Note from Aimee: The author of the following post had me weeping by the end of this poignant, perfectly timed piece. Another #PitchWars alum, the story is one that obviously strikes close to home for me personally but in today’s climate speaks loudly for us all and is a perspective I have yet to host here: a return to the trenches. That said, I do want to note (with the author’s permission) that the agency and agent discussed are not those being discussed at present.
Content/Trigger Warnings: Signing with an agent, agent ghosting, long-term querying (no stats specifically discussed)
An Almost-Darling
By: Anonymous
The beginning was thrilling enough that I thought I might be a darling.
I got into Pitch Wars with the book that was supposed to be my second attempt at querying. Thanks to a whirlwind showcase, I had an offer of rep before I’d sent a single cold query. The agent was a perfect fit—personable and enthusiastic, with a history of sales at a reputable agency. I had no doubts when I signed. Crank up the Hilary Duff, baby, because this is what dreams are made of.
We worked through revisions, made the book shine, and had one close call with an editor. But ultimately, sub went how it goes for most authors: a slow death for a desperately loved story.
Fortunately, my agent and I had picked my next project early, and I’d already sent them the revised draft. I received no response for a couple months. Worry pricked the back of my mind. Were they as enthusiastic about the idea as they’d been before? We had an encouraging check-in, followed by a few more months of silence.
I realized I was decidedly Not The Darling when I received a form letter from the agency, letting me know I’d been dropped. I had moved earlier that year, and because they didn’t confirm my address, the letter took over a month to reach me. My agent hadn’t even signed it.
I don’t know what publishing has in store for me, but I do know, without a doubt, nothing will be more shocking or humiliating than emailing to ask if it had been a clerical error, or if that was really how the only professional in my corner had chosen to part ways.
It wasn’t an error. The agent had decided not to represent my genre anymore, and I never would have gotten an explanation if I hadn’t requested one.
Several agent-siblings and I were dumped back into the querying trenches with nothing to show for our years of professional partnership. Just one little line at the end of the query. I was represented, but we parted ways amicably. Because you had to say it was amicable, or people might think you were the problem.
Months turned to years as I tried to recover emotionally and creatively from what happened. I queried another book. And another. And another.
I used to think even if publishing wasn’t a meritocracy, there was an element of forward motion. That one day, if I took my writing seriously, I could look back at the starting line, and it would be just a pinpoint in the distance. I don’t believe that anymore.
Sometimes I wonder why I keep trying to get published, and I haven’t been able to come up with a good answer, really. Most of the time, I have no idea if I’ll ever get a book deal. The vast majority of people don’t.
But I think somewhere deep, deep down I’m cupping my hands around a flickering candle of hope that after all this, I could still be the exception. I could be the one who gets the deal, and everything else she’s ever dreamed of. A decades-in-the-making darling.
Note from Aimee: This next author is a friend of mine I think many of you will know well. Before we were friends, she was a sort of inspiration for me, someone I actually thought was perhaps too big of a name in the writing community to even approach. Lucky me, she’s a normal person and doesn’t think that of herself and a friendship bloomed out of my first early awkward star struck days. Her querying journey has been long, her pain clear but professional. When she told me she was brainstorming a piece for this blog, I was honored beyond words. That I get to share it with you all now brings me joy and sadness. I love this series so much because I am so glad to know what it’s brought people, but seeing friends and peers here makes my heart ache because because as much as hosting this blogs makes me happy, what would make me happier would be to close it because every talented person hosted here (or reading here) got their happily ever after. And that sentiment rings harder than ever for the following author.
Content/Trigger Warnings: Brief mention of panic/anxiety.
Haven’t I always been giving up?
By: Kyra Nelson (Follow Kyra on Twitter @KyraMNelson)
I had a panic attack on Halloween.
I had gone to a party, telling myself that I’d leave early enough to get a jump start on my NaNoWriMo novel, but like Cinderella, I was having too much fun to be home by the stroke of midnight. By that point, I was rounding out ten years of being stuck at the querying stage, with the past several years being a special kind of hell.
The only way out of query hell was by writing through it, as I was constantly reminded by the onslaught of agent and book announcements that allowed me to watch author after author race past me. And I was (am) so desperate to escape this querying purgatory that I struggled to allow myself to do anything that wasn’t in service of that goal, even if it was celebrating my favorite holiday.
It is very hard to let yourself slow down when you only ever feel like you’re falling behind.
For a little context, the book that spurred my Halloween panic attack was the 19th I’d written. I’ve finished another since then for a nice even 20 completed manuscripts. Five of those I have queried. On paper, I have done everything right. I got beta readers, excellent ones. I went to conferences. I read craft books. I read hundreds of books in the genre I was writing. I networked. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.
I made writing my whole life.
It wasn’t enough.
People assure me it will be worth it, but the longer I am here the less I can imagine anything would be worth all this.
People also tell me I should be proud because I haven’t given up, but the truth is I have given up. I have given up so much.
Because my time is finite, spending it on writing always means I’m giving up something else. For instance, giving up a Halloween party. Even if I wasn’t giving up the time to be there physically, I certainly was giving up my joy in it.
There are so many things I have given up in the pursuit of publication. That party. Other parties. Sleep. Time with friends. Non-writing hobbies. Peace of mind.
While I knew I was making sacrifices, I don’t think I realized the extent of it until the past couple months. In February, I finished the draft of my twentieth manuscript and began what I thought would be a routine short break.
I haven’t written since. I haven’t wanted to.
For someone who has become accustomed to churning out multiple books a year, a two-month hiatus is pretty drastic. I have done so much with that time though. I’ve been spending more time with friends and family. I actually feel like I have time to pursue a romantic relationship. I’m spending my evenings actually unwinding by playing video games and watching the shows everyone is talking about. I’m more on top of chores and errands than I ever have been. I’ve picked up some new hobbies, like watching baseball and venting creative energy through a TTRPG.
I wasn’t doing any of this stuff, or at least not doing it regularly, when I was giving all my time to writing.
Mostly, I like feeling like my time is mine and not something I owe the fickle gods of publishing. I like ending my work day and not feeling like I have to start another shift.
I don’t know when, or frankly if, I’ll get back to writing regularly. Sometimes I’m haunted by the idea that I have already given so much up for nothing. But I think I’m more afraid of giving up my future with no promises anything will come of it.
While I don’t think I’m quitting writing permanently, it’s nice realizing that whatever writing I do give up will be replaced with another little piece of life for me to enjoy.
The truth is, I have always given up.
I’m finally reclaiming my ability to choose what I give up.
Bio: Kyra is a writer, editor, and recovering academic. During her linguistics graduate program, she studied children’s literature, query letters, and narrative nonfiction.Follow Kyra on Twitter @KyraMNelson or learn more about her at her website: www.kyramnelson.com.
Note from Aimee: This next Not the Darling submission comes from an author with a heartbreaking and poignant tale of not only querying but what it’s like to pour your soul into your art when darkness is coming for you. In the age of the pandemic, so many of us were burned out, and it affected the querying landscape like nothing else I can ever remember. It affected a different population in other ways, deeper ways, I would argue. This author is among that population: the COVID first line responders. I hope you’ll appreciate their story, the emotion behind it, and the bravery in telling it as much as I did.
Trigger/Content Warnings: COVID pandemic descriptions (including in a hospital setting), actual death on page, discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation, query statistics.
“But since something of my soul is in the thing…”
By: Anonymous
I write this on the day my hospital has made masking completely optional for staff, for patients, for visitors, for everyone. Why is this a meaningful day for me? Because I’ve worked as a provider for the entirety of the COVID pandemic to date. I say to date because I do not see it as over. Perhaps, in a way, for me it never will be. Perhaps to me the removal of masks within the hospitals is symbolic of how little what I and my coworkers did mattered to society, to my country, to anyone but our patients.
