Curb Your Insecurity: Tips on Good Submission Etiquette

There are plenty of querying and publishing “how-to’s” that provide authors with great information about how to find, query and submit to an agent. What is not always so clear is what you should do after your manuscript has been submitted to prospective literary agents. Waiting is often the hardest part of the submission process. That is the time when insecurity can rear its ugly head, and authors may suddenly feel that they must do something, but what they do is actually worse than not doing anything.

First, I’d like to clear up a misperception about literary agents. It is often said literary agents are in the business not for the money but because they love what they are doing. That is certainly true. While some agents are lucky enough to work at an agency that provides a salary, quite a number of us only see a paycheck after we’ve sold a book. And while we love what we are doing, this should not be construed as we are working or willing to work for free.

Consider the concept, time = money. The time we spend on book projects – whether it is combing through slush piles, reading submissions, providing edits to a client, or any number of activities we must undertake to sell a book – is considered our “capital” investment in our business.  And let’s face it, publishing, which includes agenting, is a business. Many authors, especially debut authors, write their novels while maintaining a job that pays the bills. Their writing activity may be viewed as a “hobby,” since they are not compensated for it, which in turn, makes it easy to mistake an agent’s job for his or her “hobby” as well. After all, it looks like we’re doing it for free. But since time is our investment, it is a very precious, limited commodity for agents. We have to be selective on what to invest our time on. So as an author looking for representation, you should be mindful of an agent’s time. If not, you risk putting your foot in your mouth, or worse, shooting yourself in the foot.

To help you avoid doing either, I’ve put together the following ten tips for good submission etiquette:

1. Don’t “shotgun” your submission. In other words, don’t simply send out your submission to a large number of random agents, hoping to ensure some positive responses. This wastes both your and the agents’ time.  You’ll have more success and make a more favorable impression by doing your research to make sure the agents you are approaching are appropriate for your project.  
   
   
   
   
   
2. Really follow submission guidelines and how the agent wants to be contacted. And if an agent isn’t accepting unsolicited submissions, don’t discount or ignore this by querying anyway. It shows disrespect and, at the very least, that you can’t follow directions, which is a red flag. It hints at a potential difficulty you might have in taking editing directions.
   
   
3. Don’t “nudge” or follow up on your submission too soon. I once received a follow up from an author after only 2 weeks. Don’t be surprised if you don’t get an answer. You might even get a response shortly after, passing on your book. Why? It could be that the agent happened to get to your submission, and it was just a coincidence. Or it could be that the agent decided it was better to let it go, since you seemed to need an answer so quickly. Or it could mean that alarm bells went off, and the agent wondered if you are impatient now, what happens once he takes on your project? 
   
   
   
   
   
4. Wait at least 3-4 months before your follow-up on your query or submission. Please believe me when I say it takes a lot of time to go through submissions. At Kimberley Cameron & Associates, we look at every submission. It may be as little as 10 pages or as many as 50, but our agency policy is to give each of them thoughtful consideration. And our agents are required to answer every one of them, whether in a form letter or a personal note, which adds even more time.
   
   
5. Don’t make demands either in your query or follow-up, whether it’s for a specific time frame to respond or confirmation that your submission was received. It raises a big red flag and shows a  lack of respect for the agent’s time. Consider how many submissions an agent receives in a day or a week. For some, it may be a dozen, while others, it’s several hundred. If you think they’re slow to respond now, imagine how much longer it would be if agents had to also confirm receipt of submissions to authors.
   
   
   
   
   
6. Don’t burn bridges by responding to an agent who passed on your project with a defensive retort or ask for editorial suggestions. If suggestions are provided, consider yourself among the fortunate. It means that the agent was willing to spend some her capital to help you out, so take those suggestions to heart. If you respond defensively, it not only makes you look unprofessional, it pretty much ends any potential for future contact, which you may regret after you’ve done a major revision or written another book.
   
   
7. If general comments, or reasons why your project was passed on, are offered, don’t respond requesting detailed editorial recommendations, or worse, request a copy of your manuscript back with the agent’s notes.
   
   
   
   
   
8. Notify agents only when you have been offered representation. There is no need to let us now that you’ve submitted to other agents (this is pretty much assumed) or when other agents request full manuscripts.  
   
   
9. Be honest about your intentions. When you are offered representation, it is perfectly acceptable to ask for time to notify other agents, just be honest about it and your intentions for doing so. One author I offered representation to told me that she had every intention of signing with me, only to find out she’d been using my offer to leverage offers from other agents. She kept me hanging on until she secured her “dream” agent.





10. Be professional on social media and don’t solicit or pitch agents by commenting on posts or tweeting at them unless it’s part of an organized contest, pitch party or other social media event. Along those same lines, don’t post a comment or tweet to an agent to nudge, request confirmation your submission was received, or ask when to expect a response on your submission. 

While practicing good submission etiquette will not guarantee you'll get an offer, it might help your submission hang in there a little longer. For agents, it is often easier to avoid a potential problem simply by passing. At the same time, by demonstrating professionalism and respect for an agent's time and efforts, you'll make it that much easier for an agent to take your submission to the next step.

