Short Story Subs vs. Agent Queries: Two Big Differences

In the last four months, I’ve been querying my novel SECOND DAWN, and while querying a novel is a new to me, submitting my work to publishers is definitely not. I have sent well over 700 short story submissions, so it’s fair to say I’m familiar with sending my work out to be judged. Even so, I was still somewhat surprised by some huge differences between querying novels and submitting short stories (yes, I’m just that naïve) , so I thought I’d go over a few of those here. It should be noted that what follows is not an admonition of how agents or short story publishers handle their business. It goes without saying that novels and short stories require vastly different approaches, but, if you’re like me and coming from a background in short fiction, you might find what I have to say interesting, maybe even educational. 🙂

A couple of quick notes before we get started. One, when I talk about the short fiction market, I am talking exclusively about the genre short fiction market. I have zero experience with lit-fic, but I know things work a little differently on that side of the fence. Two, most of my data on agent queries comes from QueryTracker, which seems to be a pretty reliable source, but it’s not perfect, especially for those agents that still accept queries through email, other online forms, or even snail mail. Okay, with that out of the way, here are two major differences between submitting short stories and querying agents and my theories on why these difference exist.

Reply Rate: If you submit a short story to a magazine or journal, you can expect a response of some kind about 99 percent of the time. It might take a while, but there are only a few markets I can think of that state outright they may NOT reply. On the contrary, many of the agents I’ve queried or researched state outright in their guidelines that they won’t respond unless they’re interested in the project, and I’ve seen query response percentages on QueryTracker as low as 2 percent.

Let me give you some numbers to back this up. I have, to date, submitted 728 short stories over the past decade, and I have withdrawn a grand total of nine due to nonresponse. That’s a paltry 1.2%, and to be fair, half of these nonresponses are because the journal went out of business. Conversely, I’ve sent 44 agent queries since the beginning of June, and I’ve already CNR’d three of them, and I’m getting ready to CNR three more. Sample size, sure, but it’s 7% out of 44 (double that soon) in four months compared to 1% out of 700 in ten years.

So why the difference? Volume appears to be the biggest factor. It seems that many agents are essentially one-person operations, and the number of queries they receive in a year can sometimes be measured in the thousands. Here are some more numbers. One agent that recently rejected my query has received 2,600 queries in the last twelve months (according to QueryTracker). That’s roughly 215 queries every month. This agent asks for a query letter, a synopsis, and the first ten pages in the query package. What I sent her totals around 5,000 words, a word count that exceeds the maximum for many short story markets. So, if the agent is actually going to read all that material (we all want that more than anything, right?) and also focus on all their existing clients, well, then, yeah, I kind of understand why reply rates can be so low. Again, I’d like to point out that this agent did respond to me, which is much appreciated.

Look, do I wish every agent would at least send a boilerplate form letter response for every query? Of course, but in my experience this just isn’t how the industry works, so I’ve just gotten used to it. That said, most agents are very up front about the fact they’re not going to reply unless they’re interested in the project, so it’s hardly a surprise when they don’t respond. Most will also give you an expected time frame for a response. If there’s no response within that time frame, you can close the query out and move on mostly confident the agent has passed on the project.

Sim-Subs: Simultaneous submissions are a hot topic in short story circles because so many publishers forbid them. You won’t find that when querying agents. In fact, it’s just kind of understood that you’ll be sending your book to multiple agents at the same time. That’s a refreshing change, and with response rates so low, and chances of representation so slim, it’s a necessary one, in my opinion.

For agent queries, the attitude toward sim-subs balances out the low reply rate in my opinion. See, for short stories, a lot of markets do not allow simultaneous submissions and will hold your story for 120 days or more until they make a decision. Agents seem to understand this is simply not a tenable position with novels, and from what I’ve seen, it’s not uncommon for authors to query dozens of agents at the same time. Additionally, if an agent does offer you representation, there’s an understanding that you will notify other agents currently reviewing your query/manuscript and give them a chance to respond. This, too, is completely different from the short story market where the expected procedure is to immediately withdraw the story from any other publishers considering it.

The difference here is pretty easy to understand. Novels and short stories are completely different beasts, and the time it takes for an agent to review a query package or entire manuscript, especially one they’re interested in, can be months. For example, one of the agents who has requested my full manuscript for SECOND DAWN states in her guidelines that it could be up to six months before she responds to the submission. When you factor in the time it took for her to respond to the query, I could be looking at most of a year before I find out the ultimate fate of my manuscript. Obviously, the agent understands this and expects that I will continue to query other agents, which I am.

As with all my posts on querying my novel, this is based on my still somewhat limited experience, but I feel like I’m getting a pretty good sense of how things work. One thing I did take away from my experience in the short fiction market is how to dig into the numbers, and, luckily, the numbers are far more accessible and in depth for agents queries than they are for short story submissions. So, take this post with a grain of salt if your experience differs, and if it does, please tell me about it in the comments. I can always use more data. 🙂