Why do I bring this up on a blog post about querying? To answer that question we must go back to the beginning of the Delta wave of COVID in late 2021. I had transitioned out of the Emergency Department (“ED”) to work inpatient medicine, and found myself immersed in the dead and dying. The ED was a place that wore its COVID exposure like a badge of honor, but few people died of COVID there. They came to the floor and lingered, and suffered, and finally succumbed to the virus, and I cared for them until the end, along with a host of over-worked, incredible, forgotten healthcare providers.
For me writing often seems to come from a place of darkness. When the world is hideous and unbearable, writing is my refuge. So I wrote. From my dresser drawer I took a book whose first draft I had written originally in similar dark times, years before, dusted it off, and rewrote it. My nights were filled with the sobs of family members through the phone when I woke them to say that despite everything we had done, their family member was actively dying. There were always two options: we could escalate things and send their loved one to the ICU, so that they could endure a more prolonged and torturous death; or we could change course, let them stop fighting, and keep them comfortable in their final hours or days. More often hours than days by the time we were having this conversation. Sometimes minutes.
With my nights embalmed in this horror, I wrote during the day, pouring my soul into those pages, finding an escape from the real-life darkness in the make-believe darkness of my characters. It was not that I had not known tragedy before, I had. As an EMT and then a paramedic for ten years I had worked in some of the most poverty-stricken places in the US, Guatemala, and Mexico. I had struggled to save men, women, and children injured by the most heinous mechanisms. But this was different. This was a more helpless feeling than in all those other horrors I had witnessed. The world was coming alive outside the hospital, insistent on going to sports events, reopening the clubs, getting back to their friends, and parties, without a thought to the thousands that were still dying every day in hospitals around the country. It was a loneliness that felt like madness. Here I was within the dying halls, while out there the world ignored the toll exacted by their merriment. COVID was already over for those not embroiled in it. On the radio on my way to work I listened to men and women of every political persuasion whining about the hardship of their long pandemic confinements, and rejoicing as they were set free at last to wreak havoc and mortality upon the vulnerable.
They say in writing and pursuing traditional publishing that you shouldn’t take it personally. But writers don’t write from a vacuum. Like every other artist, we create our work from our hearts, our passions, our souls, our suffering, and our aching love for life, even with all its pain. How can it not be personal?
John Kennedy Toole was an author who wrote because he had to, because it was an escape from the darkness within, the darkness that was consuming him. He was rejected, repeatedly. Once he wrote of why he had to keep looking for a publisher: “I haven’t been able to look at the manuscript since I got it back, but since something of my soul is in the thing, I can’t let it rot without trying.” Eventually Toole committed suicide at the age of 31, in part due to the rejections he experienced, in part because his darkness at last engulfed him. His mother managed to find a publisher for his work and he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.
Like Toole, something of my soul is in my work, and the reviews from the beta readers were glowing and wildly enthusiastic. So I could not let it rot, and, after extensive editing, I queried it. I queried more than a hundred agents. Why so many? Because I struggled in determining what my genre was which made it difficult to pin down who to submit to. It had a historical setting, some fantastical–though non-magical–elements, some thriller elements, and some action-adventure elements. I had eleven full requests, a wildly diverse set of agents in terms of what they represent, including some who specialize in romance, some who specialize in thriller, some who specialize in action-adventure, and some who specialize in fantasy.
Not a single full or partial rejection mentioned the writing quality. A couple felt they couldn’t connect with one of the main characters, which, to be honest, I would have been deeply concerned if they could. Most mentioned marketing concerns. One felt it was too long for a thriller. One felt that because they were busy and were, at times, able to set the book down to do the many other things competing for their attention that meant they probably did not have the deep, overwhelming passion that they needed to represent the book. I’m not kidding. That last one was a real rejection that came in a wild, frantic, unprofessional email, a wall of stream-of-consciousness, inane, and chaotic text. Interestingly, this last rejecting agent represents an almost entirely white male list and my name is clearly Latina. That name is literally all that agent knew about me. It is neither here nor there, but I mention this only because it struck me. I had previously not put much credence in the notion that racism factored into agent rejections. Call me blind, but at least in the US agents seemed obsessed with finding writers of particular niche ethnicities and identities to virtue-signal their magnanimity and the holiness of their white-saviorhood. As if people of color were exotic butterflies they could catch and pin to their corkboard collection.
The world of querying podcasts, workshops, twitter, discords, writing critique groups, reddit, all echoed the same toxic positivity at me as I kept querying. They said: “it only takes one yes,” “onward and upward,” “you just haven’t found the right agent yet,” “I was in your shoes exactly 3 years ago and now I’ve got an agent,” “just keep going,” “that’s just one agent closer to the one who’s going to love your book,” “just write the next thing and query that,” “that’s not what the market wants right now, just write something marketable.” All of these and thousands more quips encourage damaged people to keep playing a game in which their odds of success are truly abysmal and based more on luck than any other single factor.
The positivity eventually burned me out. It came at me from all sides, but it didn’t ring true. The lottery-like odds of publishing success had been laid bare to all the world by the PRH/Simon & Schuster trial. This was not an industry based on any sure science. The market was a fickle creature that even publishing executives didn’t understand. Their method, more often than not, seemed to be to pick a number of books based on what they thought people might be into, throw them at the wall, and see what stuck.
The constant, draining affirmations I was reading were the same kind of false sunshine that was blown up my ass working at a family-owned McDonald’s franchise as a youngster. Working at McDonald’s sucks, no matter how much you try to pretend it doesn’t. You can put all the powdered sugar in the world on a turd, it’s still going to be shit underneath when you bite into it. Similarly, you can query and query and query and query and never get that mythical ‘yes’. You can write and edit the next book (and I did) and query that one, but it’s also “not what the market is looking for.”
After hearing how people slog on sub when they are accepted by an agent, and after witnessing endless bizarre and sometimes toxic interactions on the internet, I’m not sure that literary agents or publishers know what “the market” wants. And that’s ok. But I would appreciate it if everyone in the publishing industry quit pretending and admitted that they have no idea what people want to read. I would appreciate it if just one agent came out and said that something that might have tempted them yesterday at 10 AM when they had a full night’s rest and got good news about Fido’s biopsy, just didn’t hit their sweet spot today at 4 PM because they didn’t have their usual 8:17AM bowel movement and they just got some bad news about their Aunt Lithadora’s mammogram.
I had a birthday recently, and I realized there was only one gift I wanted to give myself. I wanted to stop querying. I wanted to stop putting this work out there to agents and getting their thoughtless form rejections. I owed it to myself to stop making myself hurt. I’ve been through enough in the last few years and life is short. But I do still believe that my work is marketable, based on the feedback of beta readers, strangers on the internet who owed me nothing but still adored the world I created and my realistically irrational characters.
I am writing this to encourage you to consider quitting as well. Has this querying journey been ugly and bleak for you? Has it made you ponder suicide like John Kennedy Toole? Don’t do it. Your life, and your work matter. You don’t have to keep going. You don’t have to keep putting yourself through this. You don’t have to play this lottery. There are other options. You could self-publish, you could just give the book to friends and family that express interest, or publish to Wattpad or Royal Road to find readers that will love your work. You can even write fanfiction if you like. There are many lovely fanfic readers out there who will enjoy your work and celebrate your prose, your story, and your delightful characters. I’m here to tell you that what you wrote is incredible, and I’m glad you did it, and I’m proud of you, and you should be proud of yourself too.
