Querying, Or How To Lose All Confidence In Your Manuscript

I'm not the most qualified person to be talking about the misery of querying. It only took two months from the day I sent my first query to the day I accepted an offer of representation. In retrospect, I spent practically no time querying.

What is querying, you may ask? It's when you beg agents to read your book send unsolicited samples of your writing to literary agents in the hope that they will offer to represent you to publishers. The query itself is a short summary/teaser, and most agents also ask for the first few pages of the story. You then hope and pray they'll request to read the whole thing--and if they do that, you hope and pray they'll fall in love and offer to represent the novel and be your best friend and teach you everything they know.

The unfortunate element here is that literary agents are notoriously swamped and therefore slow to respond. Slow as in, two months, three months... six months, ten months. First they have to get around to reading your query, then if they request more they have to get around to reading that. I've seen agents say they have 30, 50, 100+ manuscripts piled up waiting to be read. And let's not forget how many agencies employ a No Response Means No policy, which leaves you eternally wondering.

So the bottom line of query-land is it's a torturous limbo of long silences punctuated by rejection.

If the rejections explained more about the decision, maybe it wouldn't be so bad (or maybe it would be worse--hard to say). But the vast majority are simple form rejections along the lines of, "This wasn't a good fit for me, best of luck in your efforts." Which leaves you wondering... was the query not hooky enough? The pages not well written enough? Maybe an issue with word count, or how you described the genre, or how you addressed the agent? There's no way to know whether they liked it but didn't feel a spark, or totally hated it and think you're an absolute amateur.

Since I didn't spend that long in the query trenches, I spoke to someone who has. My friend Ashely Whitt described her experiences thusly:

When I received my first rejection I was almost smug about how little it affected me. I'd imagined the rejection would sting. I figured either I'd feel disappointed and insecure or righteous anger that might propel me into more aggressive querying. But what I felt, was nothing.

It was only months later, after the rejections started piling up, that I began to feel dejected. It was then I realized rejections aren't flesh wounds, they're dozens of tiny papercuts that added up over time start to feel like they're bleeding you dry.

That's the trouble. It's not one, or two, or ten rejections that make you lose confidence. It's sending your darling out in the world time and time again and having no one want it. Getting a few bites here and there that turn out to be nothing. At the end of the day, you don't know why, and I think that's where you have so much room to imagine possibilities, you're bound to start doubting your manuscript.

I've seen acquaintances querying well before they were ready, with unpolished prose or an awkward story arc. I've seen friends querying with excellent, gripping pages and a solid plot. And both types flounder in that same limbo. Both get form rejection after form rejection without explanation. When it's your manuscript, you don't know if it's the former or the latter. You have no clue how publishable the agents think your writing is or could be.

I've read that you shouldn't even think about getting discouraged until you've queried over 100 agents. That's a staggering number. I sent out to about 25, and that was bad enough. It seems the only thing you can do is keep reminding yourself of that fact, and be optimistic that the rejections are because you haven't found the right agent or publisher yet.

To avoid boring you with a gargantuan post length, I'll share the specifics of my personal journey in part 2. Tune in next time for the details of my experience querying.