Last year (including last week) I was querying literary agents. Yeah.
For those of you who don't know what "literary agents" and "query letters" are, they are the all-important step between an aspiring author and a respectable publisher in the US/UK book market. I wrote about this in Hungarian (here: https://bazis.me/text/salber-felicia-min-dolgozol-a-heten) and honestly, explaining it again in English seems...a bit of a waste, as the Internet is full of excellent articles that do a much better job that I ever could. (Not like in Hungarian: there, the concepts themselves don't even exist, nor have good translations.) Here is one blog in English, which I found particularly good, for those who want to learn more: https://janefriedman.com/query-letters/
In the following, I'm gonna share my personal experiences with the process.
I sent my first round of (seriously workshopped) queries about a year ago. By now, I have sent about 200 queries, out of which I got 18 full request & 15 partial requests. ("Request" means that an agent likes your query letter and writing sample, and asks you to send more material; often even the full book.) This is very good statistics; nonetheless, I ended up writing (and workshopping to death) a second query letter from scratch focusing on another key aspect of my book, just to try which one worked best. My numbers show that they worked equally well (more on this later). From which I conclude that any well written query letter can do the trick, regardless of the actual content.
My experience with sending out queries was that it is *tedious*. Even having the "skeleton" and only needing to personalize the opening line and some other bits (to make sure every detail is perfectly fitting to the agent's personal desires), it is exhausting. After sending out 3-4 of them, I sometimes felt as tired as I normally do after a full day at my day-job. Therefore, I say it is good practice to take a break now and then: you need it for self-care, otherwise you'd be risking burn-out.
I also did a bunch of live-pitches; I wrote about my strategies & take-aways in an article which was published in the American literary journal called Romance Writers Report. You can access it here: https://feliciasalber.wordpress.com/2024/10/05/my-article-in-the-romance-writers-report/
I'm still not agented, but I believe it's a matter of time. The book has been fully development edited and line edited by decently reputable editors, and even won a writing competition. So, it may happen any day, but one needs to be patient. Agents are super picky. You wouldn't believe how picky. They choose love-projects (projects they fall in love with right away) simply because (1) they can (they get dozens of submissions every day) and because (2) it's the right strategy for them. Just think about it. They need to champion the project and spend countless hours how to sell it the right way. They must love it as much as the author (or close to) in order to be successful. This is a crazy business.
Plus, agents (and publishers too) tend to be risk-averse. They want a sure thing: something that sells. Something that is just new-ish enough not to be the very same as everything else, but otherwise does not want to revolutionize much. I mean, there *are* agents who seek exciting new stuff, but many (perhaps the majority?) of agents want the safety of the well-known. They need to earn money, after all. (And apart from a few star-agents, most of them work their ass out to make a simple living.)
One thing that I now DON'T think hinders me, is my focus on DEI themes. I suspected for a while that this may give me a hard time (despite what agents proclaim about supporting minority perspectives, they might be subconsciously more careful with such books, was my theory at least) but after trying it statistically-meaningful times with my second query letter which did not mention any DEI-aspects at all, I got the same success rate. So good news: agents do seem to practice what they preach. Meaning, do query your diverse stories with abandon! :) As long as the query is strong and the book solid, there should be no problem.