What Are Your Chances?

The Rejecter wrote about your chances of getting taken on by an agent in What Are Your Chances Really and why agents don't take on many new writers in Why We Seem to Hate New Writers.

Agent Miss Snark talked about how often she requests partials or fulls based on a query letter in her Speaking of Numbers blog entry. Most agents agree that they only request partials about 1-7% of the time based on query letters and request full manuscripts for only about 2-5% of those. To break that down further, most agents are getting 100-200 query letters a week (about 10,000 queries a year!) but are only taking on 3 or 4 new clients (some take more, others less) each year. The depressing news is that even good, picky agents only manage to sell about 70-95% of the manuscripts that they take on.

By the way, Miss Snark also talked about what things made her more inclined to reject a manuscript in her blog entry The Tipping Point. At least agents like her are willing to help us avoid some of the common errors that knock our manuscripts into the "rejection" percentages.