.

Traditional Publishing vs. Self-Publishing

For those unfamiliar with the publishing industry, there are several ways to publish a book. Most people think of the Big Five publishers, although many more smaller publishers exist, including academic and independent (or “indie”) presses. There are vanity presses, which make their money off of the authors rather than book sales–this type is usually to be avoided. And, at the end of the day, many great authors find success by taking charge of the editing, design, and marketing by self-publishing. 

While authors can have success in any of these ways, there is a common misperception traditional publishing, i.e., working with a mainstream publisher on the design and distribution of your book, is superior to self-publishing. Although the quality of self-published books may have been questionable long ago, most self-pubbed authors these days are publishing books that are of equal quality to traditionally published books. Due to increased quality and numerous successes, readers are more open to reading books that are self-published. The distribution of self-pubbed books is also quite good, making you think, why on earth would someone put themselves through the treacherous process of traditional publishing?

Is traditional publishing really treacherous? Well, it’s a lengthy process that is riddled with uncertainty and with a low probability of success. While some publishers accept queries directly, most traditional publishers require you to have an agent, someone who is willing to represent your book and help you secure a book deal with a publisher. An agent has to be invested in your project and your project has to align with their interests. Keep in mind that every agent receives thousands of queries each year. And they will only select to represent 3 to 10 of those. So basically there is less than one percent chance that your book will be The One. 

Why would you even consider traditional publishing, when self-publishing seems like such a great alternative? There is a certain level of prestige associated with traditional publishers. People know the publishers names and their brands. Moreover, traditional publishers are connected to a network that will help you market your book. Plus, the publishing process is streamlined, so for someone like me who has a pretty rigorous day job, it would be nice the hand over the reigns to someone else on things like cover design and layout. For me, as a professor coming from the elitist University of Michigan, it seems that prestige is the biggest factor in getting my book recognized by my institution, and so query I must. That’s how I arrived in the trenches.

What the Query Looks Like

Every agent is different, which makes the process a bit tiresome and open to errors. Nearly every agent wants a query letter and a sample of your work. There are tons of resources on the web for how to write a great query letter. Your sample of work should be the best you can produce, preferably edited professionally. In addition, some agents want a synopsis, a pitch, and, for a non-fiction book, a book proposal. Each one of these documents must be carefully crafted and follow industry standards. Remember, one wrong move can land you in the rejection pile pretty easily. 

There are sites like querytracker.com that you can search for agents, view their websites, see their manuscript wish lists, etc. In addition to every agent asking for something slightly different, the methods to actually submit also vary. While some agents have a form, other agents require email submissions (and keep in mind that there should be no attachments, so you have to awkwardly copy and paste your documents in the body of the email.  

After all the copying and pasting and hoping you’ve updated the greeting on the query letter and personalized everything to the best of your ability AND given everything a quick proofread, you are ready to submit. 

What’s Wrong with the Current Way of Querying

Hopefully, at this point, you are starting to sense where some of my frustrations come from. One of the greatest sources of inefficiency has to do with the fact that the industry has not standardized the submission (and as an engineer, you know how big I am on standardization!). Each agent basically wants the same things, but they all specify something slightly different. One agent wants the first chapter, the next wants to first twenty-five pages of my manuscript. Additionally, there is no standard way to submit. Sometimes it’s by email, sometimes by form, and other times you occasionally find someone accepting paper submissions. As an author, it is exhausting. Not to mention, all the copy/paste actions open the process up to errors, which can be embarrassingly and land you in the rejection pile quite quickly. Not great for people with disabilities. 

Secondly, a lot of the inefficiency lies in trying to read the agent’s mind about what they want. Sure, there is the agent’s webpage and most agents can be found on the Manuscript Wish List, but I must admit that some agents are intentionally vague while others are painfully specific. Thus, I find myself blindly submitting to agent’s who represent my genre, but I find that totally to be a shot in the dark. After all, memoir, as a genre, is as diverse as humanity itself!

The end result is that agents have to sift through thousands of submissions, most of which don’t even match what they are looking for and the remaining probably aren’t up to industry standards. I know what it’s like because I was editor of a journal and I can attest that roughly 50 percent of submissions were easily a desk reject, mainly because they were of poor quality or they didn’t fit the journal’s scope. And as an editor, I found the process exhausting. Multiply that exhaustion by an order of magnitude, and you probably have your typical agent. There has got to be a better way!

Conclusions

I don’t know that there is an easy solution because the publishing industry is a large, complex network, and large, complex networks are incredibly resistant to change. I do think a small fix that should be implemented in the near term is settling on industry standards for what the query looks like and how it should be submitted. This will limit the amount of time wasted by authors as they tailor their queries to each agent and will allow us to do a better job of proof-reading our final submissions (it’s also better for folks with disabilities, those working with distractions, e.g., parents, etc.).

I also think something can be done to better match authors with agents. I’m not saying that every author deserves an agent. Instead, agents should be protected from having to read submissions that are nowhere in the scope of what they are looking to represent, and authors should be saved time from submitting to agents who have no desire to represent their work. This is a trickier problem, but maybe some folks will be inspired to revolutionize the query process to more efficiently match authors and agents (and reject those who will simply not make it in traditional publishing). 

I don’t know if I will make it through to the end of traditional publishing. For now, I’m patiently waiting it out. And while I wait for those rejections to roll in, I figured I’d share some thoughts on the process.