The Query Process: laughably bad rejections

I've gotten some eyebrow-raising rejections, like the form that says (rough approximation) "This is nothing I would ever want to represent." But one personalized rejection stands out in mind whenever someone says, "What if a literary agent is just obnoxious?"

This agent had requested the full knowing the book had an angel in it. So imagine the fun when I got a rejection letter talking about how she knew my type and how people like me had to include "God on every page."

Based on her comments, I realized she stopped reading at page 30, and there hadn't been 30 mentions of God to that point. And this is even better: "I get that your main character is a religious fanatic."

My character was a Religious Fanatic because when the aforemention angel hassled her repeatedly, she hauled her butt out of bed and went to church to deliver brownies to a bake sale.

And then, when an extremely hot guy is at the bake sale, this happens:

He says, "Are you sticking around?"

I am not proud. Yes, I will find it in my heart to sit through church this morning.

Religious Fanaticism's bar is getting lower and lower. I read the rejection to my husband and said, "My main character also takes out the recycling. Does that make her an ecoterroist?"

I'm recounting this not just so you'll have a good laugh at this agent's expense (I certainly have -- and I've obfuscated/declarificated enough that she shouldn't recognize herself) but to show you sometimes agents are wrong. But even so, you may grant their wrongness authority because they're literary agents.

Think of them instead as just people. People with training and experience, but nevertheless, people.

Clearly because of her prejudices this agent wouldn't have been a good fit for me, and that's fine. But if I hadn't been able to go back through the manuscript and make sure her assertions weren't correct, I might have gotten discouraged. What if my main character really did drag herself to church under duress like all Religious Fanatics do? What if I really believed five equalled thirty?

In the end, this manuscript did net me a literary agent, although it didn't get us a Big 5 contract. It also placed second in 2013 Write Club and will be published by Philangelus Press in a few months. It's also got a sequel. Why? Because sometimes agents are wrong.

You're going to get nasty critiques. You may get them from members of your writing group (in which case, leave) or you may get them from agents, or you'll get them from editors, and eventually you'll get them from reviewers.

It's our responsibility as writers to make sure our writing is as good as we can get it, of course, and to do that we need to analyze others' comments. Some of the helpful rejections I've gotten were incredibly blunt: "This was confusing," "I hated your main character," and "Your book was boring." Sometimes a remark ("This was just a bunch of events strung together") pointed me toward the query as the problem rather than the manuscript, and then I could change the query to better fit the book.

The above were helpful because when I analyzed, the rejection-writers were absolutely, unequivocably right. The one who told me she hated my main character went on about it at length ("I wouldn't even accept a Twinkie from him!") and it was great because she totally nailed it; I revised and the story got bought by the next market I sent it to.

But we need to recognize that sometimes an agent or editor's comment is not right, and when it's not, we need to let it roll away.

Because rejections? Can be ridiculous. "The stakes are too high" was my favorite. But what do you do with "We just accepted a story with a main character that has the same name," or "When you said the relationship was platonic, I didn't realize it wouldn't be romantic"? What about an endless back-and-forth with a publisher where they insisted an adult novel must be midgrade because it had a child protagonist, and at the same time couldn't understand why the vocabulary, tone and themes (not to mention the length) were aimed at adults?

Laughter helps. Sometimes remembering how subjective it all is will help. So the agent writes a paragraph about how he doesn't connect with your main character? Awesome, but maybe you don't want to write a main character who's exactly like this agent. Shrug it off.

And think about what you do in a bookstore when you're selecting your next read. Do you take them all? No. Why? Sometimes, it's just not right. You may be wrong in your judgment call, but in the end, that's all it is: a judgment call.

Keep your head up. Analyze all comments to find the truth at their back. Use the true ones to improve. But the nasty ones? Laugh at them because doubtless that venom emerges from a place of overwork and burnout, jaded expectations and prejudices you had no hand in forming. Count them as victories because at least your work was notable enough that someone took the time to think of a cutting remark. (Incorrect, but cutting.)

And when you're done having a good laugh, go back to the main QueryTracker site and send another query. Send two for good measure. Let your persistence be the venom's legacy.

Writing a Personalized Query Letter

This month, we’re talking about the query process and query letters—and I admit it’s been a long time since I’ve written one.

So, I thought, since I happen to have a completed manuscript sitting here on my desk (handy, right?) but never wrote a query for it, why not give it a shot?

