Signed with an agent! Plus a thought on querying and stats

Hey all I haven't posted on these forums in a good long while--but I signed with an agent in the last couple of weeks, and this is where I first found the writing community. Before I came here, I didn't know what a query letter was. Or how to write a synopsis. Or really even what to do with a pile of first draft nonsense once it was all sitting there, heaped up in a giant mess in MS word. I found my first CP's here. I got my first introduction to publishing as a business here.

And now I'm feeling a little nostalgic. And I'm also procrasti-posting, because revisions are happening.

The other thing I wanted to throw out there, because I think it's helpful, is that I had a sort of bizarre query run. I had a bunch of partial requests, but none of them ever got upgraded--but the rejections I was getting on those partials were super complimentary. I did a lot of angsting over trying to figure out what was so toxic about my first few chapters that nobody seemed able or willing to articulate. In hindsight, though, all that stress was really unproductive.

Because while my stats suggested that my beginning was weak, I really didn't think it was. My CPs didn't think it was. I participated in Pitch Wars last fall, and my mentor didn't think it was. And now my agent doesn't think so either. Plus, the actual feedback I was getting, even in my rejections, was that my pages were good. It was only the numbers that were throwing me off. And by throwing me off, I mean breaking me into teeny-tiny, stressed out pieces.

So yeah. Dear Querying Authors: the numbers aren't everything. For a lot of people, they might show you something meaningful about where your query or manuscript is failing. But my numbers and the feedback I was getting didn't match--and I think when that happens, it makes more sense to follow the feedback and not the stats. Because when we're talking about querying, the sample size is always going to be small enough that there's a real chance those numbers are lying to you.

Thanks guys! And as per ElaineA's suggestion, I did cross post to QLH.

Bookmama--yes, sort of.

So there's this bit of conventional wisdom that floats around saying that you can look at the place where you're "losing" agents and use that to figure out how to improve your submission. So if you're not getting at least a 10 to 15% request rate on queries, you might consider revising your query letter or your first 5 to 10 pages. But if you're getting past the query stage and into partial requests but agents aren't upgrading to full requests, you can feel pretty sure that somewhere in those 50 to 100 pages you've got a problem to fix.

And I don't want to say that's *wrong,* per se, because I think it is a useful guideline a lot of the time. But if the numbers/percentages/stats are the *only* thing giving you reason to believe something is wrong, sometimes all the numbers mean is that you've had bad luck.

(And thank you for the congrats! My book is a YA fantasy)