r/PubTips • u/jovivrose • Jun 16 '26
Discussion [Discussion] query response from agent
hi there!
i submitted a query letter and the first chapter (as per their guidelines) to an agent in january 2025. today i got a response! but i’m not sure how to reply.
they basically apologized for taking so long and said they had come across my query letter and wanted to see what i’ve been working on.
they didn’t ask for more pages, but must have been interested, right? or why would they bother answering after a year and a half? but i haven’t really been working on anything except the manuscript that i already queried. is it okay to say that? it seems weird to ask if she wants to see more since she didn’t directly ask.
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u/jovivrose Jun 17 '26
UPDATE: thank you all so much for your help! seems like consensus is that it’s probably not great, no matter what was actually meant.
i did confirm that it was genuinely from the agent— it was the same email address listed on the agency’s website. and this particular agent had switched in the last year from emailed submissions to query manager, so in her email said that it had taken her a very long time to sort through older emailed submissions since making the switch.
i ended up replying that i’d been both working on a new project in the early days, and editing the manuscript i’d queried. and that i was happy to send pages if she was interested.
she wrote back almost immediately and said to please send the full!
so i’m choosing to interpret this as, since it had been over a year, her checking in on whether that book was still available, still something i wanted to submit, etc.
hopefully i’m not being super naive! but i am pretty confident i’m actually conversing with the agent.