Gratitude. That has been the saving grace for me, the rope I used to climb out of a bitter, cynical hole. During the Delta wave, I chose to be grateful that I had that brief chance to know and care for so many people in the last days of their lives. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to meet them before they passed, and to care for their families in their passing. I looked upon my patients in those final moments and saw that they were people, that they existed, and that they mattered. Everyone of them mattered, whether or not they had written a great manuscript that got an agent and a publishing deal. They mattered because they were human, and they had lived, and it was beautiful, and I, though I didn’t deserve it, got that chance to meet them, in all their humanity, their beautiful humanity.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the years working in the hospital, it’s that my writing matters to me, but no one lives or dies if it isn’t published by some suit in an office in New York that doesn’t care what inspired it. I’ve learned not to take my writing seriously, in a good way. I’ve learned that this is a delightful hobby, that produces work that some people will enjoy, and some won’t, like any art. But no one lives or dies because this book was or wasn’t published. It’s at my job where people’s lives are at stake, and my writing will never matter as much as those lives and those families. My book will never matter as much as all the ghosts that haunt me now as I walk the halls of the hospital and see the maskless faces of nescient people peering from those same rooms where I bore witness to so many deaths. Will I keep writing? Of course. Though I said no lives are at stake, I think sometimes that mine is if I don’t keep telling these stories. But my acceptance by some random literary agent is not what gives my life or even my writing value and meaning.
Whether or not you quit querying too, I would encourage you to choose gratitude. Gratitude that you were able to write your work, gratitude for your skill, your knowledge, even gratitude for the ugliness and suffering you may have endured that led you to write what you did. Gratitude that you didn’t die alone on the tenth floor of a hospital during the pandemic and you get to keep writing. Choose gratitude. But don’t choose to torture yourself, and if querying is torture, choose to free yourself from it. Reread the glowing praise you got from that beta reader. Laminate it. Make a bookmark out of it. Put it in a locket and carry it around your neck. Know that your work resonated with someone out there and that is a beautiful thing. Marinate in their validation of your art. You deserve it.
Note from Aimee: Today’s post struck me right from the title. Why not me? I don’t know how many times I asked that question through my querying journey. Every time I read a published book, every time I saw an announcement, every time there was a full request announced. Happy for them. But why not me? This next post addresses that very question I believe so many of us have grappled with, and I’m so honored to have it here.
Content/Trigger Warnings: Minor mention of querying stats; mention of C-PTSD and related trauma (religious); mention of parental homophobia; RSD
Why Not Me?
By: Anonymous
I’ve been in the query trenches for three years.
To some, that’s nothing. A drop in the bucket. To others, it’s an unimaginable eternity.
My first book (YA urban fantasy) was sent to 101 agents. I received 3 requests and 100 rejections. Technically, I still have a full pending an answer.
The overwhelming feedback?
Nothing.
I entered every contest I could toss my hat into the ring for. On more than one occasion, they requested additional material.
The feedback?
Nothing.
The only personalized feedback I received (from two agents independently, and I adore them for taking the time) was that the writing was great, query was strong, but the concept wasn’t new enough.
And here’s a secret for you…
I don’t write new concepts.
I am a traumatized, C-PTSD-having, ADHD-fueled, mentally ill, perfectionist, queer mess.
And all I want in the world is to write stories for people like me. Even the familiar ones. Especially the familiar ones.
So, with my next book, I changed tactics. I laid out my marginalizations so my ‘new take on an old trope’ would be more marketable.
Yes, it’s a concept you’ve seen before, but it’s sapphic. Why does this story matter? Well, you see, I’m functioning from a base of 18 years of religious trauma. Would you like to know what my preacher was arrested for (unrelated to me and my C-PTSD, thank the spaghetti monster in the sky)? Shall I list my dead relatives? My abuses and traumas? My journey of self-discovery that resulted in a very mellow coming out at 27?
The sixteen page Facebook message from a family member the day after describing exactly how I’ll burn in hell? My father’s awkward silence and refusal to acknowledge my identity? My mother’s gentle, ‘Okay, that’s fine, but you can’t tell anyone’?
Would you like me to tally my scars, mental and physical, so you can weigh them against my content and see if my story (and therefore I) am ‘different’ enough? Unique enough?
If I describe myself as ‘neurodivergent,’ is that enough? Will you assume I’m autistic? Will you assume I’m mentally damaged and can’t handle the pressure? Will you show compassion? Or will you reject me out of hand assuming I’m difficult?
If I claim that my work is sapphic, is that enough? It isn’t a romance. Not a traditional one. Should I tell you why? Show you my deep mental and emotional scars that have led to writing emotional intimacy without the physical?
Or is that ‘desexualizing WLW’ and unacceptable?
In the span of two weeks, I witnessed two literary agents talk about rejecting a YA fantasy because ‘we’ve seen this concept before.’
Like me, they were rejecting authors that weren’t writing something different enough.
The feedback on this latest manuscript (again, YA fantasy)? Great writing. Fantastic worldbuilding. *Chef’s kiss* voice.
And a concept we’ve seen before.
I received my first full request so fast it made my head spin. I dared to hope that flaying myself alive was finally getting me in the door. Making an agent take notice of something the same, but different.
And since that request, nothing but form rejection… after form rejection… after form rejection.
Agents are busy. Their time is valuable. They owe me nothing as a querying author. I know and accept all of this.
But the form I receive for ‘too queer’ is the same form I receive for ‘not queer enough’ is the same form I receive for ‘terrible writing’ is the same form I receive for ‘great writing, but a concept we’ve seen before.
What’s wrong with a twist on a concept we’ve seen before?
Why isn’t there space for an urban fantasy starring an ambitious-as-hell girl who can’t connect to other people? Her journey discovering that she can open up without losing herself is valuable. Her choice to turn away from ambition for the sake of people who finally gave her a home is valuable.
Why isn’t there space for a fantasy set in a world where ancient religions are the norm, with all their humor and all their horror? That run-of-the-mill teen’s story is important. Her friends who are devout and questioning and set against the gods and kind and cruel in every combination are important. Her discovery that a system can be horrible to the point of evil and still contain good people, that destroying that system may destroy some of those good people, matters. Her quiet questioning matters. She matters.
The next story I write? That will matter, too.
Duty versus love. The trauma-driven need to protect oneself versus protecting a person who is open and honest and kind. Fighting like hell for something as a neurodivergent person, achieving the same and better than competing neurotypical people, and being betrayed by those people. The choice to burn that world down. Whimsy and humor and boredom and trauma and dissociation and self-discovery.
They matter.
And when I have to reveal intimate aspects of myself with every query to answer the question ‘Why are you the person to write this story?’ when I constantly have to lay myself bare to get a foot in the door, the old advice rings hollow.
‘They aren’t rejecting you; they’re rejecting the story.’
Not anymore. Not when every story’s theme must have roots in my trauma, my marginalization, my life.
I don’t have an answer.
I’m not angry with agents, or even with the system. A form rejection is certainly better than no response. I’m grateful there’s an emphasis on marginalized voices, even if the implementation is sometimes dicey. There are thousands of wonderful writers with millions of beautiful stories all trying desperately to gain representation.
I’m proud of the stories I’ve written. Whether or not they’re important to publishing, they’re important to me.
So I’ll keep writing. I’ll cut myself open to carefully display the traumas that ‘allow’ me to write my stories in the hope that some agent will see and decide that I am enough.
That my queerness is enough. My neurodivergence is enough. My trauma and mental health issues are enough.
