Query Quirks

                The road to publishing can go to “Yay, this is the best book ever! Who wouldn’t want to publish me?” to “Oh my god, I wrote the worst thing ever and everybody knows it,” in three seconds. I have a completed manuscript for a Young Adult that I’ve been looking for an agent for. I’ll admit that I had barely sent out my query letter when I started looking online for clothes for my book tour. Six rejection letters later, I am feeling less optimistic.

                Rejection is normal in the publishing process. The first Harry Potter book was rejected by nine publishers. Gone with the Wind was rejected 38 times. I attended a book signing by Jay Asher a couple years ago. He said that his bestseller Thirteen Reasons Why was accepted by the thirteenth publisher (get it?) He also said that rejection letters all start to sound like bad break-up excuse after a while. There’s the “It’s not you; it’s me” (I am just not the right agent to represent your book,) the “There’s someone else” (Our agency is already representing a book on the same subject,) and the more or less straight forward “I don’t think you’re ready for a relationship yet” (Your book needs more work before it can be published.)  So far, I’ve only gotten the “It’s not you; it’s me” response but ask anyone who has ever heard this excuse. It’s hard not to think that it’s you.

                Meanwhile, as I sit and wait for responses from the other agents I queried, and there’s a good chance they won’t even respond, my creativity is being squashed. Normally, I would be using this summer to write the first draft of my next novel. But every time I try to write the first chapter of one of the millions of ideas I had while writing my last book, I lose my motivation after the first couple of pages. This is the part of writing that is usually my favorite, diving right in, typing away with reckless abandon. But now I’m stuck, unable to move onto the next project while I’m worried about my current manuscript getting picked up.

                So now I’m trying to push past that.Writing Forums is helping me revise my query and I’ve found a batch of new agents on AgentQuery.com (they also have examples of successful queries.) Hopefully I’ll have more luck this time around and be able to move forward with my writing. Until then, tea, yoga, and complaining on the internet is helping a lot.