Why 'manuscript wishlists' are a waste of your time.

[Bill]

Hey folks,

I've been following various 'manuscript wishlists' (MSWL's) for about 9 months now. I'm going to try to encapsulate the typical MSWL experience in a single post, so that none of you have to waste your time with them ever again.

Half of MSWL posts are authors misusing the tag or begging for an agent. That's right, around half of the posts tagged with the various MSWL hashtags are not agents. They're authors trying to pitch their book. That's actually the opposite of what a MSWL is for, and yet there it is.

A quarter of the posts are so vague, they're next to useless. These include such gems as: "Send me everything in this genre!" and "Looking for YA novels with heart!" and "Adaptations of Popular TV Shows pls." Things that are so entirely generic as to be useless as guidance which, one would think, is the entire point of a MSWL. That is, to get the idea of what agents specifically want.

The other quarter are treated like any other inquiry, no matter what the reply is. This means that any further questions about the 'wish' are usually ignored. It means that even if you have their dream manuscript in progress, it's not finished so don't bother them. It means that even if you had psychically guessed exactly what they wanted and had the manuscript ready, no added priority is given to your query.

A lot of these MSWL's seem to be, dare I say it, ego exercises. Offhanded remarks that are the equivalent of saying, "It would be funny if someone submitted this!" There's no actual client demand behind it. There was no careful market analysis saying that readers or publishers want this. At best they can be considered writers prompts. At worse, practical jokes.

If I ever saw a serious MSWL, where agents went: "I've asked my clients what they're looking for, and they said these are the kinds of books they want to publish in the next 6 to 12 months..." I would fall over and die. A manuscript wishlist containing market researched requests? Reader polling data? An analysis of successful genre pieces and the related gaps in the market? Say it ain't so Mr or Mrs agent!

But I'm sad to report, that just doesn't happen on most of these lists. Your time would be better spent cranking out an extra 500 or 1000 words a week on your current manuscripts. Otherwise you're wading through authors who can't or won't figure out what the hashtags are for, the most generic requests imaginable, and the of course what amounts to whimsical writing prompts.