slog

Figured maybe people would be interested in a play by play of the querying process? Yes? No? Maybe? Too late, I suppose, by the time you’re reading this. At some point, I did threaten such a thing.

I am quite behind in my querying journey for Novel 2. “Behind”, in the sense that I’m dragging my feet because I just don’t wanna, not because I have any hard and fast external deadline to meet. There isn’t really a deadline when it comes to querying a novel, in my experience. You do it until you either run out of steam or potential agents to pitch to, whichever comes first. It is a painfully drawn out process from the jump. You can speedrun as many queries as you want as fast as you want, but most of those agents you submit to (the ones who actually respond to you, anyway, which is maybe 10%), will take weeks or months to get back to you, so by the time you finally get the letter (likely of rejection) your adrenaline will have long worn off, and you will receive said rejection with a somewhat deadened, muted sense of dismayed acquiescence. In a way, that’s preferable. Better than getting a hard No when you’ve barely had time to daydream about how much your life is definitely going to change for the better after this agent falls at your feet begging to represent you for free because she’s never read a better story, and also, she is now in love with you, and also, you no longer have to work that job that makes you a little money but a lot crazy, and also, you can finally afford that out-of-the-way house that no one even wants that you’ve been eyeing up for months on real estate dot com as the price has ticked down, down, down, and even at the lowest price you’ll probably ever get any kind of home, let alone a potential dream home, you just can’t afford it regardless, except for the fact that if you sell a book and your agent falls in love with you, you will now be a DINK with a book deal, so maybe, actually, you can, and everything will have been worth it.

Anyway. I write my blog posts in fits and starts. As I write this sentence, it is July 28th, and I just received another rejection email. What fortuitous timing. It was perfectly polite and encouraging: “I’ve reviewed your work, and I’m afraid I just don’t feel strongly enough to move forward, so I’m going to step aside.

As you know, this is an incredibly subjective business, and another agent may very well feel differently. I truly appreciate the opportunity to review your work, and I hope you find someone who is passionate about your project and confident in their ability to champion it. I wish you all the best, and thanks again for thinking of me.”

(Checking in from the future on July 30th: received another rejection email. Shall we? Many thanks for sending us your submission. I’m afraid to say, however, that it won’t be a project we’ll be pursuing. Unfortunately owing to time constraints, and the number of submissions we receive, we're unable to provide individual feedback.

Our business is subjective by nature and another agency may well feel differently – we wish you all the best with your writing.)

Despite the rejection(s), do you feel a little warm and fuzzy reading that (them)? Like, oh, it’s not the right fit for her, but she sure seems to believe it will be viable to someone!

Let me put it this way. It would be rude to call it a script. But, by this point, I have received a lot of these. Anyone who has tried to get a book published, I bet you have a couple of rejection notes very similar to mine. It is somewhat difficult to swallow the polite “no” when the unspoken follow-up to “I just don’t feel strongly enough to move forward” is “because I don’t think it will make me money”. You could say that about any business, I guess. Though it does feel different when it’s something I created, for free, and am offering to someone else, as opposed to, say, offering your services as a plumber to a client who says no. In that case, the plumber (presumably) hasn’t sunk hundreds of unpaid hours into this client beforehand, and there will always be another toilet to plunge. Sorry, plumbers, I know you do more than that. It’s just a bad metaphor.

Then again, what is an agent supposed to do? Of course she wants money. I want money for my book. She wants money for her job. If she thinks my book and her job are incompatible, then of course she’s going to say no thank you. Maybe it’s the artiface of it that annoys me so much. The farce and facsimile of politeness, when I would maybe rather a curt, “This won’t sell, which is why I’m not taking it on” straightforward response. When everyone is tooth-gratingly polite about their rejections, it does actually become harder to understand exactly why you’re not getting anywhere. I’m not asking for a full autopsy of the manuscript. But when I finally find the agent who tells me straight up my books aren’t worth money, that will be quite the day, indeed. Still a rejection, yes. But not one that could just as easily have been written by chatgpt.

