Under her new system, you the author fill in the blanks for name, e-mail address and word count. Then you paste in your query letter. It's brilliant. No bizarro questions to answer like other on-line submission sites, just that query letter that you've spent hours polishing.
After that, you paste in the opening couple of pages in another box. They're busy, and they're obviously looking for the instant hook, the turn of a phrase in the first couple of sentences to judge writing skill. If your novel doesn't really get going until the second chapter, you're out of luck. That's why some agents ask for three chapters, to better gauge the manuscript, but then they probably have assistants to do most of the grunt work.
Best of all, once the query is received you'll get an automated response that lets you know the submission got to where it was supposed to go. If nothing else, there's a sense of relief that comes with an acknowledgement, that your query did not go wandering off into cyberspace. Finally, the agency will send a form rejection if they aren't interested, so there's an end point to the whole process.
For the very rare few who are asked to submit, they'll be able to download the manuscript and get updates on the process, how far along, being read, to be read, all that sort of thing. All in all, very friendly to the author. All in all, almost no one makes it that far anyway, so it's not a tremendous burden.
If you want a rough estimate about the odds, I pulled this from Kristin Nelson's blog. She received about 20,800 queries during the past year. Of those, she requested 54 full manuscripts. That's a quarter of one percent. From there, she took on 8 new clients. That puts the odds at one in 2600. And you still want to keep trying your luck, don't you?
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