It Doesn't Matter When You Query
Except When It Does
Hi Friends!
I got a question in the Q&A Thursday box last week that I think deserves the long-form treatment. When I first read it, I thought it boiled down something I’ve seen a bunch of times: When’s the best time to send a query letter? We talked about that here a long time ago, and the answer is: when you’re done with it. But the question A. sent to me starts with something slightly different:
Is there a “best time of year” to sub certain books to editors? For instance, do you get more spooky book requests during the fall? Do you avoid certain months or time frames or just start subbing as soon as the book is ready?
Bottom line, as I said, most often, you should query when the book is ready. August and December can be a little slow, but again, if you wait to send then you’re just behind all the other people who didn’t wait to send. Get in the queue when you’re ready! The season is not going to sway me one way or another if I think the book is good and saleable.
There are two instances when you might consider the seasonality of the book you’re sending out.
Your book is “seasonal.”
You may think the best time to query my picture book about Halloween is in October! That makes some logical sense! Agents or editors might be in a spooky mood. Halloween will be on the brain. They may be looking at the current books and thinking I need a new one that does X! And your book might just do X! This is not wholly bad logic.
But it’s not exactly publishing logic. It assumes that your query will be read in the month of October. Many agents take 6-8 weeks to read something, if not more, so there’s no guarantee your book will be read in the season to which it pertains.
This also doesn’t consider when that book might be published. It can take anywhere from 8 months to 2 years for a book to come out, depending on the genre, the publisher’s schedule, and the timeliness of the book. A picture book or graphic novel is going to take WAY WAY longer to publish than a completed novel that only needs a light edit, not only because there are illustrations involved. So if you query a Halloween book in 2021, it’s not likely to come out until 2023. That schedule is even a little crunched if your October query doesn’t get read until December and then not sent out until January and then not bought until March and the illustrator isn’t contracted until April and all of a sudden a 24 month production schedule is down to 18 (because you want the book to come out in September, 2023, not necessarily October.)
Still think 18 months sounds like PLENTY of time to make a book? It can be! But don’t forget that all the people making your book are not making ONLY your book. Any of them might be working on 5 to 20 other books in that time period. Basically assume that an agent/editor/etc has 50 emails ahead of yours in the queue, if not more.
You don’t have to game out your book’s production schedule down to the week to pick a time to query. But you shouldn’t wait if your book depends on being published in a certain season. If you do, it could be crunched in a way that makes the whole process harder, for everyone, including you.
Which brings me to my next point. If your book depends on an ANNIVERSARY, you have to get moving YEARS in advance. Let’s say you’re writing a book about the 50-something anniversary of whatever happened in 1972. <scans wikipedia> Let’s say the 50th anniversary of the first Boston Marathon where women could compete. (ONLY 50 YEARS AGO DEAR GOD.) Your book should come out in April, 2022, not just because that’s the official anniversary but because the 2022 marathon is also in April. Great! You should query your book in…..approximately January 2020 at the latest. Yikes, I hope you have a time machine (and also can you warn us all about 2020? Thanks.) Your book needs to be done, done, done, edited, copy edited, designed and off to the printer in early 2022 (approximately) to get into stores by April ‘22. It is not uncommon for books, even unillustrated ones!, to go from queried to bookshelves in 2-3 years. So if your book is date- or season-dependent you have to factor in the very slow production schedule when thinking about when to query your work. Or even when to write it. If you’re working on an anniversary-dependent book, I hope that big anniversary is in 2025 or later.
[Lots of people are going to read this and think THIS TAKES TOO LONG IT SHOULD BE FASTER THERE IS NO REASON IT SHOULDN’T BE FASTER IN THIS DAY AND AGE. And they are slightly right. Publishing A BOOK can be faster in this day and age. But publishing 5, 10, 20, 200 books cannot be faster in this day and age because the people who publish those books are mere mortals. There are fewer of us than we need to make the process go faster. Going faster, when it does happen, is extremely taxing on all those involved. Sorry it can’t necessarily go faster for your book. It’s not you. It’s just a hard job done by humans and that takes time.]
CLIENT LINK ROUND UP!
Coming Soon! Next Month! The latest super creepy and awesome science fiction thriller by New York Times bestselling author Madeleine Roux! RECLAIMED is “wickedly smart, devious as hell, and lightning fast. Highly recommended.” says Jonathan Maberry!
Read an excerpt by Daniel Lavery from SWORD STONE TABLE in Lithub! Shocking no one that knows him, it has the longest title of any story in that collection: “How, after Long Fighting, Galehaut Was Overcome by Lancelot Yet Was Not Slain and Made Great Speed to Yield to Friendship; Or, Galehaut, the Knight of the Forfeit.” Read it forthwith!
Take care my friends. Please get vaccinated.
OXOXOX,
Kate
Love this! It's a story about patience and understanding how many people it takes to get a book out there (and how many other books those people are working on at the same time).
I read an interview with either Warren Murphy or Richard Sapir, the cowriters of the old Remo Williams action novels of the 1960s and 70s, and he noted that one reason they stopped writing the series was that publishing them started to take longer. This was a problem because the series was (to some extent) a satirical take on events of the day. So, for example, Murphy or Sapir would read an article about Nixon preparing to go to China, and then crank out a thriller where their fictional president goes to China and needs saving by Remo Williams. They could write it fast and it would come out just 3 or 4 months after they conceived of it, landing on the rotating wire racks in bus stations all across this great land to coincide with Nixon's real trip. Murphy (or Sapir) never said in the interview why publishing suddenly wanted longer lead times -- only that they did, and that (iirc) this killed some of the series' M.O. and made it less fun to write and read. Similarly, I think of writers like Earl Stanley Gardner, who published 2 or 3 Perry Mason novels each year for 30 years. Anyway, this isn't really a question, unless the question is -- if someone ever had an idea for a series that was very responsive to current events, would publishing be able to get on it and shorten the two-year window to, say, a four-month window? I don't mean for Important Tomes, I mean for zippy mass market paperbacks of 250 pages or so. You know -- bus books.