Is It Worth It to Query Literary Agents in 2026?

Writing Query Letters and Sending Them Out is a Tedious Process. But if You Want an Agent, It's a Must.

From my experience, literary agents, at least the majority of them, no longer respond to query letters. A long time ago, when I first started querying agents, it felt like a lot of agents at least sent out form rejection letters. Sometimes I’d receive encouraging emails or QueryTracker responses that, while rejections, provided a line or two of what the agent (or more likely their assistant’s) liked about my manuscript. Sometimes they asked for the full manuscript, which was exciting. If I’m to be honest, I no longer feel that that is the case. I say this with experience, and I say this after having an agent and being offered representation for another novel, which happened on the same day. I turned one agent down, and I accepted representation from the other agent. But that was years ago. My agent and I parted ways; I simply felt that I was writing more quickly than my agent was able to keep up with and I wanted to see if anything would change if I went with another agent. So far, I’m still querying—with three novels, each of which is written in a different style about different things.

Literary agents are bogged down and have been for a long time. The publishing industry has been consolidating for years, and the larger publishing houses have always acquired smaller indies and publishing houses and imprints into their catalog. Between 2024 and 2025 alone, Amazon Publishing created and acquired imprints such as Montlake Romance, Thomas & Mercer, and Lake Union Publishing to diversify their genre and digital format offerings. HarperCollins Christian acquired Thomas Nelson Brasil. News Corp (HarperCollins) bought Harlequin to broaden its reach into romance and family fiction. There are others; I could go on all day. But you get the gist. And if you’ve listened to any podcasts or read up on the industry or participated in any online or in-person Q&As, you know things are . . . in flux. Editors and agents are burning out. They’re transitioning to other careers. They’re being let go because of redundancy and other industry and political realities that they may have not had to deal with before. And that’s not good for authors, in particular new authors trying to get their manuscripts past the submission process.

If you’ve been sending out your manuscript(s) for a number of years now, you’ve felt the change in how things are working (or not working). Literary agents are few in number; writers are, well, everywhere. Often, if you’re researching agents to query, and you’re doing the serious work of getting an understanding of what the agent is seeking, who they represent, what they’ll do for you in terms of your relationship with them, how much communication you’ll have with the submissions they’re sending out to their editor contacts, and so on, you come up with a few realties. They are:

• More and more agents are closed to queries or are only open to queries via referrals. Which means you shouldn’t waste your time querying them. They won’t likely read your query, and it’s possible you’ll just be considered a rookie or annoying. It’s like putting a no soliciting sign on your door and still having the Avon representative knocking at your door. If Avon is still a thing—I have no clue and I’m not even going to bother to Google if it is.

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• You get a response immediately or after six or eight or twelve or eighteen months.

  I’ve had all of these things happen to me. Having been a reader/editor at a number of literary magazines, I know from experience that submissions will far outnumber what we can read in full. So, like readers and editors at small literary presses, you weed out the submissions for almost any reason at all. You don’t like the first line or paragraph—meaning you’re not “hooked” to read any more than that for whatever reason: you don’t like the voice (or there is none), the work starts out with a cliché—someone waking from a dream, a description of the weather, information dumps, or just a boring beginning where your protagonist is waking up, getting out of bed, looking in the mirror, and doing nothing interesting. You need a hook, and you need it immediately these days. Long gone are the days when literary writing was as respected as it was and was published for its beautiful language and artistry, or at least that’s how it feels to me (with some exceptions, of course). Generational changes, as they do, occur, and romance and romantasy and fantasy and similar genres appear to have taken over. And that means that’s what a lot of writers in creative writing programs are writing about. That’ll change, like it always does, but who knows when, and who knows to what. But response times from agents is either immediate or very, very slow.

• You get no response at all. If you’re like me, you have a spreadsheet with all of your queries that you update from time to time. Or you use QueryTracker or some other software that keeps all of the information for you—when you sent the query, what you sent, the date you received the rejection, if it was a form rejection or if the response was personalized in some way, meaning they sent an encouraging line or told you to query them again when you have something else, or, if you’re lucky, asked for you to send them the full manuscript of your novel. I like when agents use QueryTracker for their responses, because you can always check the status of your query. An automated email tends to follow their response, so once you have the link you’re able to keep abreast of where your query is in the process. You’ll see who rejected your query, if they’ve accepted or asked for more of your novel, and you’ll also be able to tell if you simply haven’t yet gotten to reading your query. Other than when they use QueryTracker, you’re in the dark as to where your query is in the process—if it still in their queue? Are they just not going to respond at all (a lot of literary agents/agencies are up front: if they aren’t interested and/or if they don’t reach out to you by eight weeks or whatever, it’s a pass and you should move on). If you’re a writing querying agents, and six months or a year goes by, you can pretty much write that agent off and move on. In some cases, the agency will let you query another agent (usually when the agency is a larger agency), but in many cases they’ll just have it on their website that you shouldn’t query them with the same book, as everyone in the office has already seen your query if it had potential. It’s frustrating, but it’s the name of the game.

