WEBook’s Agent InBox: A Review

While I lean more toward surfing GoodReads, Facebook, Twitter, and my fellow reviewer’s sites on a regular basis more than all the other Creative Writing sites that have popped up recently, WEBook is one that I did sign up for this year but haven’t taken full advantage of due to lack of time and interest.  However, this site did launch an interesting program recently called Agent InBox.

This program gives authors the chance to create and upload a query letter, a short synopsis, a manuscript sample, and a brief biography. By choosing a genre, you are then given a list of agents who currently represent that type of work. You then choose which agents you want your letter and work sent to. It’s basically another glorified technique and attempt at getting to the top of the infamous slush pile.

I decided to give the program a test run mainly so I could report it to our readers here who might be contemplating the traditional publication route.

First, I was a little disappointed with the questions that are asked in the personal bio:

• Education
• Professional/Personal Overview
• Published Work
• Work History/Expertise
• Awards/Honors/Associations
• Other
• Additional Marketing Expertise/Platform

While you can choose to skip some of these sections and leave them blank, I felt most of these questions were a bit too much and not subjects that most agents ask you to include about yourself in a regular query letter. Sure, most want to know who you think your target audience is or what makes you qualified to write such work.  Awards and previous published work always help when you are tooting your horn.  But marketing expertise?  For me, it just goes to show that most traditional publishers these days are relying on the authors to invest in the marketing of their own books.  Something self-published authors already know about all too well.

Most agents tell you specifically what they expect in a query letter, and we are told to follow those specifications to a tee. So, it seems odd that the Agent InBox bio kind of forces more information onto the agents, and gives authors more space to sell themselves than a traditional one page query allows. While this program is automated, and you the author can choose what you want to answer, it still makes me think the program might be a turn off because the agents will receive either too much or too little information.

My next problem with the program came from the upload of the query and sample. The copy and paste option for authors who are using Microsoft Word is meant to limit unnecessary html problems, but still created odd spacing issues that someone like me with limited coding experience couldn’t fix.  So, I was a bit worried with how the overall presentation would turn out.  You have to upload a query letter for each agent you choose from your list.  The system puts in an automatic “Dear ______” for you, and assumes you’ll adapt your query letter to the specifications of each agent.

There’s a bio for each agent where you hope to learn what they are looking for, or at least to find tips about honing your letter for them. However, just as you would expect from a busy agent, most haven’t taken the time to fill out the information for you.  Instead, there are links to redirect you to their own websites where you are encouraged to go to learn more. Here, I found links that didn’t work, agents who were closed to submissions, and agents that didn’t accept genres that they were listed for on Agent InBox. So, you are suddenly back to searching agent sites and doing the homework for yourself, which you can do without the WEBook program anyway, and might as well since you’ve gone this far.

So, after uploading your information, you have to wait for WEBook to approve it.  I expected the absolute worst but received approval the following day and notification that my submission had been sent to the agents I chose. Supposedly, agents receive notification and have to sign into the InBox program to check their submissions as if they were emails.  They can pick and choose which parts of the submission they want to read, and they can also choose whether or not to reply.  Each time an agent opens the submission, WEBook sends you a notification that the status of the submission has changed.  Here’s a screen snapshot of the information I received.  I have removed the names of the agents:

I thought this part of the program was pretty nifty since you can actually see the date they opened the submission and what parts they read.  Like traditional querying, sometimes you get replies and sometimes you don’t.  The second from the top opened it but didn’t reject it. Sometimes agents don’t read past the first sentence, as seen in the second from the bottom who didn’t get past the short synopsis (My synopsis was three sentences and less than 40 words). I appreciated those who gave explanations, even though they are pretty cookie cutter. But so is the traditional querying route, isn’t it?

So, in the end, I wasn’t overly impressed with the program, but didn’t find it to be any different from the traditional query letter/email process.  I still sweated bullets over trying to cater my uploads to each specific agent, and still cursed at the lack of information provided and worried over if I was providing too much information or not. And when it was all said and done, I sighed with relief and still found myself lost and blind in a query snowstorm.