Note from Aimee: My fellow 2021 Pitch Wars alum brings this heavy-hitting post on so many topics that could have been penned by me it aches. Nothing is a guarantee in this business, but damn if there aren’t so many clever ways into making us believe there are ways to be the exception to that rule. Thank you to Astra for shining a light on dark nights…
Content/Trigger Warnings: Mention of death in the family; RSD; query statistics
The Long Dark Night of Pitch Wars
By: Astra Crompton (Follow Astra on Twitter @ulzaorith)
I was a Pitch Wars 2021/2022 mentee. When I was accepted, my hope soared. I thought: This is it; I’ve finally gotten my chance! Little did I know that my class was to be the last Pitch Wars class ever and that, through spectacularly bad timing, my book (and my writing) would be dead in the water for over a year.
How did I Get Here?
I’ve had, like many writers, a meandering journey towards traditional publishing. I started self-publishing ashcans (hand-drawn picture books and graphic novels that my parents helped me print off at a local print shop) as a tween. By the time I was fifteen, I had written my first overly ambitious epic fantasy novel (we’ll come back to that), which I printed and mailed in SASEs (self-addressed stamped envelopes) to agents in New York. This was before things like Query Tracker existed and everything was still, mostly, done in hard copy. I got nothing but rejections to my first batch of ten queries, but I figured, I was young yet.
Being brash, and with the advent of print-on-demand self-publishing, I leapt at the chance for creative control and spent a decade self-publishing a series of “unmarketable” dream projects. Some of which I’m still very proud of—even if I’d do things differently now.
By 2018, I decided to return to traditional publishing. A vast array of tools had cropped up since the old SASE days: the Twitter writing community, pitching events, Query Tracker, and mentorships like Pitch Wars. I learned hard and fast all the things I’d done wrong in the past. At first, I thought: “That’s why I failed! My querying skills, my knowledge of the market, and—yes—my storytelling skills were all lacking. But the idea!—surely my ideas weren’t the problem.”
After a brief (but statistically decent) stint trying to query my old epic fantasy, I pulled it from the trenches. I had already written all three books in its trilogy, and I’d spent a Tolkeinesque amount of time in that world: creating maps, conlangs, thousands of years of history, different original species, flora and fauna, recipes, myths, and even a home-grown tabletop RPG . . . It wasn’t right for the TradPub world. I would be too precious about it. To have any hope of getting picked up by an agent, I needed to write something more flexible, relevant, and marketable. But the other advice I saw everywhere was: write what you know.
Not ready to abandon my epic fantasy world, I zoomed into a specific corner of that map, to a more humanoid population and a more accessible culture. I shrank the scope of the story down to something more digestible, too: a genderqueer love story following a soft protagonist who struggles against gendered expectations, societal pressures, and an overbearing mother to come to terms with her own bisexuality and stand up for the love of her life—risking jail and ostracism in the process. It had a lot of me in it. It was the book teenaged me needed and never found. It felt relevant and accessible and meaningful. It was the book of my heart; I believed in it. I queried that book for almost two years. I entered it into mentorships: Pitch Wars and Author Mentor Match.
Guess what? No one loved that book aside from me. Readers didn’t get what I was trying to say. Some of them loved the front half but didn’t like the turning point. Others found the front half stifling but loved the more magical second half. Everyone loved the love interest, but no one loved my protagonist—the one based on myself.
The truth was, writing a “book of my heart” exposed me to rejection in ways I hadn’t previously considered. This wasn’t just a rejection of everything that was important to me, but every comment of “not relatable,” “couldn’t root for her relationship,” and “unrealistic portrayal of sapphic love” felt like a personal attack. How I loved wasn’t valid. I wasn’t relatable. It was around this time that I was diagnosed with ADHD. Add that to being genderqueer and asexual, and I fully felt that there was no space for a voice like mine in this industry. I was too weird, too niche, too other to have a market.
So, for my next book, I decided to break pattern with everything I loved . . . or, nearly everything. I wrote a book entirely trying to be “marketable.” I wouldn’t abandon my principles at the door, so my protagonist was still asexual, but she was also aromantic. There would be no romance subplot. It would still have magic, but rather than my big, beautiful fantasy setting, it would be set in my Canadian backyard: Surrey, Vancouver. It was the first (and thus far, only) book I’ve written set on Earth. The plot would center around hungry ghosts and a witchy woman who could step back and forth across the Veil, solving dead problems for the living and living problems for the dead. It was, in essence, a paranormal murder mystery. Thus was born my Pitch Wars book, GRIGORI BLUES.
HowDid It All Fizzle to Nothing?
The writing of GRIOGRI BLUES was far less fun than anything I’ve written before (or since). Writing an urban fantasy “grounded” in a real place was tedious and required a different sort of research into things I didn’t love: bus routes and police department policies and blooming seasons for certain poisonous garden plants. When I got to slide into the Veil, though, that’s when the book came alive for me. Bit by bit, I began to feel like this book had legs. The story was good, the challenges dire but accessible, the characters clever and memorable. I submitted it to Pitch Wars with no real hopes and went back to working on a more fantastic book. “Wouldn’t it be ironic,” I thought, “if the one book that makes it is the one least in line with the second world fantasies I love to write?”
I wasn’t even watching when the Pitch Wars 21/22 mentees were announced. My writing circle from AMM found out before I did. Their congratulations made me scramble to go check and make sure it wasn’t a dream. Sarah Remy had chosen GRIGORI BLUES (and me) to mentor! I’d applied to Sarah in previous mentorship programs because they seemed like a perfect fit in interests and skillset. I was over the moon—and still am; Sarah has been more generous and supportive than I could have wished for.
Thus began a three-month hyperfixation. Like Douglas Adams was, I’m a “performance writer.” If I have an audience, I eat-sleep-breathe my book with total and utter abandon. Shout out to my queer platonic partner for putting up with my absolutely single-minded obsession during the Pitch Wars revision process. I was learning a lot about comp titles and query letters and logline pitching (all parts of the querying process I still abhor, but Sarah helped guide me through). We did two full-book revisions to deepen character connection, smooth out some plot hiccups, flesh out the second POV, and better establish the villain. I felt (and still do) that Sarah made a good book great. We even finished in plenty of time. Everything was as polished and ready as it could be to dive into the querying trenches—starting with the Pitch Wars showcase.
Now, Pitch Wars is not a sure thing. Everyone warned me: the organizers, my fellow mentees (including one mentee who had been through the Pitch Wars wringer a few years before). Their friendship and support have been invaluable. We were all feverishly crunching stats, looking at the percentage of mentees who typically got agents. I was in the Adult category, which typically fared around middle of the road. In previous classes, about 58% of mentees in my category had gotten an agent within a year of doing Pitch Wars. I thought my expectations were fairly tempered with hope.
When the showcase opened, I got 7 requests from agents. Not as many as my mentor had hoped, but I was just relieved I’d gotten any. Some of them were even from my dream agents list. I felt very optimistic. I can’t speak to my fellow mentees’ experiences (both good and bad), but we had a sense that we were all in this together. Little did we know how much we’d need that support as a series of publishing disasters struck.
First, the day after the showcase closed, Pitch Wars was disbanded. Personally, I was devastated. I felt unmoored, gutted. All of a sudden, this important program that had given fledgling authors a leg up for ten years was gone. Any pressure agents might have felt to treat Pitch Wars’ authors as important seemed to have died with the program. Of course, at the same time, TradPub seemed to enter freefall. It was mired in imprints closing, editors quitting, agents retiring, worker strikes, US Supreme Court cases, and a record influx of pandemic hopefuls pitching their books. It seemed that no one had time for us. All the old data and metrics to tell if your query package was working—such as querying in small batches, 3-month turnaround times, rejection feedback, 30% request rates—none of it held true. There were months where I asked myself “is it really that bad in TradPub . . . or is it me, again?”
