Observations from the Trenches
Greetings from the "notification period" — a.k.a. I'll sign with a new agent on Wednesday
Hi y’all!
Happy March! It’s starting to feel deceptively like summer and okay, sure, I live in a tropical setting anyway, but—something about the air warming and that hour at sunset back, right?
This is going to be a poorly written newsletter, which I’ve accepted because I am in the thick of it, but I wanted to shed some light on the s-l-o-w-e-s-t three-ish weeks of any novelist’s life: the agent notification period.
The notification period—when you’ve gotten your first agent offer and set a deadline for every other agent to respond to you.
I don’t handle querying well, and I know that I likely will not handle being on submission well either. Every morning, I roll over in a panic sometime between 5 and 7 a.m. to check my email as soon as I’m conscious.
Most of my book news during this process, both last time and this time, has come in overnight because of my time zone. It makes it hard to sleep.
Because agents tend to be underpaid and overworked (as most others in publishing), they’re generally only able to read submissions “on their own time” on weekends and in evenings. Their workdays themselves are full of editor meetings, calls, edits for existing clients, etc,. So the standard for wanting to take on somebody as a client for more unpaid work? High.
Every rejection hurts me deeply, and every acceptance makes me euphoric. The mood swings rattle me.
Although I have a fulfilling life outside of my book news, the book project is all-consuming when it’s on, and I find it difficult to focus when I’m getting a lot of news at once. (Worse is when I get no news and my imagination runs haywire, but at least I can be good at other things during those times.)
And it’s all almost (sort of) over, because I’ll be done with my second round of querying next Wednesday. Time is dragging, I Am Not Okay, etc, etc,.