How Many Agents Should You Query Before You Decide to Self-Publish?
Today’s guest post is jam-packed with solid information about the querying process comes from Desiree Vilenna, a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors and publishers with the world's best editors, designers, and marketers. She’s taken out as much of the guess work as possible in this incredibly informative post. I won’t waste another second of your time with my rambling, and let you dig right in!
For authors teetering on the fence between traditional publishing and self-publishing, it can be tough to know how many agents to query before you forge ahead with the latter. Fortunately, I’m here with an answer: you should query exactly 20 agents, no more, no less, before you decide to self-publish. That’s it, folks; that’s the post!
Just kidding — as nice as it would be to have such a clear-cut answer to this question, the real answer is obviously much more nuanced. How many agents you query before you self-publish (if indeed you choose to do so) is ultimately up to you as an author, and only you can know when you’ve hit your limit. That said, there are a few specific factors that will very much affect that limit — so to help you come up with a solid game plan, here are the three main things you’ll want to consider as you determine your ideal “query number”!
1. Why you’d want to traditionally publish in the first place
Presumably, if you’re thinking about getting a literary agent, traditional publishing is your favored publishing route or something you’re seriously considering. But have you taken the time to really think about why you’d want to publish traditionally, rather than self-publish or publish unagented with a small press?
Between the mainstream visibility of Big 5 publishers and the media-perpetuated narrative of debut authors snagging contracts like apples off trees, it can sometimes seem like traditional publishing is not just the best, but the only way to succeed as an author. However, the first point is debatable, and the second is patently false — with the right marketing efforts, indie books can sell just as well as those that are traditionally published, sometimes even better.
What’s more, there are many definitions of success. If your one true dream is to have your book displayed in physical stores, traditional publishing will likely be the path for you. However, if all you really want is to get your book out into the world — and/or to have creative and timely control over the process — you should probably self-publish instead.
Finally, keep in mind that a traditional publishing contract doesn’t guarantee that your book will sell; just ask any author who’s received an advance, spent it, and then scrambled when book sales failed to materialize! (If this scenario sounds familiar, it might be because author Heather Demetrios wrote a viral article about it last year. If you’re considering trad pub and haven’t read it, I highly recommend.)
Basically, if you want to publish traditionally because you believe it will bring you unmitigated fame and fortune, you should know that won’t be the case. But if you want your book in actual stores, you crave the support of an in-house team, or you’ve written the sort of book that can really only flourish with a publisher behind it — well, those are much better reasons to go trad pub, reasons that even I (an admittedly diehard self-pub enthusiast) can’t argue with.
Just make sure you’ve done your due diligence and had a long, hard think about what you want. If you conclude that traditional publishing is your optimal route, then you should commit right now to querying at least 20 agents (hey, that number wasn’t totally arbitrary) in order to find the right representation. However, if you’re still feeling uncertain, or leaning toward self-publishing anyway, then consider querying a smaller number of agents just to test the waters... or skipping the process entirely if it’s too much of a hassle to be worth it.
2. How much you’re able to personalize your approach
Suppose you’re set on querying at least a handful of agents; the next factor to consider is how much time and effort you want to spend seeking them out and customizing your query letters for them. As you probably know, the more you invest in this process, the better your results will be — and in a perfect world, every author would have unlimited time and resources to research and write personalized query letters all day long.
But this is the real world, and most authors don’t have the bandwidth for maximum quality and quantity in the query arena (quer-ena?). To that end, you have a choice: you can carefully select a few top agents and send high-effort, super-customized queries to each of them, or you can create a catch-all template and query dozens of agents at once. How you hedge your bets all depends on your priorities — are you looking for a long-term publishing partner and advocate, or are you just curious to see how many offers you can get?
There’s also the option of combining strategies: sending personalized queries to a few of your first-string agents (conventional publishing wisdom says about 6-8 at a time) while continuing to mass-query your second-stringers. Of course, the danger with this approach is that all your top picks reject you and you’ve already blown a first impression with your alternates — which is why I can’t in good faith recommend mass querying of any kind.
That said, if you’re really pressed for time and willing to take the chance, at least make sure that your mass-query template is clean and professional. Double-check that everything is spelled correctly, especially the agent’s name at the top; indeed, take extra care to ensure each query is addressed to the right person. Nothing’s more transparently disingenuous than forgetting to update an email salutation.