Thankfully my Pitch Wars alumni and the wonderful Sarah kept me from utterly despairing. It helped, of course, that this wasn’t a book of my heart. If people didn’t want it, liked some part but couldn’t sell it, or loved the writing but not the second POV, or enjoyed it but weren’t compelled to fight for it . . . well, it was just a perfect storm of bad timing. Everyone was struggling and squeezed too thin. It wasn’t personal.
But what is luck if not “right time, right place”? That one thing I couldn’t control. As the months passed and the rejections rolled in, and the requests turned into rejections . . . I felt my hope oozing away. “That was my one chance. And it could never come again because Pitch Wars—and so many of the other mentorship programs and pitching events—were no more. I had done ‘everything right’ but it still hadn’t been enough.”
In the end, we didn’t get enough data to find a common denominator. These days, authors are lucky to get a form rejection—if we hear back at all. Things are trickling through like molasses. I’ve received form rejections 15 months after submitting. I still haven’t heard back from some of my initial full requests. With the requirements to have your comps be no more than 2 years old, they could expire before you even hear back from the agents you’d queried!
What was I supposed to do with this new reality? I tried writing something I was passionate about: too weird, too ambitious, too rigid for TradPub. I tried writing something personal and specific: too niche, not relatable enough, no market. I tried writing something specific to the market, something edgy but grounded, accessible but inclusive: it still wasn’t enough.
For the first time since I was twelve, this lifeblood thing, writing—that had brought me joy and release and expression—went cold inside me. I felt like I’d let everyone down: my mentor, my father, my partner. My deceased librarian mother who had instilled in me my love of books and my oma (who died during querying) who had “always believed I’d make something of myself.” Maybe it was personal. I had never had writer’s block in twenty-six years, but I had it now. I had it something fierce. I wanted to write, but what was the point? I wanted to write . . . but what?
Where Do I Go from Here?
Thankfully, I write for my day job and for my freelance work. The muscles didn’t get a chance to atrophy, and writing to a brief is far less scary. TradPub claims to know what it wants but “no, not like that!” In truth, it’s all luck: right idea, right style, right time, right agent. Throw enough darts at the board, you might get there, but there’s no guarantee. Accepting that those aspects are outside of my control has been enormously freeing for me.
As the months trickled by with no new writing for myself, I dug into other creative pursuits: sewing a 1780s French Pollonaise dress, learning to embroider, refurbishing worn-out corners of my home, doing fantasy illustrations. I wrote a short story and submitted it to a couple magazines (no luck). And I finally opened up that old epic fantasy trilogy and started editing it from the beginning. Here was a story that didn’t need to be for anyone else. I could see ways to improve it I hadn’t noticed before. I rewrote precious sections, I cut large swaths to improve the pacing, I honed my sentence craft until it sparkled. And it was a relief to see how much I had learned. Yes, I still wanted to write. I still had stories in me itching to get out.
When it became clear that GRIGORI BLUES was dead in the trenches, my mentor asked me what I wanted to do next, and I was honest: I didn’t know, just write. I pitched them a few of my WIP concepts. After some discussion, they encouraged me to work on BLOOD MOONS & BINDING MAGIC. It’s another urban fantasy, but this time it’s second world, where I most love to play. I flailed about in the document for months, drafting random scenes and bouncing things off my lovely CP and my ever-patient partner. I still have no idea if this story has any legs where TradPub is concerned. It might be recognizable enough that an agent knows what to do with it; it might be not unique enough to break out in a crowded market. At this point, I don’t care. The important part is that I’m enjoying writing again. I have characters I love who make me laugh and choke up with tears. My characters matter, even if only to me.
So, I may have lost my one chance with Pitch Wars, but I gained valuable temperance. I learned how to step back into writing for the right reasons. I gained so many creative, talented, supportive writer friends along the way. Whatever happens from here, writing will always nourish my soul.
Bio: As an asexual biromantic author, Astra Crompton is passionate about diverse queer representation that showcases the foundational importance of found family. Her speculative fiction has been published in All Worlds Wayfarer magazine, Anthology for a Green Planet, and Blood Moon Rising anthology. They’ve also written for the Unity RPG and Vampire: The Requiem by White Wolf. By day, she’s an editing and illustrations coordinator who lives in Victoria, Canada with their queer platonic partner and two cats: the snuggly but drooly Abyssinian Deos and the affectionate but anxious tuxedo rescue Schrödinger.Follow Astra on Twitter @ulzaorith.
Note from Aimee: First, I hope you love this post as much as I did. I read it in line waiting to get TSA Pre-check and couldn’t wait to get home to email Amara back to say how much I loved it so had to email twice, once with gibberish and once with a posting schedule. Second, if you are someone who likes query stats, Amara has kindly provided a Twitter thread I’ve linked to at the end for those (which you can also avoid by not clicking if you don’t want to do query stats). Now, without further ado, the post!
Confronting the Publishing Paradox
By: Amara Cavahlo (Follow Amara @nerdnothuman on Twitter)
There’s this maddening paradox at the core of the traditional publishing process: writers must invest so much time and effort into their work—work which will always have a place in society—and yet writers are rarely invested into in return.
That paradox manifests itself in many ways:
(i)
As a writer, you can spend thousands of hours on perfecting your craft, and yet never become a “professional” within the publishing industry—or, at the very least, one that can make a living off their work.
(ii)
Publishers claim to be making record profits, and yet they can’t pay the employees making them those profits a livable wage.
(iii)
On a more personal note, stories have always been everything to me: movies an addiction; books an obsession; the act of filling a page with words a necessity for my psychological wellbeing. I knew I wanted to be a full-time fiction writer as a small child and became invested in the idea of becoming an editor as a teenager. But when it came time to enroll in university, choosing between studying editing and creative writing or something else felt like choosing between uncertainty or stability. I worried about affording my basic needs if I chose publishing, because I’d already seen what it could do to its own.
I don’t deal well with uncertainty. So I chose not to study writing.
(iv)
During the three-year undergraduate design degree I did choose to do, I wrote three books outside of class—the word count equivalent to three PhD dissertations. While I can proudly present a diploma for my university work and get a job for it, all I’ll likely receive for my writing efforts is the assumption that I can’t be a very good writer, or else I’d have gotten those books published.
(etc.)
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not claiming that those who choose creative professions are always going to struggle (or that choosing something else guarantees success), or that my books are masterpieces that deserve to be published, or that writing a novel is perfectly equivalent to writing a PhD dissertation. None of those things are true. The point is that it’s incredibly disheartening to know that in some areas of my life, what I receive will be proportional to how much I invest, whilst in others—the ones I happen to care about most—I might as well be tossing keys into the ocean out of the hope that they’ll unlock Atlantis.
There was a time when I noticed this paradox and felt so frustrated by it that I refused to accept it. Instead, I hoped I’d be the exception—the lucky one. That hope was enough to keep me going for a while: I would think, “My work will get published eventually, and that will make everything worth it. I’ll be content and happy then.”
Over time, though, I started seeing how dangerous that mindset and the writing advice that advocates for it can be. Common advice like “It only takes one yes,” “Just write the next book,” and “You’ll achieve success eventually” sound great on the surface, because they claim that anyone can succeed if only they work hard enough.
I haven’t been querying for that long—only since 2021—so I don’t claim to be a veteran of the process. But even within the short time I’ve been querying, this querying advice hasn’t had quite the positive effect it’s meant to have on me, and I’ve watched how it affects my friends. Now when the rejections keep rolling in, when your every project is unsuccessful, that advice starts sounding like an accusation: “Everyone is good enough to get that one yes, and write that next book, and be successful eventually… except for you.”
