A Querying Journey
You’ve finished your novel. The euphoria is almost overwhelming. You’ve done it. It’s made. You’ve done a spelling check and a grammar check and followed-through by cutting all your excess adverbs and searched the document for all the times you overused, “she feels,” or “it seemed.” And you say to yourself, “It is good.”
Then you begin to query.
The first five rejections feel like a light rainstorm. One of them sends you a link to a, “How to Query,” website. That one hits you right in the eye. You gather yourself and do another few edits. You send your novel to your critique group for the third time, just in case. They tell you it’s getting to the point where they can’t critique the same novel more than two times. You pull your novel back in, stare at it for a few sleepless nights, then tell yourself, “Fuck it.”
So you send another round of queries. The list of agents you’ve collected begins to grow to a number that feels like too many lines on a page. You personalize each query letter, except that one you sent to the wrong agent within the same agency (who was kind enough to forward it along) and that other agent you were really excited for but ended up copy-and-pasting the wrong personalized query into the email window too late at night and fell asleep as you hit the send button. The morning after feels like a hangover, the realization a deep, deep hole that you sit in for a morning and pretend to sprinkle the dirt over your face. You’re exhausted when you go to your day job. Staring into the distance becomes your new favorite hobby. Your acne has started to grow worse.
Everything kind of sucks.
You try to write a new novel, but it feels like scraping the bottom of the cookie tin and only finding crumbs for motivation. Then the replies start to pile in and you learn what the phrase, “form response,” means.
“Thank you for your query. Unfortunately, this is not quite the right fit for me.”
“Unfortunately, though, I just don't find myself feeling like I'm the right agent for this story…”
“Unfortunately, I’ve determined that I am not the appropriate agent to represent this material. In this very competitive market, I’m simply not enthusiastic enough about my ability to sell this work to offer representation.”
“This is not right for me, but thank you for the look.”
There are some glints of light in this hailstorm of unfortunatelies:
“Thank you so much for your query. Unfortunately, this project doesn’t sound right for me, but should you not find representation for it, I would be happy to consider a different one in the future.”
“Thank you so much for thinking of me for your project! I found your query and sample pages well-written with a strong concept. I have ultimately decided to step aside, but I think another agent is going to be intrigued enough to ask for the manuscript.”
“Thank you for your query! I so appreciate the opportunity to review your work, but I’m afraid that it’s just not the best fit for my list at this time. Don’t be discouraged, though. Publishing is a marathon, not a sprint, and you just need one person to catch that shared vision. Best of luck to you!”
In the moment, these rejections can feel painful. They can feel like someone shutting a door in your face. It is understandable to feel dejection, grief, or even anger at the missed opportunity. There are a few things to consider when facing the onslaught of new rejections:
1. Never walk into a hurricane when you could have taken the scenic route and enjoyed a light sprinkle instead.
What this means: Sending out mass queries in one hit is asking for a hurricane. If you send out personalized queries in rounds of 4-6 agents at a time, your querying timeline will take longer, but you’ll give yourself a chance to revise based on actual feedback before submitting for another round. Not only will this give time to let your novel mature, BUT you won’t have to deal with more than a few rejections at a time.
A personalized query letter will also nudge the agent to give you feedback in any rejection they might send, but it is always good to keep in mind that agents don’t get paid to read query letters or submitted pages. The least we as writers can do is show them that we have done our research and consider their donated time valuable.
(Not to mention that by taking your own time you’ll also be giving those rare full and partial requests time to marinate with the special agents who requested them.)
2. Always carry an umbrella.
Rejection is part of the process. It is important to remember that even if rejections are subjective, nothing in them is meant to be personal. If anything, we should take it as “This query was a star peg and that agent was a square hole. They just didn’t fit together.”
This is not a popular opinion among writers. We want everyone to want our novel. It’s why we wrote it. When we receive rejections, the knee-jerk reaction is to feel attacked, because it feels like all the work we did was for nothing, because someone didn’t like it the way we wanted them to.
Agents are not in a business to like things. They are in a business that puts their livelihoods on the line for a single person’s piece of art. So when they decide that the risk outweighs the reward, they will send out form rejections and every writer that receives one will take it far more personally than it was intended.
This is why I think writers should carry umbrellas. These umbrellas can be the people in our lives, the online friends we run to when things are difficult, or the way we take care of ourselves. It is of utmost importance to not let rejections drench our self-confidence because we are creators and we need to believe in ourselves to create strange and wondrous things.
After all, who are we to judge the sky for its patterns and change? We’re simply looking for clearer skies and we’ll walk through as many muddy valleys and climb as many mountains as it takes find them.
Over time, these rejections become markers in our email inboxes, their sting nothing more than a memory. You can look back and see, “Oh! This is just words.”
But it isn’t just words. It’s a badge of honor. Because, even if it tripped you up, you tried again. You didn’t let it change the way you hold yourself or your writing. Because an agent can never tell you that you are not a writer if you keep writing.