| Re: "Personal" question(s) to John Jarrold
The only statistic that's slightly surprising there, John, is your astonishingly high take up rate. I guessed it would be higher than average for two obvious reasons. Firstly, because a specialist agent will recieve far less submissions than a general "all genre" agent, and virtually all will be in his/her field of interest; and secondly, because you're still building up your stable of clients, and presumably haven't reached the point where you're working full time on them, and can only rarely add new ones. Which leads me to my question, which is, based on your experience so far, about how many clients do you think you could reasonably cope with (without taking on an assistant or partner). The Marco guess is about 50.
I'm not trying to frighten you SJAB, but the one in a thousand figure is often given by well established, general (all or most genre) agents. They know that they are passing over about ten publishable books for every one that they take up, but they're working full time and can't take more. |