SAMelia
Basic
Okay, so I am in the fortunate position of being between two jobs. Strictly speaking I am on garden leave until Friday September 27th.
[What is Garden leave? Well I was happy in my previous job, and all was well, but then the company was acquired, and a percentage of the staff were made redundant. It just so happns my role was replicated by a team in the US, so adios previous company, hello garden leave. However I did some job hunting, and I am starting a new role on Oct 1st]
I decided to live like a real writer and specifically I #amquerying my new novel #Driverless, a near-future road trip adventure.
The novel is #SFF, but more speculative fiction than space opera, and is set in 2028, when driverless cars have replaced human drivers on our roads, and it tells the story of a family of truckers, who are trying to make a living faced with competition from autonomous trucks and vans.
So the pitch is:
2028. The future is driverless. Lettie hates being ‘England’s Last Trucker’, but when she needs cash to save her grandfather’s life, she is forced to take a dangerous contract to resupply refugees trapped in the AI wars of Ukraine.
or
When the #driverless network is hacked, Paps, Lettie's last relative, survives a HGV collision thanks to x-military Nursebot: Becca. As payback, Paps, Lettie and Becca, team up with an enigmatic tech terrorist to tackle a deadly mission to save fugitives from Euro-Russian #AI wars. #mswl
BTW[I posted both of these during the most recent Sept 5th #PitMad, and got 3 agents for version 1: 2028. The future is... and 1 agent for the other one.]
In the UK, I started pitching at Winchester Writers Festival in June, and so far I have pitched/submitted to about half of the 'usual suspects' - SF authors in the UK, know there are only about 12 agents in the UK who actually count when it comes to SFF - and unless your novel is taken by one of these agents you probably will not get a book deal, because they are seen as the 'experts' and therefore extremely valuable and experienced gatekeepers.
For now I am perfecting my pitch on the much larger number of US agents. I have reasons to be hopeful because I saw a US Agent was open to queries on Twitter, I sent her a query using Query Manager, and she requested the full mss. (This was on August 8th 2019, when my personal life was in flux due to aforementionned redundancy, but it did give me hope for the new novel.) I had noticed that this year when pitching Driverless, a lot more agents are using QueryManager, which was not the case when I was pitching my last novel in 2016/2017.
So I took a membership of QueryTracker ($25pa) which is not the same platform as QueryManager but it does include all of the QueryManager links to agents where they use QueryManager. Query tracker has a searcheable database of 2164 ( as of14 Sept 2019 )agents, and I decided to search for 'Science Fiction' agents who used 'Query Manager', and came up with a short list of 34.
Over the period of three days, I worked through the list. I did some serious research of the agents profiles, twitter feeds, #mswl, blogs, interviews and youtube videos. Of the 34, some only accepted MG, YA or Fantasy. A couple were only looking for hard military SF.
Eventually I made 15 personalised submissions. (On average it took me about 45 - 90 minutes per submission - BUT I have a 20 page document where I have 4 different cover letters, 6 different synopsises, 2 biographies, a 200 word summary on who this book will appeal too and a list of my most recent reading, plus about 8 different elevator pitches.)
And now I wait.
Query Tracker provides you with stats on agents response times ( which I wish I found earlier.) This table provides anonymised data on ten of the agents I submitted to.
So looking at this table 10 of the 15 agents I wrote to do respond with 3-15 days.
And on average:
70% of the responses are rejections,
8% of responses are requests for either a full or partial mss.
As 8% of 15 is more than 1, and I am being optimistic, then statistically speaking, I should get 2 requests for Full or Partial Mss in the next 15 days.
So I will be posting my responses over the next two weeks.
I hope you will all follow, light candles, stroke your lucky rabbit paw, cross fingers and toes, and anything else that might send luck my way.
Let's see what actually happens
[What is Garden leave? Well I was happy in my previous job, and all was well, but then the company was acquired, and a percentage of the staff were made redundant. It just so happns my role was replicated by a team in the US, so adios previous company, hello garden leave. However I did some job hunting, and I am starting a new role on Oct 1st]
I decided to live like a real writer and specifically I #amquerying my new novel #Driverless, a near-future road trip adventure.
The novel is #SFF, but more speculative fiction than space opera, and is set in 2028, when driverless cars have replaced human drivers on our roads, and it tells the story of a family of truckers, who are trying to make a living faced with competition from autonomous trucks and vans.
