Behind the Slushy Veil: Novels

From the closing Rappaport Agency.

This covers a year of slush, roughly 5500 submissions, and provides a decent sample size. One highly intriguing stat, to me, is that of all those queries, the agency only requested 139, or ~2.5%, partial manuscripts. 1 out of 40 queries was judged interesting enough (in terms of content, relevancy, etc.) to follow up on.

That by far is the biggest filter. Of those 139 partials, 25, or 18%, led to requests for a full manuscript. I’m having a harder time understanding the way some of this data is phrased, but it looks like of those 25, only one got picked up by the Rappaport Agency–two others went with other agencies, and the four other clients who appear to have signed with the agency this year got offers based on queries or partials rather than full manuscripts (though obviously their fulls were eventually read).

To summarize, if I’m reading this right: about 1 in 200 of the novelists who queried the agency ended up getting requests for their full manuscript. Drawing from every stage of the query process, about 1 in 1000 submissions was eventually represented.

I was surprised to see how few partials get requested, and would have guessed the odds of representation were slightly higher–of course, with only 5 clients taken on, a small change would have skewed the numbers a lot either way–but this is pretty interesting stuff.