Suspense, Day 8? Day 1?

[dr_pretentious]

After a week with no response, I finally decided to make sure the email address the Shiny Young Agent was using when she set out to start her own agency was still current. I'd updated my address book when she left the Venerable Agency where she'd been working when I first met her, but I hadn't updated it since she got the infrastructure in her new office up and running. Lo and behold, a new email address on a new website.

Once I pinged her at her new address, she got back to me with an update within 12 hours. Given the glacial pace of the publishing industry in general, and the kinds of delays that individuals in gatekeeper positions can get away with as a result, a 12-hour response time is downright impressive.

So here's the word: She just got the ms back from two readers, and reading it herself is on her docket for next week.

My wild speculations on the basis of this tiny bit of information: If two readers have read it and told her what they thought of it, and she's still planning on making time in her schedule to read it herself, then the readers can't have thought the ms sucked too badly. After all, why would she have readers, if not to cull the pile and protect her own time? So, two people whose job it was to say no have not said no. Whoever they are, I wish them a spring full of crocuses.

Comments

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

They might have loved it and yet concluded that it was still unsalable because of the page length, the politics, the state of the market, etc. So far there have been ::counts on fingers:: four moments when a person could have slammed on the brakes and didn't. There was a reader who looked at the partial back in July and then sent it up the line to the SYA. There was the SYA herself, who then read the partial over the summer and asked for the full. And then there was each of the two readers who looked at the full--I'm sure with a book this long and a market so inhospitable to long books, had either of the two readers come down hard on the ms, I'd have a rejection slip by now.

Now, the SYA has to (A) love the book, AND (B) conclude that its prospects in the market are good enough for her to spend many hours of her life and to wager a tiny part of her reputation on trying to sell it. Love is grand, but it does not necessarily conquer all.