A friend just sent me this quote from a literary agent:

Before the arrival of e-mail submissions, I used to receive perhaps one hundred queries a week. That was a lot of queries but it wasn't frankly unmanageable. The agency now receives more than twice that on a daily basis and it's becoming impossible to attend to much of anything else!  

I wonder how much of that is really due to email being easier – and cheaper - for writers to use (a lot, I suspect), how much a result of other changes in the publishing industry that tend to attract more would-be writers, and how much a result of her agency simply becoming better-known?

Still let’s compare:

Snail-mailed letter:

• 30 seconds: Receive envelope and direct it to the proper person.
  
• 20 seconds: Open envelope. Remove letter and SASE. Lay SASE aside.
  
• 30 seconds: Read query.
  
• 30 seconds: Stuff query back into SASE. Locate standard rejection letter or card. Put that into envelope too.
  
• 30 seconds: Send rejected SASE back to front office for adding to outgoing mail.
  

Total: 2 min, 20 seconds. (140 seconds)

Emailed letter:

• 1 second: Open email.
  
• 30 seconds: Read query.
  
• 3 seconds: Hit “reply” and then macro with rejection text.
  
• 1 second: Hit “send”.
  

Total: 35 seconds. 

Conclusion: The agent/staff can read queries four times as quickly using email as dealing with the mechanical/snail-mailed versions. 

What this all means is anyone's guess. An obvious route for overworked agencies is to hire more help. Most businesses, overwhelmed with work, would do so. But literary agencies seem reluctant to do that; agents may bitch about the workload but they also don't want to hand off that next bestseller to someone else in the office. They want the gold found buried within all the dross but want the dross to somehow magically go away and stop bothering them. 

I'm not unsympathetic. And I have noticed that some of my own queries to literary agents have come back rejected, not by the agents but by some intermediaries in their offices. Publishers used to have 'first readers' - usually young women on their first publishing job out of one of the Seven Sisters schools - whose job was to plow through the day's over-the-transom half-ton of paper, looking for the few items they would then place on an acquisition editor's desk for a further look. But publishers decided to save even those slave-labor costs and got rid of their first-readers and decided to accept queries only from literary agents, in effect turning the agents into unpaid first-readers. 

It was a clever idea for publishers and agents alike. At 9 a.m. the following morning literary agents raised their rates from 10  percent to 15 percent. But now all those queries, 90 percent or more (I'm being charitable, most agents would peg it at 99% or more) of which are unredeemable garbage, land on the agents' desks. And now they are starting to hire first-readers for themselves. 

I suppose that was inevitable.