Let’s get on to the actual process. First thing I do when I’m getting ready to send a query, aside from conceiving, planning, writing, editing, re-writing, and formatting the manuscript? Gotta know your audience. For Don’t Worry, I extensively made use of pw.org’s literary agents list, filtering by genre, although, as previously discussed, genre is slippery, and I have taken advantage of that lack of friction before. Permanently pinned to the corkboard of my mind is also the ever present existential dread of being Canadian. There are approximately thirty literary agents in Canada. There are approximately forty million people in Canada, and god knows how many of them are clogging up those scant literary agent channels with their manuscripts that are objectively worse than mine, because mine, of course, is very excellent.

Most literary agencies will take on international clients. Very few ever cop to the fact that this is something of a logistical nightmare and you better have an NYT #1 bestseller to shill for them to even deign a response. Maybe this is a complete conspiracy theory and I am only using it to justify my lack of success. But I have yet to be proven wrong. Why would a New York agent take me and my Canadian legal baggage on when she could so very easily find another manuscript that will sell better from her own backyard? Does that mean I have to be better than my American counterparts in order to get a seat at the table? Have I found myself in a twisted idpol version of women having to prove themselves to be better than men in order to be given the time of day in their professional lives, except in this scenario, the axis of oppression is hailing from the same land that so cruelly unleashed Ryan Reynolds onto the unsuspecting global population?

If so… maybe the discrimination is fair. That guy’s selling scrambled eggs for Tim Horton’s now. I do not look forward to meeting Ryan Reynolds at rock bottom. Unfortunately at this point, it seems I have little choice in the matter.

For Don’t Worry, I was scouring pw.org. Thankfully, that ended up being one of those passive income type deals where because I kept track of all my submissions in an Excel spreadsheet, I now have a handy reference for agents/agencies that, despite their across the board rejections the first go round, we are at least somewhat in alignment with the genres and types of stories we are interested in, giving me an easy starting point for Novel 2. When I first started querying Novel 2, I scrolled to the top of my Don’t Worry About It list, the earliest and most embarrassing submissions, and just started all over again. In publishing world, anyway, it’s not frowned upon to knock on the same door twice (so long as you have a new, different thing to shill).

There is still a small amount of admin (which often feels like an insurmountable amount) to taking that first step. Literary agents move around a lot, so I have occasionally had to chase an agent to another agency, or select a different agent from the original agency I was targeting and go from there. Honestly, though, it’s not like I remember any specific agents or their preferences, so the amount of work after that is basically the same, regardless if I have to select a different agent or not.

Which brings me to the next step. I’ve found an agent, or an agency. If it’s an agency, I toddle over to the About or Agents page, and skim every bio on there. By this point, I have something of a routine; anyone with a title of VP, President, Owner, Senior Agent, etc, I bypass. I’m looking for just Agent or Associate Agent or Junior Agent. I highly doubt I can trick anyone more savvy/with more experience into taking on one of my books. I also only query women, so I can cut out any male agents, although there are so few, at least in the genres I frequent, that specific task hardly registers.

Now that I’ve read all the bios, I have probably narrowed it down to a few. Sometimes it can be three or four. Sometimes it’s just the one agent I think is the right fit (or close enough to it). Most agencies don’t allow simultaneous submissions, or claim they share submissions between agents if they think one of their colleagues would be a better fit, so I do ultimately choose one agent. Sometimes I just have to read her bio. Sometimes she has a wishlist that links out to an external site that I will take a look at if I think I need something a little more substantive to sink my teeth into.

Substance in an agent bio is not important to me from a literary or moral standpoint; like any good cover letter when applying for a job, I’m scanning for information I can use to my advantage and include in my query letter to prove we’d be the right fit. I have copied full sentences from agent bios/wishlists and included it in my query letter to say, Hey, you said you’re looking for this specific thing in a story, and I just so happen to have written it! What a coincidence! Buy my manuscript! Read any guide to writing a good query letter and this advice is mentioned. What people tend to leave out is that, for anyone who has ever been on the hiring side of sifting through endless resumes and CVs, 90% of getting hired for anything less than a specialized position is a total crapshoot. It’s luck. Someone really needed to hire, and your resume was in the first five in the pile and proved any amount of sentience. Literary agents can probably afford to be a little more discerning, but at the same time, how many manuscripts do you think they’re shuffling through a day? Tens? Hundreds? Your eyes eventually start to glaze over no matter how picky you have the luxury of being.

