Blog Rule #1: Have something to say.

There was a time when I could sit down at my desk five days-a-week and reflexively cough out a column before my coffee required a warm-up.

Lately, I’m clenched; afraid that if I start speaking truth to power, I’ll end up screaming like my character Neal from Selfie. The unburped lid on this mixing bowl of emotions is holding back some yeasty fermentations on the query process.

I wrote my first novel during my senior year of college.  Back then, querying agents meant buying an expensive and always-outdated catalog of agent listings at the bookstore. I sent a query letter and a packet of thirty pages with every query. Even in 1989, that was an expensive proposition. Considering how broke-ass poor I was in college, $1.50 in paper and $2.00 in postage for every query I sent meant that I had better be judicious in my agent selection and hope the catalog was accurate. I ended up sending  twenty queries and that was probably twenty too many.

The mass migration of agents toward email queries started around 2005. Bleeding edge agents broke the old paradigm while I was querying novel number three. There were about five agents who accepted email queries. Upstart rogues.

Prior to that, the worst, the absolute worst was getting your SASE back with a rejection letter that had been photocopied over and over until it was an unreadable blur…   printed on the back of another author’s query letter to save money. Jeez! I wonder about the thought process of those agents. Did they understand the message they were sending? Did they care? Was there a shred of humanity left in them? Wow.

Season’s change. Querying is accomplished entirely by email now. Cheap, cheap, cheap. My only cost is my time.

And my humanity.

My last three novels have been queried and tracked through querytracker.net. I can look back and see the statistical trend in agents non-responding queries.

Percentage of Agents Non-responding Queries

Diver Down, 2008.  14%

The Haunting of Room Sixteen, 2010, 28%

A Serpent in My Father’s House, 2012, 54%

And just when my inner-Neal is ready to rail at the criminal lack of human courtesy in the industry… While querying my last novel I was non-responded twice on fulls.

Fulls are the third date of agent interactions. First comes the query, the cocktail party meet-and-greet. Then, if there is a little chemistry, they request a partial. Maybe 50 pages. Perhaps 100. That’s the agenting equivalent of meeting for coffee. “Hey, I might like you, but I’m not ready for commitment. Let’s see if you can carry an intelligent conversation for a few minutes.” Then, if you are lucky, comes the request for a full. Third date. “Put out and if you are any good, maybe we can have a relationship. I’ll call you tomorrow and we’re either going to be an item, or it’s not me it’s you.”

I got non-responded on fulls. Fuckers didn’t even call. On a full! One of the agents was annoyed that I bothered to follow up. Wow. Cojones grande.

The number of publishers continues to shrink. Fewer and fewer books are printed. The moonshot of representation gets more narrow with each passing year. The pressure cooker of more authors competing for a dwindling shred of attention has resulted in a once-supportive community turning snarky and intolerant of fellow writers. The obligation for gatekeepers in the industry to act with courtesy dwindles.

Kipling wrote, “If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you. The world will be yours and everything in it, what’s more, you’ll be a man, my son.”

Meh. Thanks, Dad. At this point, I’m just trying to stay human. If I can keep my humanity while all others are losing theirs it will be a minor miracle.