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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45207
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Several thoughts to consider:

**There is no reason to expect an agent's opinion to be a better assessment of your writing than a beta reader's opinion.**

Agents are business people. _They pay their mortgages by finding the manuscripts that will sell_, and then selling them for the best price they can. The manuscripts that will sell are those that the public is currently interested in.

Within a week of the college admissions scandal breaking, agents were wish listing a book about college admissions scandals. See? It's a market.

**A 10% request rate on queries is a good rate.**

But I know people who had a zero percent request rate on agent queries and then landed a big independent publisher. So again, agents are just people, and they receive a dozen or more queries each and every day. They have to wade through all of that _knowing that reading a full manuscript will take days of their time_, at which point another fifty queries will have piled up in their inbox.

As an assessment of your manuscript, agent rejections are almost meaningless in this context.

And, a ten percent rate is a **good** rate. Five percent might be closer to the average.

**If what you want is to build an audience, do it.**

Put yourself out there--find your audience and love them. There are a thousand ways to find readers. Websites and social media, of course. Buying ads. Friends and family. Running a blog, promotional deals.

**In the end, all you know is that some people will enjoy what you write, and others won't.**

This is true for everyone. I've tried to read Steven King--I don't get it. He's a good writer, but he does zip for me. Not a huge fan of HP either.

My favorite authors are niche--I fall into their worlds like they were built just for me. It is a subjective thing, and it'll be true for all of us as writers, too.

Original score: 9