Then we can’t avoid the paradox anymore: we gave everything to publishing, and maybe in the past that would’ve been enough to succeed, but now there is a very real possibility that publishing will never give us anything back. In the current publishing climate, perfecting your craft is the bare minimum for getting noticed, but beyond that, luck is the main determinant of your success. Writers have basically no control over their publishing journeys, and there’s nothing we can do to change that.
At this point, it might seem like we should cut our losses and just stop. I’ve seen people stop writing completely, and I get it—if no one else will invest in our writing, why should we? If writing doesn’t spark joy for us anymore, why should we continue doing it? Sometimes choosing to stop writing is the best thing a person can do for themselves, especially if they no longer enjoy the process of writing itself. (Here’s a great article about stopping from this blog!)
But we don’t all want to stop. I don’t want to stop—the characters trapped in my head would drive me insane if I did!
So then the question for us who want to continue becomes: having accepted the rather hopeless paradox of traditional publishing, how can we keep going without hurting ourselves with it?
Now, at the risk of sounding like an enormously inflated smart aleck, I’d like to share how I’ve so far gotten through querying mostly unscathed. It’s a bit of a strange mindset, and one that might not help you, but I share it in hopes that it will help someone (especially considering that everything I’ve said before this is high-key depressing).
Before continuing, though, I want to make one thing clear: while becoming a full-time writer is a dream of mine, writing is currently something I only do as a hobby, meaning I don’t depend on it financially. If I spent the rest of my life being unpublished, or publishing books that make very little money, materially I’d manage just fine. This is how I can (literally) afford to think like I do.
So. As I stated earlier, I made the decision to separate writing from my livelihood very consciously. I made that decision because I noticed that damn paradox and knew I didn’t have the temperament to stake my rent or my sense of success on an industry that runs on luck instead of merit. I also did it because, based on some of my experiences being a musician, I knew that in some ways choosing not to go all-in on writing would be very freeing in publishing’s current trash fire climate.
Let’s go back to that idea of ‘success’, shall we?
There’s this common view about art, which is that it has no worth if it has no financial worth. If someone likes baking, we tell them they should start a bakery. If someone likes knitting, we suggest they sell their creations on Etsy. And if someone likes writing, the assumption is that their writing isn’t very good unless it’s published.
Remember how my past self would say that getting published would make me content and happy? I wish I could go back in time and ask her: why do you need to base your entire sense of success and self-worth, of happiness, on the moving goalposts of an industry that doesn’t care about you?
Why should we wait for the publishing industry’s permission to feel successful?
Because the thing is, sure, getting published would be awesome—I would probably ascend into a celestial plane through sheer excitement if I became a bestselling author, and got fan art, and a movie deal, and… well, you get the idea. But a lot of us didn’t start writing because we wanted to get published (or become a bestseller, or get fan art, or…). We started writing because we had to. In my experience, it feels like the stories picked me to tell them, and they’re not going to leave me alone until I do.
And, while there are many aspects about the traditional publishing process that we can’t control—getting an agent being the first one we encounter—there are still lots we can control: we can choose what stories we want to write. We can choose when to write them. We can choose to take a break. We can choose to read books about craft, or ignore craft completely. We can choose who we share our books with, and what sort of feedback we’d like those people to give—as well as how much of that feedback we take to heart.
I used to worry about whether I could sell a project before I started writing it. But now, I choose to write things because I want to write them, and literally for no other reason. Book two in that weird sci-fi series I haven’t even sold the first book of yet about a girl getting mixed up with an extremist group that thinks demons are real? Epic. That five-season Voltron sequel TV series? That’s insane, I’ll never finish it, it’ll certainly never get made (like, ever), but I’m doing it anyway because it’s fun as hell.
After all, until my writing matters to the industry, why should the industry matter to me?
And here’s the best part of making my art for the sake of making it: I’m still very serious about getting my books published, but the rejections don’t sting as much because the books already fulfilled their purpose of making me happy by writing them. This isn’t to say that the rejections don’t sting, and that I don’t mind shelving projects (if you ever need a shoulder to cry on for those things, hit me up). But I love that if I ever do get an agent or make it even farther into the publishing process, each of those advancements will feel like the most fantastic bonus to an already-fulfilling journey, rather than the bare minimum.
The system of traditional publishing wants us to believe that all our dreams and chances for happiness are wrapped in its cold, money-greased machinery. It wants to control our creative output and, more distressingly for our wellbeing, to define what ‘success’ is for us. But I say screw that. We make our own.
Bio: Amara Cavahlo is a UX and graphic designer who, confusingly, is an Australian citizen with an American accent who also happens to be a native Spanish speaker (and subject of feline overlords). If you wish to summon her to your location, an offering of one (1) chaotic science fiction or fantasy book will do. You can follow her on Twitter @nerdnothuman or learn more about her on her website: https://amaracavahlo.wixsite.com/author/about
Querying Stats for the last book queried: Click on this link to learn more about that book pitched as:
Miska of Serifos presents:
THE “VIRGIN” PRIESTESS’S GUIDE TO RUNNING AWAY: DEMIGOD BOYFRIEND EDITION
Hi, this post is being written by me, Aimee, your host for the Not the Darling Series. If you’re new to the blog, you can read about the premise of the series here and can find the blogs by typing “Not the Darling” into the search bar to the right of this post. So, as we wrap up our first month (!) of submissions in this series, I wanted to take some time to reflect on some of the amazing things I’ve learned from the incredible authors who have let me get to know them and their journeys.
Authors at all stages of their career should be reading these.
Let me be clear. This space is and always will be for un-agented, querying (or quitting querying) authors. That is the premise and the purpose and remains my passion behind this project. Accordingly, I thought the main (majority) target audience for these stories would be other querying authors. I’ve since learned that not only do authors at all stages of their career want to read these stories, authors at all stages of their career should read these stories. They’re humbling. And raw. They’re full of passion and pain. They remind us that querying authors are our peers, a fact too often forgotten.
For those of us who queried forever, these stories are a bittersweet reminder of the parts of the journey colored rose when we finally got that yes. They remind us to stay humble and that we are no different than any of the authors writing these posts (which again, is why they’re our peers). For those who did not query long, they teach a lesson thankfully never learned via personal experience but which these authors have been kind enough to do the emotional labor to teach via THEIR personal experiences. To keep you humble.
Humble, I know. It’s a loaded word in an industry where we have so few wins. Where so many of us are crawling and bleeding, scraping our way tooth and nail to be seen, screaming into an empty void for recognition. Where marginalized authors fight every day against stereotypes saying we’re too loud, too angry, too aggressive, too whatever. And I ask for humility. I know. But I don’t ask for humility toward the titans of publishing or Barnes & Noble, toward Amazon or the C-Suites of Big Five imprints. Where they are concerned, I say lift your chin as high as you can and own the fucking room.
I ask for humility toward your peers, who are struggling. Who are just like you, in so many ways. I ask you to check in on them if you can and when you’re able. Because they’re screaming into the void. They’re fighting the industry, throwing ribbons of their hearts into the wheels of the machine that is publishing hoping one might trip over a piece so they might be fed a scrap. For them, yes, I ask you to be humble. We were there once. All of us. And we could be again at any moment, the tables turned. This industry is small, so very, very small. We are stronger together.
I am a fantasy author so might be me, but if publishing had a door, I imagine this would be what it would look like. The gate that the gatekeepers keep, held shut by cogs and clocks that make absolutely no damn sense. Seems right, yeah. Image by Amy from Pixabay
It really is luck.
