Like any kind of relationship, even business relationships
can fall apart. While, I do not want to go into specifics,
by the beginning of the year it had become painfully obvious that the search
for a new agent was necessary. The realization was gut wrenching, and looking
back I clearly should have moved on long before that. My biggest reason for
waiting was the simple fact that getting an agent in this business is hard.
Really hard. I’ve heard some writers say that it’s easier to get a book deal
once you have an agent than it is to get said agent in the first place. For now,
I can’t confirm the veracity of this but hopefully one day I can.
Now I am querying agents and it’s not a fun process. For those of you who aren’t writers, querying is the process by which an aspiring author gets an agent to represent them or a publisher to buy your book. It involves writing a query letter (thus the name) to an agent and then waiting for them to decide whether or not they want to represent you. The wait unpleasant, usually eight to twelve weeks until you get a response, and for pretty much any writer starting out, whether they go on to have a successful career or not, the querying process is like hockey. You throw shot after shot at the net until finally one breaks through because there WILL be rejection and lots of it.
The query letter, despite generally being only a few hundred words, is no small task. There is a general form that is used but it has to be adapted depending on what information a particular agent is requesting. Sometimes they want a short bio added to the query, or a longer multipage synopsis, or a comparison of your work to similar books. The undisputed hardest part of any query letter is the partial summary of your novel into eight or nine sentences. That’s it. Condensing a vast majority of a book, that in my case is forty-nine chapters and over 100,000 words long, into nine sentences is ridiculously hard. It’s frustrating and once you’ve written and rewritten your summary over and over, your cherished novel that you have spend hours painstakingly crafting into something you are willing to share with others now sounds ridiculous.
Recently I got my first rejection, so I think that means I’m officially a writer now. It’s part of the gig and comes with the territory, a rite of passage almost and something that even happens to people who are really good. There’s a statistic bandied about in writing circles that JK Rowling (the Harry Potter series) was rejected twelve times by publishers and Steven King’s first book Christine was rejected thirty, before they were picked up.
Even though I know that everyone gets rejected, it’s still not easy to deal with. Each negative response has to be processed in a way that you accept the result, but don’t let it discourage you from continuing on. I tend to be exceptionally hard on myself, so it’s challenging for me not to take the letters personally. I’m trying to trust that this is building my character and making me more resilient, but I could also be deluding myself. Self-doubt grows during this process, but maybe that just makes an eventual acceptance so much sweeter,
For now, I wait and keep plugging away at my next book as the requisite eight to twelve weeks ticks by. I currently have a few more queries out in the mythical void awaiting judgement while I search for other agents to query. If you see me drinking heavily in the corner, feel free to assume I got another rejection. I accept moral support in the form of cask strength bourbon or scotch that’s old enough to vote.
