Querying Actually Isn’t That Bad Because I’m Already Used to No One Liking Me

I’ll give you a moment to decide if I’m joking or not

Me after sending out like 8 queries

Quick explanation so we can all be on the same page: querying is the process of sending off your manuscript to agents or editors in the hopes that someone believes enough in your project to help get it published. It’s step two of the trad publishing process, if we count step one as actually writing the thing.

And usually when people talk about querying, it’s always about how soul sucking it is. Even the success stories are about how soul sucking it is.

That’s because the success stories are mmm approximately 0.0001% of all stories. Querying is less the process of sending off pitches, and more the process of wracking up rejections, and more rejections, and even more rejections, until you have enough rejections to drown your dreams in.

Here’s the thing—I was overly prepared for this process from years of being humbled by my mentor. Most of the time, I do not find querying that hard.

It’s kind of like catching Pokémon to me. I like sending off pitches to get rejections from different agents I respect and admire because not all agents send back anything—some just ghost you, so when you do get the rejection email, it becomes a little collectible or something. You can bring it out and show it to your friends and go, "see, she thinks she's not the right fit at the moment. :-)"

But sometimes it’s hard not to fall into the querying black void. The “oh my god what if I’m not good enough” black void. The “maybe I should give up” black void. Because the other side to querying is that you have no idea why they made their decision. Maybe it was an instant decision or maybe it required some thought. Maybe it was a rejection because of the market, or their own confidence in the project, or because they disliked the query letter, the synopsis, the manuscript, or your bio. There’s about a thousand reasons for a rejection that all boil down to the same words: “unfortunately" and “good luck finding someone else.”

It's easy to turn into a revolving door of trust and doubt.

The first rejection I got that stung was this:

“Gates, thank you so much for sending the sample pages. I’m afraid they didn’t draw me in as much as I had hoped…”

Stake to my heart, crops dying, seven wounded… Okay I know it’s mild, but what got me a bit about this rejection was the implication that she had not only read the query letter and was maybe interested, but then read the sample pages and they failed their first and arguably only job. They didn’t draw her in as much as she had hoped.

It’s the subtle plant of the idea that there was hope here, but I had lost it. That’s a lot harder to swallow than the others, which had only ever felt like I never had a chance to begin with.

And it’s thinking like that, that makes querying suck.

As of right now, I've sent out 30 queries and received 12 rejections and 18 no-replies. That’s nothing. That’s chump change. Tell that to a published author and they’d laugh. I have over a hundred agents on my list, and I expect to email every one of them, and maybe, fingers-crossed-hopefully something will stick. But there’s always the chance that it doesn’t. Because querying is like that.

It can be a black void.