Friday, February 5, 2010

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.

4 comments:

  1. Wow. That's a whole lot of reading!

    ReplyDelete
  2. It was an eye-opening post, wasn't it? Makes me re-think that whole "being an agent might be fun" idea.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What a handy guide. Thanks for posting it!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Pat, Cathy, and Tammy,
    Can you imagine receiving 327 queries in one week? Out of those 327 he requested to see four. I would like to know what genres those four were.
    Donna

    ReplyDelete

Mysteries of the Ozarks, Volume V - Interviews with Lonnie Whitaker and Dr. Barri Bumgarner

Here is the second installment of interviews with contributors who have stories in Mysteries of the Ozarks, Volume V , from Ozark Writers, I...