Re: "There are many reasons for agents not to respond—they might be busy, they might have other reading, they might be buried with edits or dealing with a complicated offer situation with a publisher."
You left out one important reason agents don't reply to a query: Many agents now officially state that they'll only respond if interested. I haven't taken the time to actually count the number of agents who say this, but it is substantial. -- It might help the person you replied to know this: nothing personal; that's just what a lot of agents do now. (Which Janet Reid hated; yeah, I was a huge fan as well. Sigh.)
Earlier in that section I did mention the no response means no policy, actually! Keep in mind, though: the 'no response means no' policy does, in a lot of ways, suck, but agents are dealing with an absolute deluge of queries, month after month. Often it's hard to respond individually to each one. I've only been open to queries since March 18 and I've already received over 700.
Re: "There are many reasons for agents not to respond—they might be busy, they might have other reading, they might be buried with edits or dealing with a complicated offer situation with a publisher."
You left out one important reason agents don't reply to a query: Many agents now officially state that they'll only respond if interested. I haven't taken the time to actually count the number of agents who say this, but it is substantial. -- It might help the person you replied to know this: nothing personal; that's just what a lot of agents do now. (Which Janet Reid hated; yeah, I was a huge fan as well. Sigh.)
Earlier in that section I did mention the no response means no policy, actually! Keep in mind, though: the 'no response means no' policy does, in a lot of ways, suck, but agents are dealing with an absolute deluge of queries, month after month. Often it's hard to respond individually to each one. I've only been open to queries since March 18 and I've already received over 700.
Oops! Sorry that I missed tha. And thanks for supplying your query statistic! That definitely allows for a fuller perspective.