Today I hit a milestone. Early this morning as my five year old and my French bulldog slept close by, I submitted my 50th query to solicit an agent to represent my manuscript. If you are not a writer or have never submitted a query, it can be quite an arduous process. I have been trying to send out several each day while on sabbatical, yet I maybe get through about 5 per week. The first step is to find an agent who is interested in representing your genre/sub-genre. For me, I need to find those who want YA–young adult fiction–and more specifically, YA mystery or thriller. This means combing through the hundreds, thousands of agents out there and then finding out if they are even open to receiving unsolicited manuscripts. It’s a back and forth search process that can take up to 20-30 minutes for each. The next step when you find someone who you think might be interested in your project is to find out what each requires for submission–the first 3 chapters, the first 20 pages, 50 pages, 5 pages. A full synopsis, a one-page synopsis. A pitch. A bio, and by the way, as an unpublished writer, I am utterly boring, so finding a way to make myself sound intriguing has been a challenge. The combinations of what they want and/or don’t want are endless. 

Of the 49 other agents I’ve submitted to, I’ve heard back from 18. Most of the time, agents don’t take the time to even send a reply, and I can understand. Their inboxes are flooded with queries from hopeful writers, making it challenging to just read through them, let alone respond. Imagine if you were an agent and someone sent you an email with a pitch for a book idea that on its surface doesn’t interest you at all. Would you take a moment to reply to them? Probably not.  Of the 18 who have actually emailed me a rejection, most have been quick form letters–a ’sorry, this project just isn’t for me’. A select few, maybe five in total, have given me personal feedback. These are like gold, but are so much harder to read–they loved the idea but the pages I sent just didn’t capture their attention, ‘I wasn’t drawn in by the material’, ‘I didn’t connect with the opening pages as much as I’d hoped’. Ouch. So why are they gold? They give me just a glimmer of a reason to keep going. My idea is a good one, meaning it WILL sell. I know this. I feel it in my bones. I will have to keep rewriting until the right agent opens my query and says, “Oh, I love this idea,” AND “the writing is good!” Though there is also the knowledge that what interests people is completely subjective and maybe my writing is just fine, it just didn’t interest that one agent, but maybe another will love it, and I shouldn’t change a thing. Ugh! How do you know?

The answer is, you don’t. But what I do know as a writer, nothing is ever done. Nothing is ever perfect, so I keep editing and rewriting. I’ve been working on this novel since I began my MFA (Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing). The name of the protagonist has changed three times. I’ve edited and re-edited the finished product three times, including adding an additional 30,000 new words this past spring–again, to my non-writer readers that’s approximately 100 pages of new text. I’ve changed the narrative structure from third-person to a hybrid of first and third-person.  This has been a labor of love for 16 years, with each change taking months if not years to complete. 

So as the light from the early morning sun streams through my bedroom window, I am silently hitting send on queries 50 and 51–hoping, wishing, imploring they love it even a fraction as much as I do.