Never thought I would retract my long held position about agents saying pass on projects by not replying, but on Friday I received this email:<\/p>\n
Dear Sam,<\/p>\n
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review The Last Track<\/em>. As much as I enjoyed reading this, I am sorry to say I did not fall in love with the novel like I had hoped. As agents do, I need to truly love a project to take it on. Considering that you will also want and need an agent who will get behind your work with her full commitment, I wish you the best of luck placing your project with an agent who adores it. Thanks again and apologies for my belated response.<\/p>\n Best regards,<\/p>\n * Name redacted By Sam *<\/p>\n * Agency redacted by Sam *<\/p>\n Normally I do not post rejections but I thought this one was interesting for several reasons.<\/p>\n 1) They actually sent it on their own volition. Usually I query, get a request for material, send it off and the project disappears into a void. Usually any request about the project status is unanswered.<\/p>\n 2) Response time. Five weeks to evaluate a manuscript is very acceptable, given the circumstances, as BEA sat squarely within the consideration period. And for perspective, I can cite one agent that took more than eighteen months to reply to a query.<\/p>\n 3) Professional tone. This was not written by a snarky junior assistant. If it was, they are ready to be an agent.<\/p>\n As soon as I prep another query blast pack, I’ll send this agent a thank you note. They did me a favor.<\/p>\n After a few years of trying to sell agents on a manuscript, I finally have some closure. With one agent, at least. And apparently there are some with manners, even in NYC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Never thought I would retract my long held position about agents saying pass on projects by not replying, but on Friday I received this email: Dear Sam, Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review The Last Track. As much as I enjoyed reading this, I am sorry to say I did not fall […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10853\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}