…and they sent you to this post.
First of all, I think it’s cool that you’re supportive and showing interest in your friend or family member’s writing. That’s nice of you! Second of all, this post is not a comprehensive breakdown or a universal explanation of any part of the writing process, it’s just my experience of querying a novel so far.
So! Your friend is trying to get a literary agent and you’re wondering when they’ll have news about their book!
Your friend doesn’t know. No one knows. It’s a mystery. They can’t even give you a ballpark. There are no timelines.
The first step of querying is…well, okay, the first step of querying comes after a lot of hard work already that only started with writing the book. But for the purposes of this blog post, querying starts after researching the best literary agents for the book (which is more tricky than it sounds but we’re skipping straight to actually beginning to query, here).
Your writer friend first has to send a query letter to an agent. (This is not a how-to post to guide anyone in writing a good query letter. This is a very tongue in cheek approach. Please, writers who stumbled on this post instead of friends-of-writers who were sent here, please don’t try to use this as a guide to write a good query letter.)
The query letter basically says,
”Dear Agent,
I’m looking for someone to represent my book, and I have read that you like books with these things in them. My book has these things!
Here is my attempt to write a back-of-the-book style blurb about my manuscript, please be intrigued.
Here is some information about me, please like me.
Thank you!
Tired Author”
What goes along with that query letter is determined by what the agency requests and it’s different every time. Some of them want a synopsis (summarize the entire, whole novel in usually one page—without missing any major plot elements but also without sounding like a dry summary but also without going on for too long…). Almost all of them want a small sample of your writing. This can be the first five pages, the first ten pages, the first chapter, the first three chapters, the first 10,000 words, or anything the agent decides to ask for in their guidelines. Only a few times have I run across an agency that asks for a query letter with no sample pages at all.
So your writer friend or family member sent that! That’s a huge step, they were very brave, they deserve some cookies or something!
Next they wait for a response. Agencies take submissions generally by email or by an online form (sometimes by snail mail but I have zero experience with that, so I won’t touch on it here). I prefer the forms, there’s almost no guesswork, and with a form submission I almost never run into one of my least favorite sentences in querying:
“Due to the volume of queries we receive, we unfortunately cannot respond to all queries.”
One reason your writer can’t answer the question of when they’ll know more about the book they’re querying is because they don’t always know whether the book has already been rejected by some agents at any given time! Sometimes querying a novel is like throwing it into a deep dark well and never knowing if it ever hits the bottom!
Some agencies who include that in their guidelines go on to give a time frame. “If you don’t hear from us in eight to twelve weeks, it’s a pass.”
Some agencies say “We respond to all queries” but don’t include any time frame. That’s fine, writers can consider a query open forever. Some say “We try to respond to all queries within twelve weeks” and that’s honestly still basically considering a query open forever.
Some, though, say, “If we don’t respond within twelve weeks, please feel free to reach out.” Look at that! Your writer friend has permission to ask how the query is going! That’s reassuring, right? Wrong, it’s terrifying. I’ve gotten up the guts to do it only one time.
So. After some completely unknown period of time one of four things will happen with your friend’s query.
It will never be answered and they’ll eventually consider it closed but they’ll never be really sure. Maybe the agent didn’t even get it? Maybe the agent did email you but you didn’t get that? It’s a mystery forever.
It will be rejected. A bummer! But at least your writer friend can move on from that one now.
It will get a partial request! Exciting! An agent read your friend or family member’s query and liked what they saw enough to ask to read more—most often the first three chapters, the first fifty pages, or the first hundred pages. Then your friend goes back to waiting. For how long this time? We still don’t know! But however long it does take, one of two things will happen:
It will be rejected. More of a bummer than a query rejection! But at least your writer friend has had a solid confidence boost, maybe some feedback and encouragement, and can move on from that one.
It will be upgraded to a full request! Exciting, see below, point 4!
It will get a full request! Exciting! An agent read your friend or family member’s query and liked what they saw enough to ask to read more, and to be sent the entire book! Then your friend goes back to waiting. For how long this time? We still don’t know! But however long it does take, one of four things will happen:
It will be rejected without much fanfare. Really big bummer! But at least your writer friend has had a really solid confidence boost, maybe some feedback and encouragement, and can move on from that one.
It will be rejected in a lovely manner. Less of a bummer! Your writer friend got a super confidence boost, probably good feedback and encouragement, and maybe even an invitation from the agent to query them again with another project if they don’t find representation with this one.
It will get a revise-and-resubmit request. From what I hear, this can run the gamut from exciting to nerve wracking to a bummer. The agent is interested in your friend’s work but isn’t ready to offer them representation unless they make requested changes and resubmit to make sure the requested changes were done in a way that works for the agent. If your writer friend or family member decides to go for the r&r request, they’ll work hard on the revisions and then send the altered story back, and one of three things will happen.
rejected, extreme bummer
still need more revisions, try again, extremely mixed feelings
an offer! see below!
It will get an offer of representation! Joy! The goal! Attained! (Kind of, some more steps to the process of getting an agent appear after this, they usually take about two more weeks before an offer turns into a signing.)
So, okay, once the queries are sent out into the wild, your writer friend or family member has very little control over how long the process will take. More than that, they have almost no real knowledge of how long the querying process will take. I’m sure they loved that you showed interest in their goals! That was really sweet of you! But it’s an impossible question for them to answer. And they probably will tell you when they do have good news to share! But they don’t know when that will be and they cannot guess.
After your writer friend or family member gets an agent, there’s a lot more that has to be done before the book can come out. There’s more revising with the agent, then the agent submits the book to publishing editors and the agent and the author wait together for rejections/acceptances, then there’s probably more editing, honestly this part of the process is not familiar to me but from everything I hear, it’s marked by a lot of the same uncertainty and lack of any distinct timeline for most of it. If any of my friends who are on submission decide to write a blog post of their own about this part of the process, I’ll link that here.
What it all boils down to is that your friend can almost never answer the question of how it’s going or when they’ll have news. But it’s really nice that you cared enough to ask!