I will be Brutally Honest because that is my brand. When I opened this space and said the only editing I’d do would be to make sure (to the best of my ability) nothing was harmful to the author writing the post or anyone on the other side of the screen, plus minor grammar stuff, I fully expected some objectively bad writing. For those who don’t know my background, it’s a bit… stuffy. I have an undergraduate degree in creative writing from a school whose sole purpose was to groom its students for an MFA at Iowa which is The US’ Best Writing Program for Serious Writers. Everyone thought I was headed to Iowa. I thought I was headed to Iowa. Why I didn’t go to Iowa is a whole separate thing. However, that education never entirely left me. Combine that with a decade plus working in legal, writing Very Serious Legal Stuff, and you get someone who can be… snobbish. I know. I hate it and work hard to battle it every day.
Why am I admitting this ugly truth to all of you lovely people on the internet? Well, because I want you to believe me when I say not a single thing submitted me to thus far has been edited by me at all (except for minor grammar things), nor have I found any piece of writing published on this blog to be “objectively” bad writing. In fact, I’ve loved everything submitted for entirely different reasons. But objectively, it’s all been well-constructed, with a nice voice, good pacing, varied sentence structure, and excellent continuity. I’ll stop reading something I find objectively bad. Not only have I read everything here straight through (a few times), I’ve actually been late to a couple meetings just to finish reading several of these pieces.
So for me, a bona fide snob, who went into this project fully prepared to accept what I consider objectively bad writing (I’m literally wincing typing this, I’m sorry to be such an asshole, truly), to come to you and report zero bad writing is Saying Something. To take it one step further and say all the writing is in fact very good, is Saying Something Bigger. And the TL;DR something is this: When agents get up on Twitter and say there’s so much good stuff in their inbox it’s impossible to decide, or the quality of the writing has gone up so much recently, or mentors from mentorship programs say this is horribly stressful because they want to choose 20 things, I used to roll my eyes. Because I, a snob, didn’t believe it possible for that many people to be consistently submitting objectively good writing. Selfishly, I also didn’t want there to be that much competition. I have, however, learned through personal experience, this is not the case.
The writing is good. Objectively good. The agents aren’t lying. Neither are mentors. Those aren’t platitudes they’re feeding you. The inboxes are brimming with good stuff. This is all really coming down to subjectivity and luck. Which sucks because you can control neither. This is a shitty consolation. Sorry. I didn’t say this was a positivity post, just a reflection.
Oh, hey, look! It’s one of my writing professors come to talk about Faulkner’s brilliance some more because you know… the decline of the southern aristocracy and uh… incest or something. The Next Great American Novel coming to my agent’s inbox T-minus… NEVER. Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
The Conversations are Important and are Happening.
Since the Not the Darling series started, five (5) posts have debuted on the blog. They have been viewed over 700 times in more than a dozen countries. They’ve been shared on Twitter, reblogged on other blogs, shared on Facebook, and appeared in at least one Discord of mine, but others I’ve been told about.
The conversations they’re spurring are as varied and important as the stories themselves. Conversations about mental health and the toll rejection can take, on the taboo topic of giving yourself the okay to quit if you need it. Questions about how to find community in this new era where mentorship programs aren’t as widespread as they used to be, and Twitter pitch contests which were once as much about building community as finding an agent, are fraught and oversaturated. Frustrations and confusion about marketability and publishing trends, about whether you should write to the market or write what you love. The evergreen and always relevant topic of “being too old to debut” by publishing standards. The list goes on and every day it grows, taking on a life of its own I’m so awed and inspired to watch.
When I first started this series, I was a little afraid of these conversations. I was unsure if facilitating them would make me a target if they got out of hand or if I would be held responsible if I couldn’t “control” them. Over the past month, I’ve been so humbled to find that was a shitty and cynical take (I’m really winning on this episode, I know). The dialogue so far has been respectful and nuanced, smart and kind. And for that, I’m so grateful to everyone contributing not only to the blog series, but to the conversations as well. It’s important we have them, and that we have them in this way.
In case anyone ever wondered what it’s like to sit through a workplace training with me as your host – it involves loads of graphics like these. Edited to include the same kind of bad humor. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Thank You. Keep ’em Coming.
Finally, to the authors who have already contributed: Thank you. Each and every one of you is courageous and I’m honored to know you, to host your stories, to be a small part of your journey, wherever it brings you. Reading your words has been a joy and a privilege.
To those thinking of submitting: Please do! Submissions are still open, and there are still so many amazing conversations to be had! Submission criteria can be found here.
Note from Aimee: Good morning all! A content warning for this post is that it does contain query stats throughout. But this is another critical perspective that we really don’t talk about enough. The offer that ends in querying. Thank you to the author who was brave enough to submit it!
How I Got an Offer on My First Book… and Am Still Querying 5 Years Later
By: Anonymous
I hope one day this post will form the backbone of a “How I Got My Agent” or “How I Got Published” post…but today is not that day. I’ve queried 5 books since 2017, and here’s a summary of the ups and downs of that experience, from an offer on my first book to querying crickets on my most recent.
Book 1: Dual timeline vampire story (yikes)
I wrote this book without any thought of getting published, until my boyfriend at the time (now fiancé) read it and said he thought I should try to publish it. That sparked a flurry of learning about agents and queries and synopses. I paid for QueryTracker and trawled Manuscript Wish List. I signed up for Twitter and learned about pitch contests. I pulled my hair out writing a good query. I sent about 100 queries and got 3 full requests…which honestly wasn’t bad, looking back.
And then…I got an offer! Wow, an offer on my first book! I’m doing great! What could go wrong?
Well, by the time I got that offer, I was ~10 months into querying. I’d emotionally detached from that book, and moved onto writing something else I thought was better. I’d also learned a lot about the industry, and came to the conclusion that this agent was a “schmagent.” So, I declined the offer, and shelved that book. No regrets.
Book 2: Gilded Age historical fiction
This is when I started to figure out things like “genre” and “reader expectations.” I’d written something that read like a historical romance, except for the fact that the MMC was married and there was a lot of drama relating to that. When posting my query for critique, I learned that that wasn’t going to fly in romance, so I pitched it as historical fiction with romantic elements. I sent about 70 queries, and got 3 full requests.
And then…an agent called me to talk about my book! Wow, I must have done it now! It was a reputable agent with a track record of sales, but…she wasn’t sure she could sell it. She wanted to talk to some editor connections and see what they thought. She got back to me a few weeks later and said she had to pass as she didn’t think it was sellable. But, she was effusive in her praise for my writing and told me she thought I had “it.”
Book 3: Historical romance (if Lisa Kleypas wrote Pirates of the Caribbean)
By now, I’d learned a lot about genre and figured out that historical romance was where I wanted to be. So, I wrote something more “traditional” (no married protagonists), and was sure this was my best work yet. I sent about 70 queries and got 5 requests, which was the best I’d done so far. I was sure this was the one.
And then…an agent wanted to set up a call! Wow! I knew this just had to be it. I compiled a list of questions, made up an excuse to get out of work, and anxiously awaited the call.
The call opened with, “I know you probably thought I was calling you to make an offer, but…”
She was calling to nicely reject me, and that was crushing. She was only interested in representing series, and I’d written something that was firmly standalone (which I had conveyed via email before the call).
Book 4 (not queried): Ancient Roman time travel story
I love this story, but I never queried it because I learned that time travel was a tough sell, and I also recognized some issues with the story.
