Here are some quick stats:

• I’ve received and responded to 5,246 queries, 4,915 of which were e-mail, 331 of which were print (e-mail turned out to be wildly popular for us; my print queries plummeted, and quickly)
• Of these 5,246 queries, I’ve requested 188 partials or fulls (3.584%)
• I’ve received exactly 200 partials to date (some referrals & conference requests in there), rejecting 184 and requesting 16 full mss (8.000% of partial requests have gone on to be full requests)
• I have requested 28 full mss or non-fiction proposals in total, offered representation 7 times, and signed 5 clients, for a .714 batting average
• All told, I’ve signed 0.095% of what’s come in through the front door, addressed to me
• Because my client list currently has more men than women, I tracked my requests by gender to try to ID and deal with any unconscious biases that might be coming up. 53% of my partial requests have gone out to female writers, 47% to male writers, so that’s a start; 2 of 5 new clients I’ve signed have been women (40%; both slush pile), but I think there’s work to be done here.

There are a couple other things these stats don’t address: Professional referrals, and the (very) occasional situation where I reach out to someone because I’m interested in them. I started tracking professional referrals this past August, and between current clients, other authors, editors, and agents, have had 12, from 12 different sources, in a month and a half. (I’ve also, for curiosity’s sake, started tracking authors who have fired their previous agent and are querying me — 9 since July, indicating there’s some turnover going on right now.)

So, it’s a great time to query me!

With that slightly frightening 0.095%, you might think it’s not, but I’m looking to aggressively expand into non-fiction, literary fiction, and middle grade, in addition to my current staples (YA and adult SF/F).

I’m going to try to sign any author whose work I really like (and have in most cases succeeded in doing so, though occasionally every agent loses a “beauty contest” in which lots of us vie for one writer), but I also have a burning desire to diversify my client list (balancing gender as much as I can, signing more non-American writers, GLBTQ writers, and writers of color) so that’s weighing in the back of my mind as I go through the slush pile as well.

Being inside on the hottest day of the year, when publishers are certainly observing the summer Friday, has led to my finally doing a few updates.  The new header is one; I’ve also deleted the annoying category cloud, and provided links to client blogs.

And now for the piece of news with the most interest and of the most relevance to 99.9% of this blog’s readers; I have opened to e-mail queries at JABberwocky.

My e-mail address for query letters is queryeddie [at] awfulagent [dot] com.  Any unsolicited e-mail query sent to any other address will be deleted, unread.  Likewise, don’t send any attachments; any synopsis must be included below the cover letter in the body of your e-mail.

Now, why the change?  Two reasons.

The first is that, although I’m expecting we’ll get hit with a wave of material worse than what we’d see in print, we’re also finding that many people e-mail first, and send letters once they’ve finished e-mailing. If a query is good, we’re put at a competitive disadvantage, because other people get more time to read. The second is that we get fewer queries from authors who live outside the US.  This cuts us off from a good portion of the UK, South African and ANZ markets (we’ve always had many letters from Canada, though), among many others, and making it necessary for people to hunt down IRCs seemed foolish to me, after I thought about it.

So, enjoy! Let your writer friends know I’m now open to e-mail queries.

In the thousands and thousands of pieces of writing I’ve read over the last couple years, a pattern has started to emerge, and while I haven’t approached these in anything resembling a scientific manner, I do think, based on the improperly gathered evidence, that there is a hierarchy of needs related to narratives, and that the more of these needs are met, the more successful a narrative will be.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ve tentatively called it the CASE Hierarchy. You’ll see why after the jump.

Okay, you jumped! That’s so nice of you!

Before I begin, let me remind you that I’m looking for feedback. If this seems too off base, too ivory tower white male, or too much like the inspired lunacy in Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, shoot me a reply:

For a story to function to the best of its ability, there are four primary areas of consideration to which its author must pay attention, beginning from the most fundamental and building from there. These stages are: Creativity, Articulation, Storytelling, and Engagement.

At the most basic level, in order for a narrative work to be truly successful, its author has to have creative ideas. A short story, novella, or novel that doesn’t demonstrate creativity on the part of the author cannot hold the interest of the reader and cannot be an artistic success on its own merits (though the connectedness of the author, nepotism, or severely lowered reader expectations through a programmatic approach to reading might make it a commercial success anyway, provided that there is in fact something resembling a linear story).

If the author of a narrative demonstrates creativity, this does not necessarily mean that this narrative will succeed — only that the author is capable of generating ideas that could be used effectively. The author must also be able to articulate those ideas through the skillful use of language. This requires developing an understanding of prose style, grammar, and a broad enough vocabulary to be able to choose words that accurately communicate what the author intends to say.

While the results of this level of understanding can potentially be interesting, they do not necessarily guarantee a successful narrative. A series of vignettes, for instance, can merit attention and inspire a reader to think, but if they remain unconnected, they don’t communicate the ideas as well as a work does that is capable of building these into a story.

The next step is the most important, structurally. In order for a narrative to be successful, it must function as a story. To do this, a narrative is required to have some central conflict, that is resolved. This does not mean that the conflict or its resolution are necessarily straightforward, merely that they exist. It is possible that in some narratives, the central question might appear to be whether or not the reader can identify the narrative itself.

While the prior example could theoretically work in the hands of a particularly skillful author, most narratives are more compelling when they have a central conflict with a greater degree of tangibility than a story in line with the above example would likely provide.

For many readers, it seems enough to have an engaging narrative that differentiates itself creatively from other narratives and communicates both the story and the ideas within it well. While narratives of this type are functional, there is a further level of development that is required to make a narrative function to its greatest potential: engagement with the philosophical concepts that underlie human civilization.

While sometimes ideas that occur at the basic creative level of development can flirt with these larger themes, or readers might, in their pondering on philosophical topics, attribute things to a narrative that weren’t deliberately put there, they do not necessarily do so.

At this highest level, there is a balancing act that the writer has to perform. If he or she presents too much of an agenda with philosophical or ideological ideas, the ideas run the risk of overwhelming a narrative, as in most of Ayn Rand’s fiction. But there also has to be enough there for the reader to be able to work with to feel he or she is engaged, and it has to be intrinsic enough to the work for readers from other cultures and time periods to get it (unlike Finnegan’s Wake, which virtually requires a knowledge of cryptography to make sense of its nonsense).

And if a writer manages to pull everything in the hierarchy off, the result is a masterpiece.

(Most of this was written on my phone, so apologies if the language is especially choppy.)

So, thoughts?