Is the modern querying system a structural failure of role-bundling?
One thing I occasionally wonder about with the modern querying system: Is it actually fair to agents, or even a good use of their skill set, that they’ve effectively become the industry’s first-line slush pile screeners?
That wasn’t always the arrangement. Publishers historically handled the slush pile themselves, but over the 80s and 90s, as open submissions closed and editorial staffs shrank, that filtering function gradually shifted onto agents. The modern query system seems to have formalized around that shift without much consideration of whether agents were actually the best people to perform large-scale unsolicited manuscript triage.
In almost every other major commercial industry, product/IP development and filtering are strictly separated from B2B sales. Yet here, the job agents are usually best at is not the same job querying asks them to do. Agents excel at packaging and positioning projects, understanding editors and imprints, negotiating deals, managing careers, and generating competitive interest once a manuscript is already viable (Sales).
But accurately identifying which cold submissions represent the highest long-term literary or commercial potential from an overflowing inbox feels like a very different skill set; that feels closer to admissions screening, talent scouting at scale, or developmental editing (IP Selection).
Which makes me wonder whether some of the dysfunction in querying comes from the industry collapsing two very different functions into one role. Agents became both elite sales intermediaries and mass-volume gatekeepers. And as the submission volume exploded, the system naturally became fast, heuristic-driven, opaque, and overwhelmed.
Is it possible for publishing to ever separate these two jobs again? Or is forcing agents to act as the first-line filter just an inevitable reality of how traditional publishing handles its shrinking margins?