We're meeting with literary agents — and we'd love to talk to you

As a writer, I’m well versed in the query experience from the writer's side. 

It’s a lengthy process, and it’s not for the faint hearted. The whole experience feels glacial. Not only have you perhaps spent years working on your manuscript – then the edits, the beta readers, more edits. Oh, and did I mention the edits?

You’ve polished and perfected your work. You’ve doubted your ability. You’ve read other books in your genre and wondered if your work could ever compare. Could it sit on a shelf alongside theirs one day?

But no, their book has a way of getting that character just so. Yours feels like there’s a slight barrier between the reader and the character. How does that other writer do that? Can you ever do that?

Finally, you decide, you’re ready to find a literary agent to represent your work. You read the forums, you follow literary agents on Instagram, you piece together what you’re supposed to do in this industry; you’re meant to write a query letter.

You learn how to write one. What a comp title is and how to figure out which ones to use – ideally from a debut author, published in the past 2-3 years, who is successful but not too successful, lest you’re inaccurately describing the sales journey you think your book will take.

You’ve researched agents. You’ve found the ones that your book is a good fit for their list, determined if and when the agent is open, what their submission requirements are, how you might open your query to highlight the business case for why your book is a good fit for that agent’s list.

You’ve even built a spreadsheet to track your submissions.

Finally… finally! You hit send on your first query. Then your first five, first ten. And then you wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

Eventually, you might get a reply. It might be a pass. It might be a request for a partial, or a full.

Whatever it is, the process is slow. Glacially slow.

But that’s just how the industry is, right? Unless… could a query sorting tool help agents find aligned work faster, and writers get a response sooner? Could it? (We think so).

What is the query inbox experience like for agents?

We’ve been working on QuerySort for almost 7 months. It’s become such a huge and exciting process for us, something we’re so passionate about. I literally can’t wait to work on it every day.

And while I have firsthand experience of the writer’s side of the querying process, and while we have deeply, excitedly, researched the literary agent experience of the query inbox, nothing really compares with hearing about the agent’s experience firsthand.

Which is where you come in, dear reader agent (just wanted a Lady Whistledown moment!).

We’ve been building QuerySort based on what we have researched about the literary agent experience. We’ve read articles on query volume, we’ve heard agents speak about it during writer events, we’ve read Instagram posts on the numbers. We’ve analysed QueryTracker data and found that the majority of agents experience huge query inboxes that they have to work through to find the submissions that they want to request on (and from data of the past 12 months, that’s around a 1.8% positive response rate).

We know that query volume is a challenge for literary agents.

But we want to hear about it directly from you. We want to understand how you get through your query volume; your process, how you review queries; what tools you wish you had to make that process easier.

We want to understand the query experience of literary agents, from literary agents.

Because we care about getting this right.

Can you imagine if we do? Literary agents opening their inbox and knowing immediately which queries to read first; the ones tagged High and Medium alignment with their wishlist – with Low alignment queries still there to be read when suits the agent best.

No more wading through hundreds or thousands of queries that were never going to be a match (we’re talking outside the ages and genres you don’t represent, stories about topics/genres on your exclusions list, or clear batch and blasts), to find the ones that are. Imagine opening your inbox and seeing that you have 28 new High alignment queries, 126 Medium alignment queries, and 653 Low alignment queries. 

You could jump straight to the High and Medium alignment ones, knowing that in here, you might find the submissions you want to request from.

And then imagine the experience for the writers who have done the work of querying agents whose book is a fit for their list. They would be High and Medium alignment queries. Those writers who have done the work could hear back quicker. Even if it’s a no.

Wouldn’t that help literary agents and writers?

We think so.

And to make sure we’re building everything right, we’d love to meet with you. We can even give you a sneak peek of QuerySort before we launch.

Can you spare 30 mins to meet with us?

If you can spare 30 mins of your time, we’d be incredibly, eternally grateful. And as a thank you, we will send you a 50% off code for your first 3 months when we launch, should you decide to subscribe.

We also know how time-poor agents are, so if you can’t commit to a 30-min call, we totally understand. (We’d also happily, gratefully adore an email to hello@querysort.com with your current process and how you think QuerySort could help. Or a waitlist join… or even just some positive vibes…).

We’re really looking forward to meeting with literary agents, to understand your query workflow and of course to show you what we’ve been building. But also, we want you to know that we are just two women who saw an inbox overwhelm problem and are deeply passionate about solving it.

And if we can help agents find work that’s a fit for their wishlist faster, and help writers get responses sooner?

Well, we might just have a slight impact on the glacial speed of the publishing industry.