Checking in from my version of maternity leave (which is to say, checking email at 4am, watching a lot of Supernatural, getting caught up on my pleasure reading, and as always, paying my clients) to answer this question from a reader. Lee writes:
Hi Daphne, there’s an agent who has had my full for a couple of months, but not excessively long. She’s one of those agents who responds to every query and who keeps her blog updated with where she is on queries and requested fulls and partials (which is great).
Here is the problem. I checked her blog about two weeks ago, as I periodically do, and she said she was up to a certain date on queries and up to another date on requested fulls and partials. She said to contact her if you hadn’t heard back. Something seemed odd, so I checked my archived email, and I had sent my requested mss five days before the date she said she was up to, if that makes sense. Checked spam folders, double-checked the dates, double-checked that I’d gotten her auto reply when I submitted the requested full…everything was kosher.
So I sent her an email including all our previous correspondence and a short “checking in because you said to” kind of note. I got the auto-response to that one, too.
But then…..nothing. She never wrote back to that email either.
so now I’m wondering, is my ping lost in a see of queries? I left the subject headers from our previous emails on it, was that a mistake? Should I send her another email that says “checking in on a manuscript sent XXX date” or something? This agent actually read some previous work of mine and was totally responsive and cool, so I feel like this might be a tech glitch, but I’m still freaking out a little bit.
What’s my next move?
I would try another email with a more specific subject line, and if you don’t get an answer to that in a week or so, try again from a different email address. Sometimes, our email programs think they’re smarter than us, and hide things we’d normally want to see. Good luck!
And since the likelihood of my posting twice in one week is very slim right now, congrats to Matthew Cody on the pub of his latest middle grade adventure, Will In Scarlet!