Once I decide on an agency and an agent, I have to check that agency’s submission guidelines, which is usually a separate page. Some agencies allow agents to dictate their submission preferences, usually with some overarching rules. Some agencies have the same rules for every agent. Submissions are usually submitted via email or QueryTracker, although I have submitted through a few website forms as well. Some agencies want only query letters. Some agencies want those query letters submitted following their strict structural guidelines (meaning I have to take the time to adjust the query letter I’ve already written). Some agencies want the first five pages posted into the body of the email. Some agencies want the first three chapters attached as a Word doc. Sometimes you just post pages directly into the required field in QueryTracker.

Some agencies also want a synopsis, which is a brief overview of everything that happens in the novel. So, not really meant as marketing fluff (unlike the query letter), but a fairly detached play by play of the events of the novel, all the way to the end. Not a ton of agencies ask for this, but enough do that I wrote one out for Don’t Worry and also Novel 2. Another one of those tasks you thankfully only have to do once, but still, it takes time to scour your book and write out every plot point, then, being mindful that shorter is better, editing it down and down until you have something between 500-1000 words, and most places would probably say that’s still too long. With this exercise also comes the lovely realization that writing everything out so bloodlessly makes your novel sound like absolute shit.

Once I determine who I’m submitting to, what the submission requirements are, and which channel I’m submitting via, now is the time to customize my query letter (the amount of times I’ve prepped my submission as if I’m going to be emailing it when the agent actually only uses QueryTracker… Always check the submission method first!!!). To customize my query letter (using email as the example method here), I set up my subject line. Some agencies have requirements for this, others don’t. If they don’t, I just go for something straightforward with something like “Adult Fiction Query - [last name, first name] - TITLE” or “Fiction query for [agent name] - TITLE”. Then, I’ll copy and paste a query letter from a previous submission, changing the following; why I’m choosing this specific agent and the amount of material they wish to see. Then, I have to prep the material itself. I have a number of “most requested” page/chapter amounts saved as separate documents. However, sometimes I have to copy and paste the text directly into the body of the email from the Word doc, which doesn’t always play well, so sometimes I have to search my sent folder to find a pre-formatted version of the first ten pages or whatever. Then, I usually double check submission guidelines, fill out my own Excel sheet tracking my submissions, and… send.

And I get on with my life. For weeks. Or months. And then, one auspicious day and if the stars align, receive a response. And that response, up to this point, has always been a no, worded much like the friendly examples mentioned above. More often, there is no response at all, which is in fact a response, and that response is also a no.

Rinse and repeat. Ad infinitum. Each submission takes time. Each submission chips off one more tiny piece of my psyche, never to be recovered. Each rejection means one less agent out there I can pitch to, which means one more agent more likely that no one will take on this manuscript, and I will be left, again, without a path forward.

What can I say? It’s job hunting, but worse. Unlike job hunting, though, it doesn’t matter at all. The needle moves not at all when I get rejected. The only sacrifice being my time, skill, and sanity. At least it’s cheap. It doesn’t cost anything to submit.

Below is the query letter for Don’t Worry. This is not to be used as any kind of example or how-to, as this letter failed to serve its purpose; I remain agentless and without representation. I just thought people may find it interesting. Psychologically, it is. It’s amazing how many ways you can spin the same story. I did occasionally change the genre of Don’t Worry, made little tweaks to the letter here and there, but in general, here is what agents saw when they received queries for Don’t Worry About It:

Dear [Agent Name],

I am seeking representation for my book, DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT, the story of a lesbian celebrity’s sexploits in Hollywood and her unintentional journey toward unattainable autonomy. As an agent interested in [insert reasoning gleaned from agent bio/wishlist here], I believe this story could find a well-matched home with you. This novel takes a complex, unflattering look at how the world views women, and a complex, unflattering look at how women view each other and themselves. It is a novel about the damage women do to each other, and the lateral societal structures that encourage them. 

