455. Literary Agents: What are Your Chances?

When fiction writers have finished and, as they say, thoroughly polished their novel, they then usually send it off to an agent since they are the ones who filter books for publishers. Writers then expect to be accepted by some agent or other, maybe not at their first go but possibly before they reach a two digital number attempt. Now, how realistic is that expectation?

Much depends on the kind of novel otherwise classified as genre. Here are a few statistics.

From 1,594 agents on Query Tracker the following offered representation in the year 2017:

N.B. If a genre isn’t listed it is because no representation in that genre was offered.

Genre                                             No

Children’s                                           3

Commercial fiction                             5

Family Saga                                        2

Fantasy                                             18

General Fiction                                  2

Graphic Novels                                  1

Historical Fiction                                7

Humor/Satire                                     1

LGBT                                                2

Literary Fiction                                17

Middle Grade                                   52

Mystery                                              6

Picture books                                     8

Religious/Inspirational                      1

Romance                                          14

Science Fiction                                11

Thrillers/Suspense                            7

Women’s Fiction                              17

Young Adult                                   130

So, you see where the market lies? If this is what happens on QT, the chances that it happens elsewhere are not improbable.

The 130 figure of YA compared to the rest of the genres is very high indeed and my guess is because young adults are still at school and reading to them is second nature. Supposedly, the older you get, the busier you become as commitments mount up and time to read becomes scarce or the desire to do so wanes. So we authors should get savvy on who reads books and perhaps would not be totally incorrect to assume that those people whose working life is over have much more time for reading, become potential readers. I for one, hope it to be so since I also write books based in the sixties when these potential readers were baby-boomers!

Now, don’t all dash off to place a YA genre sticker on your MS. You know you’ll get found out, and the price for deceit in the publishing world doesn’t come cheap.

That’s about it! So, unless you do write YA, you know what your expectations of landing an agent are - as realistic as winning the lottery - you know you’ll never win, but that doesn’t stop you from playing.