Autocratic, Arrogant, and Rude

There are certain agents who I consider members of the AAR.  That's Autocratic, Arrogant, and Rude.

What's that?  There's another AAR that has to do with literary agents?  Oh.

I'm sure those AAR agents have nothing to do with the one's I'm talking about.

The Autocratic, Arrogant, and Rude agents that I'm referring to are the ones who don't answer queries.

You may have seen their listings.  They says stuff like, "Due to the amount of queries we receive, we are not able to respond to each and every one.  If we are interested in your work, we'll contact you.  If you don't hear from us in six weeks, assume that we are passing."

What autocratic,arrogant, rude fucking assoholes.

When I see an agent with some form of this bullshit spewed in their listing, I can only think there's one reason they can be so rude.

They must not have made enough sales in the past year to hire some kid at ten bucks an hour to reply to email!

I did a little research on this.  I called several agencies (14 to be exact) and asked them how many email queries they receive per month.  Not a one of them would give me an answer other than "a lot," or "a bunch,"  One person who answered the phone said, "too many," while another said, "more than I can count."

I tried a different tact.  "Would you consider 200 to be a lot?"  Not really, was the consensus.  How about 300?  Five hundred?

All 14 agencies agreed that 500 would be a lot of queries.  So, I'm going to use that number to work with here.

If an agency receives 500 queries a month, and you consider there's 20 working days in a month, that means that they get an average of 25 queries per day.  If you're a one person agency, that might be a little overwhelming.  If you spend two minutes reading each query (because some of them you're not going to get all the way through anyway), that means you're spending about an hour a day doing nothing but reading queries.

What the hell are you doing the other seven hours?

Oh yeah, working with clients, trying to sell to publishers, and all that other agent stuff.

So do you just leave those 25 hanging?

No.  After you read the email, you've got to do something with it, right?  If you don't want to represent the writer, then you hit the delete button.  Actually, you probably click the garbage can.

Why not do what I do?  Instead of clicking the garbage, I click another folder that I've put on the desktop and the unwanted email goes in there.

Then this kid that you hire at ten bucks an hour comes in once a day, goes to that folder, and pastes a form letter reply to the writer.  If you really want to get fancy, you can leave blanks in the form reply for the name of the potential author, the name of the manuscript.  If you do nothing but cut, paste, and send, it should take the kid less than an hour to get through the folder of 25 rejections.  Two hours at the very most.  Plan on three.

Ten bucks an hour for easy work is $30 a day.  That's $150 a week or $600 a month.  That means over a year, you're spending $7200 to keep yourself from looking like a complete asshole who doesn't answer their email.

I'll bet you spent more than $30 the last time you went out to eat and all it did was make your ass a little bigger.

"SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!" I hear some agents screaming.  That means you have to make one $50,000 deal to pay for the kid.  And if you didn't do that much, then either you need to be answering the email yourself, or finding another profession.

I ran across a listing the other day for McGregor Literary Agency and they were boasting about how they had sold 30 titles in the past year.  Thirty books ain't bad, McGee, er ah, McGregor!  Then they go on a little later in the listing to espouse the same bullshit as above:  Sorry... we can't afford to hire the staff (they actually said that!!!) to respond to every email query we get.

So make up my mind.  Did you sell 30 titles or not?  Did you get any kind of advance on any of them?  If you're selling that much (I should emphasize the word IF), then you can afford some broke college kid who would be overjoyed at the chance to earn $150 a week.

And if you can't, then I wouldn't want you as an agent anyway.