At a celebrity charity event, womanizer and Oscar-winning actress Wren Daley finally loses her cool. Harassed one too many times by a beloved young star, Wren socks him in front of a crowd including a notoriously unscrupulous paparazzi. Though the star goes sprawling, it is Wren that begins to tailspin as her agent devises a plan to rehabilitate her tarnished image. First, her privacy privileges are revoked. Wren is to become an outspoken, liberal celebrity, who, above all, believes that women should be allowed to choose (no matter that she is saying so against her will). Next, she gets a girlfriend who, in real life, is an inspiring influencer, dreadfully heterosexual, and in a long-term relationship with her high-school boyfriend who refuses to propose. Thrust into the spotlight after so many years of avoiding it, Wren’s too-cool-to-care exterior starts to crack, and the true pain and price of womanhood, femaleness, and lesbianism makes itself known, no matter how tightly she closes her eyes.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT is an adult novel of 110,000 words that combines lesbian erotica, literary fiction, and romance into thought-provoking social commentary. This novel is meant to titillate body and mind, exploring female and lesbian desire in a way few other mainstream works have. It is meant to be a challenging story, encouraging debate and word-of-mouth discourse. It will appeal to fans of With Teeth by Kristin Arnett and Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason.  

I have a [degree from university related to writing]. Since then, I have been writing personal stories and screenplays in my downtime, until deciding early last year to take up the mantle of writing a novel I fully believed was worthy of publication.

Please see below [or attached] for the first [however many chapters/words requested] of DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

If you recognize parts of this letter, it is likely because I repurposed much of it for the ao3 synopsis, so at least it ended up being good for something.

I obviously don’t have a ton of experience, but I think this is a fairly good query letter. Maybe most damning, I think it’s quite honest about the contents of the story. Surely, that’s good? Though “good” may just be a measurement of how sufficiently it has convinced an agent I’m worth her time. In that case, it was terrible. Regardless, the query letter for novel 2 follows this exact structure, because I am not convinced the query letter is what’s at fault. Of note: the comps for Don’t Worry? Never read ‘em. Someone else suggested them because I had no idea what to compare it to (everyone claims to want unique stories… but also… no they don’t! They want something similar to what has sold in the past). I have actually read the comps for novel 2. One of them, I think, isn’t bad. The other… maybe a stretch in terms of how it relates. Oh well. Did my best. It’s just sooooooooooooo hard being sooooooooo unique and different.

This is a long blog post where very little of substance was said. That’s fine. This was more for me than for you, if I’m being honest. A good old vent sesh. Fluffing myself up. Casting myself as the underdog hero in an utterly mundane and unimpressive drama. In fact, if you’re a writer who is trying to sell your manuscript, maybe don’t read this post at all. Ah, but this is the end of it, I’ve already done all my complaining. Sorry.

If nothing else, I agree with my many rejection letters that this is all subjective. It just takes one agent to think there’s something to it. I haven’t found her yet, but I also haven’t queried every agent in existence… yet. Despite the fact that I have good, real life reasons for dragging my feet on the querying (beyond just not wanting to, I swear), it is also… just hard. Even at my best, it is just hard. It’s emotionally difficult to set yourself up for what you already know is going to be overwhelming failure, with an absolutely miniscule chance of success that may never come to fruition at all.

I feel sad when I receive a rejection letter. But also, that is truly just how it is. Whether I like it or not. Whether I think it’s fair or not. Whether I think my unpublished writing holds more value than writing that has been published. It does not matter. This journey has been a lesson in thick skin and long conversations with myself about money, careers, and the value (or lack thereof) of art.

The best thing to come out of this process so far is that no matter the amount of rejections I receive, or lack of audience at all, even after posting a number of original works for free, I retain the belief that the stories I write are stories worth writing. I wouldn’t write them if they weren’t. I wouldn’t waste my time. No matter how sour my grapes or dollar-hungry I maybe unfairly cast literary agents as being, I’m proud of my un-published/self-published work. How could I not be? It’s not perfect. But it is interesting. And it is good. And I made something out of nothing. And I did it by myself. To both my benefit and my detriment, I write stories that are worth writing, not stories that are worth money.