Is Your Book in Demand? The Top Genres That Land Agents

And the ones that are flat

Apr 14, 2025

"In God, we trust. All others must bring data." -W. Edwards Deming.

Lately, I’ve had publishing data on the brain. Not long ago, I looked at debut author deals at Publishers Marketplace, and two weeks ago, I broke down the bestsellers at USA TODAY. Both will be regular features at “Pitch Your Novel.”

This week I take a peek under the hood of Querytracker, a service I highly recommend and have used myself. It’s inexpensive ($25 a year), and it’s an effective way to keep track of who you’ve queried. It also serves as a search engine for agents and gives querying authors useful data on an agent’s response rate.

If you sign up for the newsletter, you’ll get updates on when an agent opens for submissions or if they make changes to their wish lists. You can also see which agents are most likely to respond and what their average response time is. Additionally, users provide commentary on their querying experiences.

When a writer gets an offer, they are invited to share the genre of their manuscript and the name of the offering agent. I decided to track that data from January 2025 to the present. Here’s what I found:

The three hottest genres include romance, fantasy, and horror. In romance, romantasy and rom-coms dominate. Dark fantasy is the most popular type of fantasy.

Mystery had a poor showing with only two manuscripts. That’s a little bit of a surprise since humorous caper/heist mysteries have been selling to editors. The absence of historical novels isn’t puzzling; several industry experts have said that retailors interest in historical novels—particularly WWII—has waned.

Sales at the London Book Show suggested an increased appetite for feel-good fiction, but the USA Today Bestselling list and the data below suggests that horror and dark fantasy continue to dominate over lighter fare. It’ll be interesting to see if that will change as this year wears on.

The thriller market looks like it’s cooling, and women’s fiction and sci-fi are soft. Gatekeepers still seek upmarket fiction, which is elevated writing combined with commercial pacing and plotting. Reese and Jenna picks are almost always upmarket.

Whenever I present publishing data, I like to remind authors to avoid writing to market. It can take months to land an agent, a year or more to get a publishing deal, and over a year for a book to hit the shelves. Three years from now will romantasy still dominate fiction? I kind of doubt it. What’s more, when writers sense a trend, agents find their inboxes overflowing with submissions of that genre.

So why pay attention to these deep dives on data? First, it helps to manage expectations. If you’re querying in a soft genre, it might take more time to land representation. Second, if you’re consistently being rejected, it’s possible it has nothing to do with your writing or pitch; it could be the unpopularity of your genre.

Finally, it can help you to make decisions about which publishing model to pursue. Some medium-sized publishers specialize in soft genres like mystery and they take unagented submissions. Some genres do well as indie books.

FURTHER READING: PUBLISHERS YOU CAN APPROACH WITHOUT AN AGENT.

Here’s the breakdown of the 150 agent offers:

55 Romance (Fantasy 20, contemporary 20, rom-com 12, 1 historical, 1 paranormal)

31 Fantasy (10 dark 3, high and the rest are unknown.

18 Horror

10 Literary

11 upmarket/book club

8 Thriller

5 Women’s Fiction

5 Sci-Fi

3 Book Club

2 Mystery

1 new adult

1 Contemporary

0 Historical

0 Chicklit

Getting an agent is the first hurdle, and it’s hard to know how many of these writers will go on to get a publishing deal, but it’s gotten more competitive. An editor used to get about 400 agent submissions each year, and now that number is closer to 600. Some say they get as many as 1200. Considering they can only acquire a handful of manuscripts, the odds of getting a deal are daunting.

But every once in a while, dreams come true. I read recent Querytracker success stories, and one author, Faith Gladwin, had a true Cinderella tale. The novel is described as “a gothic-tinged, adult speculative horror novel, with sapphic romance and chronic illness representation.

It was pitched as BLACK SWAN meets THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and it follows a group of elite ballerinas competing for the lead role with a prestigious company, on a retreat to a secluded manor. But the competition turns deadly as a string of freak accidents cuts through the dancers.”

Gladwin had been working on the novel a little under a year and it took only eight days for her to get an offer of representation. You can read her success story and query letter here.

SHORT TAKES ON QUERYMANAGER

Querytracker is for writers; Querymanager is for agents. You don’t have to be on Querytracker to submit your query through Querymanager.

Some agents only look at the one-sentence pitch on Querymanager. If it doesn’t resonate, they reject. That’s why it’s important to perfect your pitch.

FURTHER READING: LEARNING HOW TO PITCH

Querymanager keeps track of all your queries to a particular agency since 2007 when it was first launched but it doesn’t allow agents to see all the agents you’re querying. Agents can also set it up to prioritize certain genres or other attributes in a manuscript.

Querymanager makes it extremely easy for agents to manage queries and reject manuscripts. You can see how the process works here. If it’s so easy, why do agents often have a no-response means-no policy? It’s puzzling but I agree with the late, great Janet Reid who discusses why she responds to every query.

What are your thoughts?

Is Your Book in Demand? The Top Genres That Land Agents

And the ones that are flat

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