When To Follow Up

The Definitive Post

Hi friends,

I’m getting the same question over and over lately, and I know exactly why. Writers, here and all over the internet, want to know when can I follow up? How long should I wait until I follow up? How long it is going to take for an agent to read my work? Why is it taking so long for an agent to read my query/requested full/submitted ms? You might not think those are all the same question, but they are. I’ll explain.

Writers want to know how long it will take for agents to respond, and/or what it means when an agent does take a long time to respond, because writers are in a black box, alone with their thoughts. You don’t even have your book or proposal to work on and distract you anymore because you’re done and you sent it off to an agent! Now all you have to do it sit back and wait for a response and all you can see is that response not coming in.

Oh, you may see that agent online posting book party pics to instagram or commenting on twitter or writing a newsletter or posting new deals and it looks like they are doing everything but reading your work. It looks like they are not reading your work at you. This isn’t true, however. They are living their life and doing their job and reading your work is only one, small part of those things. Not an insignificant part but still, just one, small part. You only see your inbox without that agent’s email in it. You don’t see their inbox with hundreds (maybe thousands) of other emails in it.

Still, it’s ok to follow up! Following up is normal, professional, and expected. It will not sour an agent against you. It will not make them think you’re a pest. It will not trigger an automatic rejection because you were annoying. It’s normal! I get them everyday! It’s fine!

But a follow up not trigger an answer that doesn’t exist yet. If you haven’t heard back, that’s probably because there isn’t any news. A followup is not the jostle that frees your candy bar stuck in the vending machine. It won’t trigger a rejection, but it also won’t trigger an acceptance, if that acceptance doesn’t exist yet. Agents rarely sit on good news. Talking about books we love is the best part of the job, and that could include your query or requested manuscript. Sometimes no news is just no news.

Writers want agents to respond to a follow up with an answer, preferably a good one. At the very least, it would be nice if the agent could tell you when they expected to have an answer for you. But I’m sorry to say that’s not likely to happen in response to your follow up, either. Sometimes I don’t know when I will get to a query or finish reading a requested ms. Taking the time to look at my schedule and planning things out and remembering that so and so client is delivering pages at the end of the month that must be read that same week would actually take more time—for all the follow ups I get—than just doing what’s in front of me and getting to things in due course. My workflow is just not that regimented or regular. It’s not an assembly line. You can still follow up though! It’s ok to do so! You’re just not necessarily going to get the answer you want.

What happens when you follow up? Your remind the agent that a noticeable amount of time has passed since you sent them your work. Obviously it’s noticeable to you, lol. But to the agent, your query or manuscript may as well have come in thirty seconds ago. Yours and an agent’s perception of time are inversely proportional. What’s months to you is seconds to us. This reminder will hopefully spur them to reprioritize it, however they can, or send the answer they already know (because they read it) and just haven’t had the time to deliver yet. That’s usually a no, because we don’t sit on yeses. BUT, the very most likely thing is they haven’t read it yet. And the very best possible outcome is they read it sooner rather than later, and you’ll get your answer before too long.

When should you follow up? There’s no magical time period after which every answer should already be in your inbox. Still, I know you want a number. So here it is. The definitive time period after which you’re allowed to follow up is three months. When can you follow up again after that? Another three months. Yes, these numbers are arbitrary but they’re also reasonable for everyone and something concrete you can focus on. It’s reasonable to expect I can read an email after three months and three months is a reasonable amount of time for you to wait for that response. Of course, three months is also a millisecond when it comes to the thousands of emails I need to respond to and an eon when it comes to the yawning void of nothing in your inbox. A friend once said to me, if both parties are a little unhappy, then it must be fair.

Please follow up if you want to, need to, or it helps you cope with the frustrating, silent abyss of publishing. And please remember everyone in publishing is trying their best. Should it happen faster? Should it be easier? Yes. But should is often unrealistic. Make sure your expectations of what will come of that following up are realistic. And I’ll make sure to be realistic about what I can do in a day. Remember, no answer isn’t necessarily a no. It’s more likely the agent doesn’t have an answer for you yet at all. And that means there’s still hope.

Good luck, my friends.

OXOXOXOX,

Kate