Query Stats from Nathan Bransford

Today in St. Peters, MO: Sleet and snow, high 33 degrees.

Over on literary agent Nathan Bransford's January 28 blog, he posted some interesting query stats. Nathan is an agent with Curtis Brown and one of the two agents mentioned in Chuck Sambuchino's article from yesterday about word counts. I am among the almost 3,000 who follow Nathan's blog. I've found a lot of useful news and information about writing and publishing on his blog--plus it's very entertaining.

In one week while Nathan was on vacation, he received 327 queries, which he has broken down into genres, word counts, and miscellaneous factiods. Genres include the usual, plus mangst (I had to click on that link) and "no freaking clue." Word counts for manuscripts ranged from fewer than 25,000 words to 200,000 plus. Some factiods mentioned in his post are: the number of queries that begin with a rhetorical question (which he does not like), the number of queries addressed to another agent, and the number of queries that misspelled the word "query."

It's an interesting post, if you want to check it out.