How Tight is Publishing?

I hear a lot about publishing being really tight right now - meaning it's extremely hard to break into and get published. Mostly, I don't think about this because I have exactly no control over the market, just over what I write.

But I saw this post by Lori Perkins recently and I thought this must be part of the so called tightness people are talking about. Lori is an agent who has been working for about 20 years, and she says that 20 years ago, she got about 2000-3000 queries a year. Now she gets 30,000. She attributes this to the computer and word processing, her theory being that 20 years ago, there just weren't that many people who could type well enough to complete an 80,000 word novel. I think that having 10x the manuscripts out there must contribute to the difficulty to get to market (if it truly is harder today than decades ago, which I'm not conceding yet). Simple supply and demand.

And it makes me wonder if I'd have typed out an 80,000 word novel. I tend to think I would have, because I wrote plenty on my word processor with it's 8 line display, and before that, I wrote long hand and then typed it up later. It was part of my editing process. (OK, I was 14, so I'm reaching here, but I did use it as an opportunity to revise).

It also makes me wonder how much the process of typing or writing longhand affects the actual manuscript. On the one hand, it's much easier to revise, so possibly books go through more revisions now. On the other hand, I know that when I wrote long hand, I wrote much more slowly and thoughtfully and didn't rely as much on revision. Not that I plan to go back. I love my keyboard. ;)