Book 5: Book 2 rewritten without the married MMC
I loved Book 2 so much and thought it might have better success if I rewrote it to be more in line with romance genre conventions. My writing had also improved a great deal by this time. I sent about 70 queries and got 15 requests! That was triple my best prior request rate. I was sure this book was the one.
And then…it wasn’t. None of those requests panned out. It sucked.
Book 6 (not queried): Ancient Roman historical romance
This book was a weird combination of historical fiction (involving real historical figures) and romance, with a dash of alternate history. It’s my bonkers pandemic book. I love it, but decided not to query it.
Book 7 (querying, about to shelve): Ancient Roman historical romance (yes, another one)
The idea for this book came about when I was reading a Regency romance and was like “Wouldn’t this be cooler if it was set in Ancient Rome?” You can tell from books 4 and 6 that I was really digging the Ancient Rome thing. I was enjoying showing off all the useless bits of knowledge I’d gained through 11 years of Latin classes. I love this book, and I was sure it was the one (sound familiar??).
I sent about 70 queries, and got 4 requests. After the over 20% request rate from my previous experience, this felt extra crushing. I thought things were supposed to get better, after all. I mean, my writing had only improved since 2017. Didn’t that mean I should be getting closer to my goal? Apparently not.
The handful of personalized rejections I got were along the lines of “love the premise, love the characters, but that setting is not marketable.” I guess no one but me wants to read Ancient Roman historical romance. I still have 1 full outstanding and a couple of queries, but I have mentally moved on.
Book 8 (revising): Ancient Roman historical romance (when will I learn my lesson)
I wrote this one while querying Book 7. I now know it’s not going to go anywhere, given that the setting was such a sticking point for Book 7. I’m thinking of maybe submitting to a couple of reputable small presses.
Book 9 (drafting): Gilded Age historical romance
I’m returning to the setting of books 2 and 5, but with different characters. I love this book, and like every book before it, I’m convinced it will be “the one.” Lol. We’ll see.
So, with all of the above in my rearview mirror, what have I learned?
The good:
My writing has gotten much better and much cleaner. My drafts require much less editing now.
I’ve found my genre (historical romance), and love it. I understand it more, and read almost exclusively in it, when before ~2018 I hadn’t read a single romance novel. It brings me a lot of joy.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that publishing is not a meritocracy. I see it as the business that it is.
The bad:
While I don’t get upset by rejections, I’ve emotionally numbed myself to the process so much that I can’t even celebrate the small wins. My mind jumps immediately to the next place I’ll fail.
I’m jealous of others’ successes. I hate seeing agent or publishing announcements. They make me feel bad about myself.
With all that said, I’m still optimistic. Looking back at this run-down (it was cathartic to write), I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished over the past few years. I know my writing and my stories are more than good enough. Even though it’s clear by now that I’m not a publishing darling, I do believe I’ll find success in this industry in some form. It just seems to be taking a while. 🙂
Note from Aimee: Today’s post has query statistics at the end for those interested. They follow a picture (which picture and alt text was inserted by me, not the author of this post) so they can be more easily avoided for those who don’t like to see stats. The book referenced in this post is described by the author as an adult, second-world grimdark fantasy and is the first novel written by them. I have also included links to the resources listed by the author, but neither this post nor my inclusion of links is an official endorsement of either (and no one was paid to put them here) and you should always research any paid service carefully before pursuing it. Now, without further ado, today’s amazingly raw, amazingly written, amazingly brave story of realness ❤
What if You Just Wrote the Wrong Book?
By: Anonymous
I knew the book I spent 4 years writing was a no-hoper before I ever sent my first query. I knew it as soon as I looked at agent MSWLs in my genre, as soon as I followed agents on Twitter, as soon as I looked for comps. I also know the book I just shelved is the best book I will ever write.
As a child, I had vague ambitions of becoming a published writer, for the simple reason that I wanted to achieve something in life and wasn’t good at anything else. But financial stability came first, and so I devoted my teens and 20s to academics and demanding jobs, writing only a few short stories over 10 years. It wasn’t until I managed to downshift to a 40-hour-a-week job that didn’t suck up all my mental energy that I had hope of actually finishing a novel. Even then, I struggled to find a work-in-progress I loved enough to stick with–until finally I did.
Finishing that monster of a 135k first draft (later whittled down to 121k) took me almost 4 years. Coming to the end and actually being proud of what I’d written was the most joyful moment of my life to date–until I got on the internet and realized I’d written the exact book nobody wanted.
My book might have been perfect for the SFF market in, say, 2010. But by 2022, my European military fantasy was exactly what agents in this hugely oversaturated market were begging not to see (which, if I’d been reading recent debuts instead of spending years frantically trying to finish my own book, I would already have known). Readers’ tastes had long since changed, but I was still writing for the teenager I’d been.
My book was second-world and epic when everyone wanted “grounded.” It had three POVs and a heaping of military strategy when everyone wanted intimate and character-driven. It was a bloody grimdark hitting every conceivable trigger warning when a lot of readers were hungry for lightness, romance, and hope. And worst of all, it had a female villain protagonist who sought power not to protect loved ones or to fight oppression but for power’s own sake–and thus was really, truly unlikeable to everyone but me.
I decided to query my book anyway, because what did I have to lose? I left off anyone for whom my book was explicitly anti-MSWL (quite a few), but between US and UK agents, I still had a healthy list to burn.
I came prepared. I scoured r/pubtips, submitted my query to the wonderful Query Shark, and paid far too much for a manuscript assessment by a freelance editor, because I wanted an honest opinion and was worried seeking unpaid betas would take months and plunge me into social media drama. The verdict: the editor couldn’t understand why anyone would write this sort of thing, and also I needed therapy.
But by far my most valuable investments were three, 10-minute query and sample chapter consultations with literary agents through Manuscript Academy (US) and Jericho Writers (UK). This is the best $49 you as a writer will ever spend, because it is the only time a professional in your target market will tell you exactly what you did wrong, as opposed to just hitting the reject button.
The agents I spoke to were lovely individuals who put real thought into explaining why, no matter how much I revised my query package or my manuscript as a whole, a book with this premise would never sell. Then, much more difficult, they tried to give me some guidance on what would.
Now, 10 months out, I’m at the end of the query journey for the book of my heart. I’m proud of the requests I received, and not at all surprised that they ended in silence or form rejections, given that the book only gets really controversial halfway through. I’m heartened by a few one-liners praising my prose, which I was afraid was too literary and historical for the current market. I’ve also done some thinking about what I need to do to improve my craft: tighten pacing, narrow my scope, and manage word count better as I go.
But as a thirtysomething woman (seemingly ancient for a debut), I can’t figure out for the life of me what to write next. It doesn’t help that I’m the sort of person who takes years to write one book, while most agented writers appear to have churned out a first draft every few months since age 14. Every time I come up with a new premise for a novel, I stumble over the same hurdles. Is this original? Is this “hooky?” Can I imagine one of the 15 acquiring editors in my target market actually acquiring this? Is this–above all–marketable?
I don’t want this post to sound like I feel somehow aggrieved. I’m in the same position as every other casualty of the query trenches, except that I’m privileged to have money and time and not to have to cope with the additional struggles marginalized writers face. Against reason, I still dream of getting an agent and a tradpub deal someday. But writing for the market has killed the joy of writing for me.
Image and alt text added by Aimee, query stats redacted from the post and follow. Image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay
Query Statistics as Provided by Author:
Adult second-world grimdark fantasy
Query start date: April 2022
Queries sent: 86
Partial Requests: 1 (rejected)
Full Requests: 7 (4 form rejections, 2 pending, 1 ghost)
Pay the ship fare
Make sure warriors don’t abduct bf
Survive
Aimee Davis 