Next week is Thanksgiving, the start of the holiday season and the start of another 'slow' period in publishing. Agents must surely work according to the calendar, not unlike literary farmers who sow and reap at particular times of the year. Queries sent out in August, received at the end of the summer hiatus, had a respectable response rate and there are some partials out there now, waiting to sprout into full fledged manuscripts. More recent letters have resulted in a remarkable silence. Few SASE's have shown up in the mail, and the e-mail box is even more empty.
Rumors in the budding novelist camp typically explain away the lack of response by the time of year. Due to holiday parties, there is little work done in the New York publishing world, so one sits on one's hands because all queries are ignored for the duration. The same holds true for the month of August, when everyone goes in vacation. Just like in Europe, which shuts down for entire thirty-one days. Add to that schedule the routine that publishers follow, and the writer pretty much has no good time to submit. Novels are picked up on defined dates so that the books can be shipped to the stores for other defined dates, and if one does not make the cut at the right time, then the manuscript might just as well be deposited in the desk drawer.
After some considerable time spent in attracting an agent's attention, I can say that there does seem to be a pattern to the weekly calendar of rejections and requests. With that in mind, I dread the mailbox on Monday and Tuesday, while haunting the computer screen on Wednesday and Thursday. I am on the writers' timeclock, setting a schedule that revolves around the agents' schedule that circles around the publishers' schedule. It seems that I live in my own little universe.
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