Writing exercises like this are an excellent way for writers to work on their craft. (Another good exercise? Write a synopsis. That’s like a P90X-level craft workout, right there.)

While I had no query written for this particular book, I did have a hook line written (thanks to this article which I keep on my favorites list. This post is part of series that goes on to discuss the set-up and the conflict. If you haven’t yet read those articles yet, do it now).

I took a few minutes to write my query letter using Elana Johnson’s pointers, and clocked in at 250 words.

Not bad, I thought. I opened with the title, word count, genre, and hook line. I described my character in her place and time, I mentioned her internal and external conflicts, and I talked about the man who pushes her through that important doorway in the story, that point of no return. I followed with a little comparison to other books and closed it politely, professionally. Just like Elana taught us, way back with the QTB was new.

That’s why those articles are classic—the advice works just as well now as it did then.

But writing the query isn’t a once-and-done thing—it is and should forever be an ever-changing individual approach to an individual agent.

I wrote my query before even looking at agents because I wanted to capture the essence of my book in a pitch. However, once I started looking at agent profiles, I realized that I’d have to go back to the query and tweak it.

I’d written the query for me. In actuality, I should have written it for the agent.

One Size Doesn't Fit All
A query template is a very good place to start your query, but you can’t stop there. The next reference should be the agent’s guidelines for querying, because what they want trumps all you do. Plain and simple.

The first agent on my list wanted a letter including background and writing experiences, along with three chapters attached.

The second agent on my list should be mentioned as the target for the query, with the actual query sent to another person. She wanted first four pages included in-message as well as a submission history.

The third agent wanted the query emailed to her personal address at the agency, with three chapters in the body of the email. They also provide a file of queries they’ve received in the past with their reactions/reader commentaries so you can polish your query before sending it.

Three agents, three separate sets of guidelines. Why would it even make sense to send the same query to all three?

Make It Personal
Sometimes, writers are so excited to get those queries out that they take shortcuts. Shortcuts are bad. You’ve spent months, if not years, perfecting your novel. Now is not the time to slap a sloppy generic label on it and spam people with it.

Don’t:

• Start with “Dear Agent”
• Send query as a mass email (more than one agent in subject field. BCC’ing it does not make it all better.)
• Send an identical copy to every agent on your list
• Attach things that are preferred in-message and vice versa
• Assume that an agent will be overjoyed that you disregarded guidelines

Do:

• Start fresh with each letter. Of course you can keep your hook intact, but starting out the query and finishing up fresh each time gives you the chance to personalize the letter to that individual agent. It will keep you from putting the wrong name on it. It will ensure you have the agent’s sub guidelines open in one window while you email them in another. 

They say a book is never truly finished until it’s in the hands of a reader. I think the same applies to a query. A query is never truly finished until it’s been personally written for a single agent. If you can write a book with the hopes of making one single person happy reading it, then the least you could do is provide the same for an agent on your query list.

For more on the topic of querying, be sure to check out Elana Johnson’s series on writing the query  as well as these five mistakes to avoid when querying.

WHY AREN’T I GETTING REQUESTS?

 

You wrote a killer query letter. You polished up your first three chapters to make sure they packed a punch and left the reader wanting more. Then the rejections rolled in. Out of your list of dream agents, not a single one even asked for a partial. Why? Here are some questions to ponder.

You queried widely, but did you query “smart”? Many agents represent the thriller genre, for example. But what kind of thriller? And who does the agent represent? QueryTracker has a handy “Who represents Whom” database. More important, what has the agent sold lately? Publisher’s Weekly has a paid subscription where agents can self report sales, but there are free resources that are only a Google search away that also provide sales information.

QueryTracker provides links on the agent’s profile page to on-line resources where you will find additional information and interviews. This gives you an idea of the agent’s tastes, pet peeves, and favorite authors, which in turn, will help you tailor your query to their specific preferences. Take it a step farther. Thumb through your comparable titles in the store or library and go the acknowledgment pages, where the authors almost always list their agents.

Next: Is the agent’s current list similar to the overall tenor of your manuscript? If not, keep looking. Or, does the agent already have a client who has a book almost identical to yours? If so, why would she want yours? When you look for a good agent fit, book covers reveal a whole lot.  If all of the thrillers listed on the agent’s client page have shirtless hunks on them, it’s a safe bet he or she leans towards thrillers with a heavy romantic arc. Cottages with picket fences suggest a cozy mystery, not a slasher novel.

