The Slowdown Starts Now

The day before Thanksgiving, and not a creature is stirring in offices across the land. Many are taking the day off, to prepare for the grand feast to come. Perhaps it's only a half-day at work today, with time to catch a late flight home. In New York, in literary agent land, the whole process begins to wind down when the stores on Fifth Avenue start putting up holiday decorations. One whiff of pine, one glimpse of a colorful glass ornament, and thoughts turn away from the slush.

Granted, the two weeks that bracket Christmas and New Year's Day are the absolutely most slow of all. No one is working, it seems, what with the vacations and the holiday parties and the general merriment. As if anticipating all that joy, the publishing world, agents included, gear up for the time off by starting a slowdown now.

Should you wait to query? Absolutely not. Someone is working; not every agent is so well established that they can take time off and still pay the rent. It's not as if your snail mail query is going to get pulped because it came in with a batch of Christmas cards. What will happen is that your response time will be drawn out, and don't expect anything like a quick reply between now and the start of the new year.

So query away. Get your humble request out there, under the noses of agents who might be a bit distracted by the twinkling fairy lights. If you can't stand the longer wait, the month of December could be a good time to polish the query, polish the manuscript...and you're working on your next novel, of course. If you've got a short story in you, this is a good time to try your hand at submitting to literary journals. Need names and addresses? You can always start here.