Yes, It Costs $25,000 to Query Literary Agents

If you want a chance at being read, that is.

One of traditional publishing’s most disingenuous claims is that “money flows to the author.” It’s true for those who have the connections to get manuscripts read and works placed in a phone call or two, but most people don’t, and for the “don’t”s there is the query system. Querying is a freemium product—the free tier only exists to piss users off, so they can be upsold more expensive versions with decent customer service. If you try to query for free, you will be rejected unread and, after you burn through the small number of agents who can place in your genre, your book will be dead. Unless you find dysfunctional processes amusing—or happen to be running the most important study of traditional publishing in the past 25 years—you should not waste your time with this nonsense. Consider all the people who wait outside a nightclub, in the cold for hours, who will never be let in. They have become street-level advertisements for an establishment that has no other use for them. Is this what you want, or do you value your time?

Oddball cases where people query for free and succeed exist, but they’re exceedingly rare, and usually involve some hidden advantage that managed to escape publicity. Literary agents receive thousands of query letters per month, sign less than a dozen clients per year, and fill 90 percent of their slots through referrals, so we’re talking about sub-0.01% chances here. You should not, if you’re serious about publishing, waste your time and reputation on avenues with such horrible odds. You should instead use methods that actually work. The bad news is: They all cost money.

An MFA is one route. To be honest, for young writers with low opportunity costs, this is probably the way to go. If you can get a funded slot in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, consider taking it. This is the cheapest and best way to get a literary agent—if a professor introduces you to one, you’re in; if you don’t get such a referral, you’re probably sick of writing after two years of being unsuccessful, so somewhere else you go. Win-win. Unfunded positions are much more of a gamble; referral to an agent is never guaranteed, and it becomes unlikely outside of the top 5, so I’d advise against taking one. There are cheaper ways in.

Conferences are an option. The Bread Loaf Conference costs $4,440 and, while official percentages are never published, is believed to deliver a read rate of about 15% and a representation rate of 12%. Note that getting read is the hard part. Literary agents and acquisitions editors accept about 80% of what they read, but they read less than 1 percent of what is submitted to them. Notably, getting a “full request” does not mean a read is guaranteed or even likely; it can be a sign of real interest, but full manuscript requests are also offered to make difficult people go away, or to preserve relationships with third parties, or simply out of optimism that fades when the liquor does. Cheaper conferences do exist, but it should surprise no one that they have worse odds—the view of acquisitions editors and literary agents is that writers unwilling to shell out for the most expensive venues are not serious enough about their work to merit real attention.

Another strategy is to build a platform online, but the numbers that entice literary agents do not often happen organically. You’re not going to get 100,000 Instagram followers posting two pictures per week. You can buy followers, but you risk platform bans if you do it poorly. There are dozens of ways to manufacture the appearance of success and popularity, but I warn you that few of them are pay-and-forget. This stuff can take up so much time it derails your writing or, even worse, costs you your day job. So be careful.

What most people who succeed in traditional publishing must do is buy author services where the chance of a referral is not only an unspoken part of the package, but the reason for the rate to be what it is. You can hire a decent copyeditor for $0.01–0.02 per word, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Instead, we’re talking about the “developmental edits” and “manuscript assessments” priced at $0.08–0.15 per word, with author calls billed at $300 per hour. Some of these people are “book doctors” who spend hundreds of hours fixing broken books, but don’t usually give referrals; with them, you’re buying the labor, which you don’t need, because a traditional publisher will edit the manuscript again at no cost to you. Others are referral editors who do very little editing—that’s not what you’re paying for—but who are well-connected in the industry. Unfortunately, referral is not guaranteed, so you have to make the best impression. For this reason, I would advise against using the cheaper “manuscript assessment” options that will inspire less gratitude; I would say it is smarter to bet bigger on fewer targets, and advise that people who can only afford small bets cannot, in fact, afford traditional publishing.

An ugly truth is that very few people earn much as editors at publishers or as literary agents. The industry pays horribly. Instead, they make the real money after they leave by selling connections. The reason editors and agents refuse to read unsolicited manuscripts is that to establish a pattern of doing so would threaten their retirement plans.

Getting exact numbers is difficult; I had to exfiltrate the information over months from a variety of sources. Nevertheless, a clear linear pattern emerges; the price of a conference is correlated to its ability to get attendees read. The observed market value of a 1% chance of a manuscript being read by a literary agent is, depending on genre and season, between $225 and $290—call it $250. Of course, we are talking about probabilities, not certainties. There will be an author somewhere who gets lucky and lands an agent after a single $750 conference, leaving $24,250 in the war chest for marketing and publicity—if you thought traditionally published authors didn’t need to spend their own money on marketing, you don’t understand this industry—because a 3% chance does not mean zero. There will be others who invest $60,000 and get no reads, or only unfavorable ones.

All this guarantees nothing. Getting an agent to read does not ensure representation. Signing one does not always lead to a book deal; editors leave their houses, and connections cool. What’s more, most books fail to earn royalties beyond their advances, and only a small percentage of books earn advances that exceed what querying costs. Most people lose money.

The reason it stays this way is that there are people for whom it is legitimately worth $25,000—or several times that—to say that they have been traditionally published, even if they never make the money back. There are trust-fund kids who need to prove that their writing is “a real job” so their daddies do not cut them off. There are housewives, their children grown, who will only be able to resume their executive careers if they can prestige-wash the time without W-2 work, and a published book is an excellent way to do that. There are business-book authors who buy their way onto the bestseller lists, losing six figures on the mass-buy operations, but earning seven from speaking fees and consulting gigs. In short, this society is full of people with enormous sums of money who are willing to pay what querying costs, and for whom it makes sense to do so. But you’re probably not one of them.

I’ve not mentioned self-publishing; that would require a much longer essay. The rules are less clear, and different strategies work for different genres and different books. It would be dishonest to claim hard numbers, because a profitable method of publishing romance might fail for science fiction, or vice versa. Self-publishing is more meritocratic than the traditional route, because text and the reader experience actually matter, but it’s also much more unstructured, which makes this kind of analysis harder to do. In traditional publishing, text and genre alignment can be ignored because the author’s social standing—if the author has none, the reputation of the person referring the manuscript must stand in, and this is why referrals cost what they do—determines entirely how the work will be treated by publishers and presented to the public. Textual quality only matters in traditional publishing if the author cares about their work being taught to students twenty years from now, and most do not.

If you cannot afford to lose $25,000—we are talking about a volatile, prestige-priced investment class in which full principal loss is a real risk—then you should not take traditional publishing or querying seriously. The free, non-referral tier of the query service is beyond stigmatized. People in publishing read it not only as a sign of someone who can’t afford better avenues, but as an indication of a writer who considers their own time worthless, and that is even more lethal to one’s standing than being poor.