Querying the Queries: A Summer with kt literary

I spent the last three months interning at a literary agency (kt literary LLC), and while my day to day varied based on specific projects, let’s take a look at what I typically would work on.

First, I look over my supervisor's queries. Queries are applications to a literary agent asking for them to represent you, and my supervisor accepted queries from June 1st to August 1st. Two months may not seem like a long time, but the two of us went through over one thousand queries this summer. My goal when looking over queries by myself was to go through and reduce the number to under two hundred fifty and make sure we answered a query within two weeks. While doing that, I was responsible for screening the queries in terms of quality, genre and writing style, and if it did not match my supervisor's expectations I would send the rejection email. I would typically work on queries for an hour or two each workday, but I did have a few days where I only worked on queries.

Once I went through enough queries for the day, I would start reading manuscripts. Reading through manuscript requests is the step after accepting a query, where you read either parts of or the whole manuscript and decide if the author is what my supervisor wants to have as a client. A lot of this work is subjective, and a large part about reading manuscripts is reading until your attention is gone (although my supervisor and I agree on reading at least 10% of the book first). This means that sometimes I’d read a whole manuscript, other times I’d decide my supervisor should pass on the manuscript after forty pages.

Reader’s reports are what happens when I read a whole manuscript. A reader’s report looks at the manuscript as a whole and gives the literary agent insight on what is done well and what needs improvement. It’s similar to a book report, but highly subjective and informed by my own opinion about what makes a book well written. Thankfully my supervisor agreed with most of my feedback, working together to figure out the best step after the reader’s report.

Most of the time, I would finish my work on a project after the reader’s report, but occasionally I would have additional projects. Those were often made up of searching for comparable titles, reading a new draft of a manuscript, and on one notable occasion, writing a rewrite and resubmit letter. Comparable titles are the publishing industry’s version of market research, giving a publisher a list of similar books to whichever book we are trying to sell. Finding comparable titles was either spectacularly easy or incredibly difficult based on the book. Reading new drafts of manuscripts meant writing new reader’s reports, often mentioning what improved. My rewrite and resubmit letter to an author my supervisor might take as a new client was a letter with all of the feedback from the reader’s report put into a compliment sandwich in hopes that if the author rewrites and resubmit the manuscript, my supervisor would offer to represent the author based on the new manuscript. 

I would usually only do two or three of these tasks a day, largely focusing on queries and requested manuscripts, but I consistently worked on other projects, met with industry professionals, and had opportunities to discuss with upcoming authors. I'm incredibly thankful for this internship and the skills it taught me are invaluable.