Hello everyone, as you may or may not know I am querying my books to agents again. And it’s been going well. I don’t mean that I have heard back from anyone but I have been stoking my own fire and acting as my own cheerleader. I am the gym-bro flexing in the mirror as I write my tailored query letter, nodding at myself with approval because if there has been one thing I have learned in my three years on-and-off agent search is that the biggest champion for your book is you.
Well, today I cried.
Full big baby mode activated, toys thrown out the pram, dummy spat out and tears - real ones. I didn’t even have to listen to a sad song to do it either (go me and and my emotionally repressed self)! Woo! There is one emotion that will always make me cry without aid and that is frustration.
And that is the portion of querying we have reached, this is the bit where it begins to feel pointless, shouting out into a void with no answer, not even an echo. My first attempt at getting agent in 2023 was much more fruitful in terms of responses and it seems that the literary agent sphere has changed since then. Let me preface this with my understanding that the amount of submissions agent receive a week is too many to respond to individually but it doesn’t make it easier when weeks and months pass with not even a “thanks, but no thanks”, that someone has read your work and you are indeed a real person and not another number from the slush pile. Even a form rejection is better than silence.
I know it is such small potatoes. I know it’s worth the process. I just wish it wasn’t so brutal. You have to be thick-skinned but querying wears that skin down like years of an ebbing wave against a rock face. I think it’s important to take a moment, feel the frustration and the self-doubt, cry if you need to. After all, this is how dreams are made. Nothing lands in your lap, it takes years of hard work and you’ve got to be a stubborn bitch. Once upon a time I dreamed of having a finished manuscript I could query to agents, I’ve achieved that. Next, get the agent.
Unlike completing a manuscript, so much of querying feels out of my control and this is where most of my frustration is born. For most it isn’t enough to just write a good book, it’s the right book, the right person at the right time. The topic of my book falls into this category and I have been told by an agent I might struggle to place it because of the subject matter, it’s bleak, it’s risky. I accepted that and I still do, but I am stubborn enough and perhaps even delusional enough to believe there is someone is this world that will want to champion this book as much as myself. After all, assisted death bleak, it may be risky but it is a conversation worth having. So what can I do to reach my cheerleader? There are some things I can control. I can write a good synopsis, I can write a cover letter to each agent I submit to ensuring it is personalised to them, ensure my pitch paragraph is a pitch, not a blurb and not a synopsis. I can follow the submission guidelines of each agency and I can keep going.
My grandma used to say a lot of things but one I always come back to and tell others when they’re going through a rough patch is ‘Nothing worth doing is easy’. I hear her voice each time I remind myself of this. This is hard because it is worth it. So many others are trying to achieve the same thing aren’t they? It is hard because it is what you love doing and want to do for the rest of your time on this planet. So I’m opening up my query tracker, looking at the next agent, championing this book and taking up space in their inbox.
Wish me luck! x