One Literary Agent’s Perspective on Twitter Pitch Parties

I must seem like a glutton for punishment. I participated in the last three Twitter pitch parties (#kidpit, #pitmad and #sffpit) and I’m gearing up for the one (#writepit) coming up this Friday. As a newer agent, you might wonder why I’ve chosen this route to find authors rather than being open to unsolicited submissions. Part of my reasoning comes from being a slush pile reader. In the year and a half I waded through hundreds, if not thousands, of submissions, I can count on one hand how many book projects I recommended to agents. In the last two months, after participating in the last three pitch parties, I have already found a couple of talented authors with interesting book projects I want to represent.

Twitter pitch parties have proven more effective, because they help match up an agent’s taste to an author’s book. I’m more likely favorite a tweet if the pitch resonates with me. They are also a better way of targeting the kinds of projects what we’d like to represent. For example. while several agents at Kimberley Cameron & Associates represent science fiction/fantasy, our individual preferences within that genre vary widely. One of my colleagues might be looking for a high fantasy or a space opera, while another might prefer an urban fantasy or a cyberpunk adventure.

There are excellent articles online about how to pitch on Twitter pitch parties. One of them from our own Relentless Writer, Janet Wren. My intent is not to rehash that information but instead offer suggestions from an agent’s perspective. And I fully admit these suggestions are influenced by my personal preferences:

• Your pitch needs to have a strong hook. It should pull us in and make us interested in reading more. It should not, however, be a summary of the story or the plot. It should contain tantalizing details that reveal story or plot, but that’s not the focus. The focus is to make us stop scrolling and take notice.
• Show the main character’s personal stakes. Personal stakes help create that emotional connection with your story. 
• Include the external conflict without eclipsing the personal stakes. It should, in fact, heighten the personal stakes.

I favorited James Matlack Raney's Twitter pitches, because they employ these three ideas very effectively:

When an army of wolves descends upon the GrayWoods, a lame runt must rise above his place and lead his siblings to sanctuary #MG #Kidpit 

Wolves. Magic. An army bent on revenge. A lame runt and his family must risk everything to survive. The Lord of the Wolves. #Pitmad #MG 

--James Matlack Raney (@JMRaneyWriter)

• Avoid being vague or abstract. The principles of craft still apply, even in pitches, and specificity is always more effective. Like James Matlack Raney’s pitches, limit the amount of detail and use targeted detail that raises questions. 
• Be careful not to use overused phrases, clichés or generalizations. For example, a pitch that reads: “She had to face the darkness in her soul” won’t entice me to request a submission. It also makes me suspect that’s this is the kind of writing I’d find in the novel, which I wouldn’t be interested in reading.
• Just like in your stories, be careful with using questions to create artificial suspense. Pitches like, “What do you do if your marriage was a lie?” are much less effective than using short declarative sentences with tantalizing details.
• Differ your pitches in more ways than just switching around a word or two. Vary the two tweets allowed per hour to reveal more about the story, although each must stand on its own. I can't speak for other agents or editors, but I’ll check the author’s feed to read all of his or her pitches. For example, the reason why I requested a submission from Michelle Barry isn’t because of just one of her tweets. It was actually the culmination of her tweets that made me favorite one:

Flowers have been extinct on the moon since the Old World collapsed, until Myra reawakens their magic #KidPit MG Secret Garden Retelling

When Myra unlocks a lab full of forbidden flowers she also releases a secret magic within her. #KidPit MG SF/F The Secret Garden retelling

--Michelle Barry (@MichelleABarry)

• This brings me to my next suggestion, which some authors may not agree with: Don’t retweet so much during the pitch period. I understand you want to support your fellow authors, and there is nothing wrong about tweeting your friends’ pitches or pitches that you find interesting. But when you flood your feed with retweets of others’ pitches, you can actually end up obscuring your own pitches from agents who might be checking out your feed for the other pitches you tweeted.
• Make sure you tweet more than once or twice during the 12-hour pitch party. Most authors have no problem taking advantage of two pitches per hour, but a small number only tweet one or two pitches the entire day. These pitches are often missed because they're sandwiched between thousands of repeating tweets (#Pitmad had almost 50,000 tweets!). 

Lastly, my last two suggestions are more requests:

• Unless you are pitching a picture book, do not include illustrations, pictures, gifs, video, etc. of what you envision for the book cover, characters, world, etc. Better to leave that to our imagination. Your words have a more powerful impact. (Also, my eyes are looking for words not pictures, and since spam tweets usually include some image or graphic, I'll scroll past without thinking, much less reading.)
• Do not pitch or promote your self-published book. First of all, it's fruitless to pitch, because agents and editors simply won't consider the book. Second, such tweets clogs up the feed and obscure the pitches by unpublished authors who are seriously looking for representation.

As you work and rework your pitches, keep these suggestions in mind. Your work will not go unnoticed and eventually you'll start getting stars from more agents and editors. If not at first, just keep at it; keep honing your pitches. All your efforts, no matter how big or small, will bring you even closer to finding a home for your book.