The common wisdom has changed

[shalanna]

It used to be that when you queried an agent or editor, you would often get the "Try me again" or "I'd like to see anything else you have," closing. Back in the days when Writer's Digest was actually useful--I suppose up until the late 1980s or so--you could follow up a query with the next query, and the agent would remember you and think well of you for coming back quickly, as they hadn't forgotten you and they knew you weren't a one-hit wonder.

Now Nathan Bransford (as well as Miss Snark, in her old blog) has said, "If you re-query an agent, wait a couple of months."

I don't understand his reasoning on this. But ours not to reason why, eh?

Everything has pretty much changed since the 1980s and before on this stuff, so throw away any old Writer's Digest-style stuff you have in that library of yours. It's a new world out there.

Comments

[dennismhavens.livejournal.com]

This particular change could be as simple as the way the publishing business has changed and (very gradually) evolved since the 1980s. Those of us who were writing and submitting back then, and who used computers and printers to turn out manuscripts, knew it was going to be a long time before publishers, or agents, accepted electronic submissions . . . even though we'd been ready to do that for a long while, even in the mid-to-late Eighties.

Now they've caught up with us, and in a way it has made them vulnerable to the "too much, too soon" syndrome. You know darned well what would happen if you submitted every last one of your novels to the same publisher, or agent, shooting out another one as an e-mail attachment as soon as you'd had the last one rejected. I think that "rule" (if indeed it is one) is aimed more at newbies who try to overwhelm with sheer volume. You do your homework, you know who's looking for which genres, and how you've been treated in the past by a given agent or publisher. Not every writer goes to that much trouble.

So yes, the change throughout the industry since the 1980s is huge. It would be odder, I think, if old submission rules hadn't changed. Think about this: How long would it take you, today, to submit every word of every novel you've ever written to a given agent/editor? Now think back to 1988, a mere twenty years ago, and estimate how long it would have taken to get a similar volume of work out there.

Let's face it. Since the advent of home computers, far more people have been writing books. Not necessarily GOOD books, but books. With far fewer publishers today than there were in 1988, manpower is being stressed to the snapping point. Something has to give, and in this case it was submission rules.