And whether you’re using a template or not, always avoid simultaneous queries to multiple people at the same agency. Not only is this annoying, but it also makes it seem like you don’t especially care who you end up with — which, needless to say, is neither flattering to agents nor indicative of a serious commitment to publishing. It’s fine to query another person at the same agency once you’ve received a rejection/long silence from your initial contact, but sending both queries at the same time just seems thoughtless. (With the very rare exception of finding two people at the same agency who are both perfect fits for your book — in which case, make sure to explain that in your query letters!)
In any case, to summarize: if you intend to go full “quality,” you’ll probably want to stick to the lower limit of contacting 6-8 agents per round with highly individualized letters. If you care more about “quantity,” your threshold might be a lot higher, but please invest at least a few hours' work into the template you send out to dozens of people.
And if you want to split the difference, you might send personalized queries to those same 6-8 agents and template queries to another 10-12 per round — just so you’ll still have some terrain to explore if you get radio silence back. (I’ll once again state that I can’t fully endorse any plan that involves templates, but I also can’t deny that they save time.)
Of course, factor #1 will affect your approach here as well. If you’re already feeling trepidatious about trad pub, then your “quality” approach might mean only sending 3-5 individualized queries at a time. You’ll also need to think about the state of the market and what you can realistically expect in terms of responses... which brings us to factor #3.
3. The overall amount of time you’re willing to wait
Remember, the time you spend on the research and query process isn’t the only temporal investment you’re making. You also need to think about the time it will take agents to get back to you! This is the final consideration that will affect your ideal query number, and while it’s a pretty cut-and-dried factor, it can also drastically impact your process.
I can tell you right now that most agents will get back to you in some form within 4-6 weeks of your initial query, especially if you follow up. In the grand scheme of publishing timelines, that’s a blip on the radar. However, if you’re hoping to get your book out there soon, it can seem like forever — especially with the knowledge that your agent will still need to land the right publisher, and that that publisher will likely take at least a year to release your title.
Once again, if you want to publish in a timely fashion, I have to vouch for self-publishing over trying to find an agent. But if you’re determined to publish relatively quickly while going the trad pub route, there’s an argument to be made for querying as many agents as you can per round! Again, the precise balance of quality and quantity is up to you — but if you want to make immediate haste with your book, you’ll pretty much need to max out.
The more likely scenario is that you’ll have a far-off, ballpark sense of when you want to publish (within the next two years, within the next five years, etc.) to guide your querying. For example, if you’re hoping to publish next year and your first round of queries is unsuccessful, you’ll know you need to try more agents in your next round. But if your first round does generate some interest and/or you don’t mind taking your time (especially if you’re still working on certain aspects of your book, like editing the text or putting together cover design briefs for your eventual publisher!), you can hold firm.
The Bottom Line
As I hope I’ve made abundantly clear, there really is no hard-and-fast rule for how many agents you should query before you self-publish. That “6-8 quality agents per round” guideline is a helpful starting point, but the degrees by which you add, multiply, and divide are extremely changeable and entirely dependent on you!
Still, in the interest of utility, I will say that if you’re determined to publish traditionally and you do everything “by the book” — personalizing all your queries, waiting 4-6 weeks to send each new round of letters, and remaining stalwart in the face of rejection — you’ll likely end up querying between 20-40 agents over the course of the six months.
Then again, maybe you’ll get lucky and land an agent on your very first try! Or maybe you’ll decide that a contract isn’t worth the hassle, delays, and commissions, and conclude that self-publishing is the path for you after all. (Sorry, had to get my bias in there one more time.)
Publishing is a fickle business, after all, and none of us can really know what the future holds. But no matter what happens, you’ll have these principles to guide you as you query (or don’t query!), and you can feel confident moving forward — wherever it is you might end up.
Gosh! I told you this was going to be good! Thank you Desiree for this wealth of writing wisdom! If, after reading this post, you’ve decided self-publishign is for you and you’d like some help with the process, I’d love to help. Check out my course or coaching offers, or email me with any questions.
Desiree Villena is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors and publishers with the world's best editors, designers, and marketers. Over 2,500 books have been produced via Reedsy since 2015.
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