So the pitch is:
2028. The future is driverless. Lettie hates being ‘England’s Last Trucker’, but when she needs cash to save her grandfather’s life, she is forced to take a dangerous contract to resupply refugees trapped in the AI wars of Ukraine.
or
When the #driverless network is hacked, Paps, Lettie's last relative, survives a HGV collision thanks to x-military Nursebot: Becca. As payback, Paps, Lettie and Becca, team up with an enigmatic tech terrorist to tackle a deadly mission to save fugitives from Euro-Russian #AI wars. #mswl
BTW[I posted both of these during the most recent Sept 5th #PitMad, and got 3 agents for version 1: 2028. The future is... and 1 agent for the other one.]
In the UK, I started pitching at Winchester Writers Festival in June, and so far I have pitched/submitted to about half of the 'usual suspects' - SF authors in the UK, know there are only about 12 agents in the UK who actually count when it comes to SFF - and unless your novel is taken by one of these agents you probably will not get a book deal, because they are seen as the 'experts' and therefore extremely valuable and experienced gatekeepers.
For now I am perfecting my pitch on the much larger number of US agents. I have reasons to be hopeful because I saw a US Agent was open to queries on Twitter, I sent her a query using Query Manager, and she requested the full mss. (This was on August 8th 2019, when my personal life was in flux due to aforementionned redundancy, but it did give me hope for the new novel.) I had noticed that this year when pitching Driverless, a lot more agents are using QueryManager, which was not the case when I was pitching my last novel in 2016/2017.
So I took a membership of QueryTracker ($25pa) which is not the same platform as QueryManager but it does include all of the QueryManager links to agents where they use QueryManager. Query tracker has a searcheable database of 2164 ( as of14 Sept 2019 )agents, and I decided to search for 'Science Fiction' agents who used 'Query Manager', and came up with a short list of 34.
Over the period of three days, I worked through the list. I did some serious research of the agents profiles, twitter feeds, #mswl, blogs, interviews and youtube videos. Of the 34, some only accepted MG, YA or Fantasy. A couple were only looking for hard military SF.
Eventually I made 15 personalised submissions. (On average it took me about 45 - 90 minutes per submission - BUT I have a 20 page document where I have 4 different cover letters, 6 different synopsises, 2 biographies, a 200 word summary on who this book will appeal too and a list of my most recent reading, plus about 8 different elevator pitches.)
And now I wait.
Query Tracker provides you with stats on agents response times ( which I wish I found earlier.) This table provides anonymised data on ten of the agents I submitted to.
| agency code | total submissions | positive responses | % positive | rejections | % rejection | Reply Rate | time to positive | time to negative | average response time (days) |
| a1 | 101 | 23 | 23% | 41 | 41% | 63% | 2 | 3 | 2.5 |
| a2 | 99 | 2 | 2% | 83 | 84% | 86% | 0 | 3 | 3 |
| a3 | 473 | 4 | 1% | 426 | 90% | 49% | 0 | 4 | 4 |
| a4 | 41 | 3 | 7% | 9 | 22% | 29% | 0 | 6 | 6 |
| a5 | 463 | 30 | 7% | 404 | 87% | 90% | 8 | 7 | 7.5 |
| a6 | 228 | 4 | 2% | 205 | 90% | 84% | 0 | 8 | 8 |
| a7 | 326 | 42 | 13% | 261 | 80% | 87% | 9 | 9 | 9 |
| a8 | 316 | 45 | 14% | 244 | 77% | 87% | 11 | 10 | 10.5 |
| a9 | 37 | 2 | 5% | 11 | 30% | 35% | 0 | 21 | 10.5 |
| a10 | 292 | 34 | 12% | 216 | 74% | 80% | 12 | 14 | 13 |
And on average:
70% of the responses are rejections,
8% of responses are requests for either a full or partial mss.
As 8% of 15 is more than 1, and I am being optimistic, then statistically speaking, I should get 2 requests for Full or Partial Mss in the next 15 days.
So I will be posting my responses over the next two weeks.
I hope you will all follow, light candles, stroke your lucky rabbit paw, cross fingers and toes, and anything else that might send luck my way.
Let's see what actually happens
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