The Absence of Yes: Why Agents Don’t Answer Your Email

By Di Brown

I’m querying a memoir.

Is there any single sentence in a writer’s life that is as debilitating, exhilarating, and soul-crushing?

Got a gut-wrenching story that took a decade to live, two to recover from, and five years to write? Summarize it in two to three paragraphs. Synopsis. Outline. Show the arc. Outline your platform. Demonstrate the market. Do it really well and an agent might glance at the first ten pages. Or not.

In most cases, I’ll never know. Because agents ...