Well, this morning I asked for another partial, so that's 50 for this year. And I also signed a new client -- so that's 6. Which I think is a higher number than ususal.
She also said:
Two of the partials that I upgraded to full manuscript readings became clients. Of the other four, I read three of them in full right off, and signed one on a partial.
According to these stats, my query to partial percentage was .6% -- the number I see batted around most often for requests is usally more like 1-2% so I was a bit on the low side this year.... My partial to full percentage was also on the low side for me this year. But the number of clients signed is higher than usual. I believe in 2006 I only signed up 3. That's probably around typical for an agent with a client list my size and with my experience. Younger, hungrier agents will sometimes sign up more -- but the turnover on their lists also tends to be higher as well.
The 1-2% query-to-partial requests statistic is one of the statistics I've now heard tossed several times. Either the truth is that it's actually lower than 1-2% or the two agents I've quoted (see the previous post on this subject) were on the low end for requests this year. In any case, it seems to vary from agent to agent and from year to year.
In the comments section of her post, Jennifer also said that of the six people she signed as clients:
3 of them had short story credits, but nothing novel-length
2 of them had previously published novels (1 of those was branching out into a new genre)
1 of them had no short story credits, but novels forthcoming that I did not sell
By the way, with these updated statistics, someone querying Jennifer had a 0.075% chance of becoming a client in 2007 and had a 0.0375% chance of becoming a client in 2006. Obviously, having some sort of valid publishing credits helped, though those credits also indicate that their writing was already better than average.
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