Wannabe Writer Week, Part Deux

In keeping with this week's theme of wannabe writers, I'm going to share a sobering statistic I got today from my agent Saritza Hernandez, a staffer at the L. Perkins Agency who handles my books for the epublishing market. (I am repped by multiple agents there, each specializing in different markets).

Some people think (erroneously) that epublishing is subpar in terms of quality and is essentially the same as self-publishing. (Hint: It's not). Granted, unlike print publishing, it is possible to get an epub book deal without an agent (for the time being, anyway), but as the digital market continues to grow by leaps and bounds, more agents are getting directly involved in digital dealmaking----and as such, more and more authors targeting the epub market are seeking out agent representation.

To wit, Ms. Hernandez recently announced she was temporarily closed to new query submissions so she can get through her current backlog of over 500 unsolicited author queries. When I asked her what her query acceptance rate was, she shared the following:

"Last month, I got through 131 queries in my inbox. Of those, I requested 4 partial manuscripts and 1 full manuscript." (Which she has yet to read and/or accept/reject, mind you). In other words, she expressed interest in less than 2% of the authors who queried her. (Saritza currently reps 21 clients and has sold 10 books so far this year. Full disclosure---two of those books were mine).

And mind you, Saritza is only agenting in the epublisher market, which remains a very small portion of the overall publishing market. (I should also add that Saritza is an AWESOME and very efficient, effective agent; she once sold a book of mine in less than a week.)

So those of you who think this whole publishing thing is easy, chew on those stats for a while. Then go have a beer.

Peace.