  
  

And why is it so hard to get a literary agent these days? Well, there are plenty of answers. Here are a few reasons why it’s so hard to get a literary agent:

• Agents have limited time they can devote to new clients. They already have a large client list, and the demands of managing those clients fills their days and often their evenings. They must negotiate deals for their authors’ books, handle any contracts that need executing, providing their authors with guidance in different areas of the publishing and writing process, pitching their authors’ works to acquisitions editors at publishing houses, selling foreign rights and movie rights, and more.

  
  

Watching and studying market trends. As mentioned above, there are certain genres that pull in the money. The sales from those books often supplement the other books on publishers’ lists. For example, you may have a bestselling novelist that’s guaranteed to sell to their readers and thus will pull in millions of dollars for the publisher. That allows that publisher to take on other authors who may not sell enough books to meet the advance(s) provided by the publisher to the author (through the literary agent, whose normal commission rate is usually 15% of the contract between the author and the publisher).

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• An Overwhelming amount of author submissions. If you think about the literary agent/agency world, there are a finite number of agents out there, a number that obviously fluctuates each year. Yet every day, there are thousands of more books and authors than agents, all of them trying to get an agent to represent their work. If all the agencies and agents were put together to form a sieve, the number of books and authors trying to get through that sieve would overflow the sieve and fall away into the void. It’s why I appreciate it when agents use QueryTracker. Agents, like it or not, have to focus on the books they believe they can sell/place with acquisitions editors. While it can be disheartening, publishing is a business, and as a business publishers (and agents/agencies) must do what’s right for the business, i.e., have products that sell. You may not like the fact that the books selling aren’t your cup of tea and perhaps beneath what you believe should be published, but your opinion doesn’t matter. Demand matters. And the demand for certain genres far outranks the demand for certain other genres. That drives what editors seek when going through their query letters.

  
  

• Agent Fit. Now, this particular issue isn’t due to anything related to modern day issues, though certainly it is affected by current demands. But literature is subjective. Agents, like readers, prefer certain types of writing. One agent may enjoy fantasy and speculative literature while another only reads romantasy, crime fiction, and nonfiction about politics. That’s why it’s always important to do your homework on each and every agent you query. Don’t blast out your query to any and every agent you find on Publisher’s Weekly’s website. If you do, you’re wasting not only the agent/agency’s time, but you’re also wasting your own time. Don’t do it. Be a professional. Do your research. If you’re into literary fiction, and your novel is literary fiction, only query agents seeking literary fiction. Sending your novel to someone who doesn’t read literary fiction tells that agent two things: you didn’t do your research, and you’re not a professional. Remember, you only get to make one first impression. And if you have a distinct name like I do, you want to make sure you’re always putting your best foot forward. The last thing you want to do is have an agent or agency delete your email the second they see your name.

  
  

• Ten million other reasons that may have nothing to do with your novel. Agents are people, just like you. They may love what they do, but they’re human. They get sick. They get stressed. They get overwhelmed. They have families, and sometimes those family members need them for any number of reasons. How many times have you focused strictly on one project at your job because it was higher priority than your other work? How many times have you had to take care of your ailing parents? Or one of your kids? Or were concerned about your industry and thus put your career stability and aspirations before other things on your plate? Well, the same applies to literary agents. This is why it’s important to not take things personally. Remember, there are plenty of bestselling authors out there who’ve been rejected hundreds of times. Yes, there are some who’ve won the literary lottery, where every agent who received their query wanted to represent their novel, and every publisher who read that author’s book wanted to buy it. But that’s not normally the case. All you can do is treat your writing and your querying as a job, and follow through on everything that’ll give you the best chance to be successful.

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Now, to the final, overarching question of what all of the above boils down to—whether or not it’s still worth it these days to query literary agents. So, the question is this: Is it worth it to query literary agents in 2026? Well, that depends on what you want to do. Do you just want to see your writing in print? If that’s the case, there are other options out there. You can self-publish on any number of platforms. You can pay a vanity publisher to publish your novel (which isn’t cheap). You can contact smaller publishers who accept books from writers who don’t have agents. You can enter contests. I’d recommend going to writing conferences where you can pitch to agents as well as smaller publishing houses, and where it’s possible to make contacts and network with others in the profession. Or . . .

You can query agents with the goal of having one of them offer to represent you and your novel. I have one novel published by a small press, three novels that I’m currently querying, and about six others in various states of the editing/rewriting process. I’m grateful my novel, THE LOSSES, was published by Midtown Publishing (which, it appears, no longer has a website). But my goal has always been to publish with one of the “Big 5” publishers or one of their imprints. Once that itch is scratched, we’ll see where my heart goes afterwards. But for now, follow your heart. It’s a tough industry, this writing business. But it’s my passion, and if it’s yours, always chase your goal and remember, professionalism goes a long way.

Below you can find the list of the Big 5 and all of their imprints, thanks to Ali Almossawi

https://almossawi.com/ 

MacMillan Publishing and It's Imprints

Penguin Random House and It's Imprints

Simon & Schuster and Hachette and Their Imprints

HarperCollins and Their Imprints

If you're ready to look for an agent, I recommend visiting https://querytracker.net/, signing up, and researching agencies and agents to see who you might consider sending a query letter to for your polished manuscript.

Cully Perlman is author of a novel, THE LOSSES. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com

Cully Perlman, author of THE LOSSES

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