Don’t overlook the importance of social media, including your own. If your would-be agent is snarky or mean or only tweets about her other day job, do you really want this person as your advocate? Look at your own social media. Do you come across as bitter/whiny/demanding? You can be certain that an agent on the fence about requesting material or making an offer is checking you out on-line.

Did you overlook new agents? Every agent was brand new at some point. If an agent seems to be a good match for your manuscript, is enthusiastic about signing new authors, and is working with a reputable agency, give it a shot.

Did you lead with your genre in your query letter, and if so, are you sure it’s the right one? Your middle grade adventure may actually be a young adult fantasy (I learned that the hard way). If you’re unsure, check out the many on line articles on genre and word count (Chuck Sambuchino has a very helpful one) or run it by the fine folks on the QueryTracker Forums. We are always eager to help each other navigate the querying trenches.

Did you engage in a fearless assessment of your manuscript before you started querying? Yes, your manuscript is your precious baby. But has it been thoughtfully critiqued by someone who is not a blood relative or close friend? Did you have it edited and proofread? Going it alone is a mistake. Find a critique partner or a beta reader. The QueryTracker forum is also a great place to obtain constructive critiques.

Remember, your lack of requests may have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of your writing. True, agents take on what they love, but they also take on only what they think they can sell. A market driven industry doesn’t always result in a meritocracy. Maybe this time querying didn’t result in an offer of representation. It stings, but sometime all you can do is move on to the next project. Here’s to  many QT success stories in 2015, hopefully yours.

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Setting Your Querying Goals

You’ve finished your manuscript and your critique group/partner and beta readers have helped you strengthen the writing and the story. Now you’re ready for the next step: querying.

This month on the Querytracker Blog, each contributor will be sharing tips for querying. Today, I want to discuss your query goals. Yes, I know your goal is to land your dream agent. Am I right? I thought so. Unfortunately, it’s not a goal because you can’t control whether or not you’ll achieve it. A goal is something you have control over.

Let’s assume you’ve written a top notch query that will grab an agent’s attention as early as with the first line. The next thing you’ll need to do is create a list of agents who will most likely be interested in your book. If you’ve written a romance, you don’t want to query agents who HATE all things romantic. That’s just wasting your time and theirs.

Do you have your list of potential agents? Good. Now you need to figure out how many agents you will send your first batch of queries to. You don’t want to send it to everyone on the list at the same time (and I’m not referring to a mass mail out, which you should NEVER do). Maybe you want to send it to five agents at a time. Once they’ve all responded to the query (or after a given period of time to accommodate the non responders), you send out the next batch. You keep doing this until you’ve reach your next goal…

In total, how many agents are you planning to query before you move on? Some writers decide to query fifty agents before they wonder if something is wrong with the book and decide it’s time to move on. Some decide one hundred agents is the magic number. And some writers keep querying agents until their next book is ready to query. If you set a goal, it will push you to keep querying once the novelty wears off (and once you get busy with other things). It also helps to have a goal in mind for when you want to rethink your query and sample pages (usually the first five pages to first three chapters, depending on what the agent requests on the agent’s website). If you’re getting requests on your query and sample pages, then you’re golden. If you’re getting nothing but rejections on the query and sample pages, you need to re-examine those and make them stronger. But before you do that, you need to figure out at what point in the querying process you’ll consider reworking them. It could simply be that it’s not the right premise or voice for that particular agent and there’s nothing wrong with your query.  And while you’re at it, determine how many rejections on partial and full requests you’ll sit through before you re-examine your story premise and writing. It could be that it needs some major rewriting, or it could be that you haven’t found the right agent for the book, yet.

By figuring out your goals ahead of time, it will help motive you to keep trying and help you know when it’s time to shelf the project. It will help remove one level of frustration from the process.

Do you have querying goals?

Breaking Down the Query (the story of a colorful noob getting results)

This post kicks off our series on queries and the query process. Stay tuned for more awesome. 

My path into traditional publishing wasn’t typical. I’ve only written one book, which I recently sold to Knopf in a two-book deal. So, my journey was littered with firsts, and blunders that would make the queen’s guard cringe (but that’s for another post).

