QUERYING: What to do when you get a query rejection

It happens to almost everyone while querying, a rejection. It can be a rejection to a query letter, to the first 5 or 10 pages of your manuscript, to a partial, or even to a full. Whatever it’s to, it will hurt.

It hurts because you care, and that’s okay. The agent isn’t evil for rejecting the work you put your blood, sweat, and tears into, but you’re also not immature for being hurt from rejection. It’s all part of the process. And it’s a good thing that you’re getting rejections, because each rejection is a step closer to your goal of signing with your future agent.

It’s a sign that you haven’t stopped trying, and continuing to write, query, and take rejections is all you can do. There will be people out there who find their agents right away, and there will be people out there who have to query for years to find the right agent for their path. For example, I’m on the third year of my querying journey and querying my fourth manuscript. I’ve had a lot of rejection at this point (166 so far to be exact), but I will never let that stop me.

Querying isn’t for everyone. Some people will choose to self publish, some will choose to work with independent publishers, others will stop trying to query entirely. And that is completely up to them. There are people that can market better than large publishing houses (especially with the rise of bookstagram and booktok) and there are others that love complete control over the process. Many people who choose to self publish have control over their covers, wordcount, release date, and other elements of a final book that traditional publishing typically does not give to the author.

However I do not have an interest in that. I only want to write.

And a bonus to that would be to share my writing with other people that would like it. I like sharing my writing with my friends, but not everything I write is for them. As someone who likes to read across multiple genres, I like to write across several genres.

Romance, fantasy, and thrillers are just some of the genres that I like to read and write. The feeling that I get when I read a new favorite book, sometimes I get that from writing. And then sometimes I’m with a friend that’s read my writing who has a favorite part or gushes over the writing, and I imagine what it’d be like to give that experience to someone else.

And those are the times that I keep on querying.

Rejection hurts, but it’s part of what I need to accept while following my dreams. So today, when I got a rejection from an agent that I had thought was perfect, someone that I really thought would like the premise of my manuscript), I let myself feel everything that comes with rejection.

Disappointment.

Annoyance.

Self-doubt.

Anxiety.

But then I go through the motions of the rest of my life.

Get a drink of water.

Take a short walk.

Read a fun book.

Watch an episode of a comedy (or in my case, Kdramas like Marry My Husband)

And I get back to work. I always have a current project when I’m querying. Because as much as I love the projects I’ve queried, there’s no guarantee that I’ll find the right agent with that project and/or there’s no guarantee that it’s the right project.

With every manuscript I’ve queried, when I start out, I always start with the hope that this will be the story that get’s me an agent. I’ll love everything from the characters to the storyline to the pacing and every other part of the project, but it’s way to easy to fall into the habit of measuring the success of your days to the numbers of queries you send and the number of replies you recieve.

I know many query-ers will know what I mean by feeling over-joyed when you get requests for full manuscripts, and it’s easy for me to ride that high all day. But even though I had 6 full requests for my last manuscript, none of them resulted in offers. If I want to share my writing with the people that I know will resonate with my stories, I can’t let the disappointment from those failed fulls completely rule the rest of my writing career.

I’ve written several works that I’ll never query, one of them being a dragon rider college that’s very much cottage core peace-time romance with the backbones of a potential Fourth Wing fanfiction, but I believe I am 100% still a writer because of some of these works. Writing projects not for the sake of querying but for feeding the creative soul is a must when you’re feeling drained.

Writing the kinds of projects that make you want to keep writing aren’t necessarily the projects that will get you an agent, but if they make sure you keep writing, they’re just as good as a query-able project. And who knows, maybe one day you’ll need something from your backlist and your unquery-able project can make its debut.

Either way, I hope you know that I’m with you. Rejections are draining. And you can get a lot of them when you’re querying, but each one means you’re one query closer to the query that’ll get you an offer. Until then, all you can do is keep writing.

Love,

EJP