When I sat down to write my query, I knew absolutely nothing about them. What surprised me was that I spent as much time researching and writing my one-page query as I did 30K of my novel. I gotta say, though, it was worth it. I sent it to 17 agents, got 7 full requests, and 5 offers of representation.

Below is a breakdown of all of the sections I used and how I arrived at each one.

The Mini-Synopsis – aka make my book sound fantabulous in ten seconds

The idea of cramming my entire novel into a measly paragraph gave me agita. See, I thought the mini-synopsis needed to paint a complete picture of my story, and was super happy to discover it was actually a teaser to inspire an agent to read on.

Once I understood, I found my way to agent Kristen Nelson’s blog, Pub Rants, where she broke down the back of a book-cover into five or six manageable sentences. She explained the purpose each sentence served in a plot description – which was something concrete I could replicate for my own story. My logic was that a book cover serves the same purpose for a reader as a query does for an agent.

Then, I took my pitchy synopsis and compared it to the stuff the fine folks of QT wrote and the honest critiques on QueryShark. I told my ego to “shut up” and I revised, listened to feedback, and revised some more.

The Bio – I wore a skirt suit and tie to my fifth-grade school picture (true story)

Dun dun dun… I had NO writing credits or degrees and was narrowly eyeing this section like it was challenging me to a fight. I had read warnings to omit my multitude of cats and how I hate wet socks. Instead, I made a list of things that represented me best as an author and as a human someone would want to work with.

That list included clubs and organizations I was in (or could join) that related to my book subject matter or target audience, skill sets that would be useful in promoting my work, and any real-world experience that made me the right person to tell my story.

A bio wasn’t necessary and it’s debated how much info should go in there. Personally, I was a fan because I considered it an opportunity to pitch myself. Something I realized later when talking to offering agents was that they googled me, visited my website, and even knew the names of my business partners. It’s important to agents to work with someone they feel confident about, and I used my bio as a place to accomplish that.

The Comparison – Twilight Potter meets Divergent Hunger

I really liked this bit. It was an added bonus where I got to use other people’s radness to make my book look good. I read on lots of sites to avoid gigantically successful stuff and esoteric stuff. Problem was, I couldn’t think of books I wanted to compare mine to. I blame this on my bad name retention and my mother… ‘cause, well, I can, right? I wound up comparing my novel to two movies. The advisability of that is questionable.

Word Count/Genre – transcending boundaries

So, this was a no bueno situation. I couldn’t definitively pinpoint my genre. Therefore I didn’t know what my corresponding word count should be. What I did know was that I didn’t want to be rejected on a technicality. After reading genre definitions, I discovered that the wiggle room was to my benefit as long as I accurately represented my work.

My story, for instance, could be considered YA Contemporary with magical elements or YA light Paranormal. Now, Contemporary was selling well and Paranormal was being treated like the ugly stepsister. Having some working knowledge of the literary market made a difference. Publisher’s Weekly was a great place to find sales info, and lots of industry folks had wonderful blogs about this sort of thing. 

The Personal Intro – where I believed stalking agents was normal

Now I was in eel-infested writing waters. Having a sentence or two telling an agent why I queried her was something I wanted. After all, I spent lots of time choosing agents who would be great at representing my book, had integrity, and had agreeable personalities. But, I had also read all over the interwebs that the personal intro was a gamble, because it’s easy to come off as a cheesy nutter who’s trying too hard.

Of course, I’ve never been afraid of being a cheesy nutter; so full steam ahead. Trusting myself was the most important thing I learned in query-writing. I don’t think my query was successful because it was perfect or followed all the rules. In fact, I broke a bunch of them. I think it was successful because it was intentional, because I did my homework, because I asked for help, and because ultimately it represented me and my writing.

My query was only one variable in gaining representation, but it was one I could control. I couldn’t control market preferences, an agent’s schedule, or how many mss an agent had on her plate. There were also agents that were great candidates for my query, but they already had similarly themed books on their lists. For me, it wasn’t about getting bogged down with the unknowables, but having fun presenting my story.

I felt confident when I emailed my query to agents that I had done my part. I also felt confident that not everyone would find me fabulous. But, I wasn’t just looking for an agent; I was looking for someone who was an excellent match for me.

Our 3rd 5x5x5 Winner!

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She has won a $100 gift card to either Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or ITunes. Her choice.

There are still 2 weeks and $200 to go, so get your entries in now.