4 Things I’d Do Differently While Querying
On March 10, 2021, I checked my email while sitting in a parking lot and saw I had a reply from one of my top choice literary agents, Emily Sylvan Kim at Prospect Agency. She was the first agent I’d queried with my new manuscript, and a few weeks earlier she’d requested the full. I was tentatively hopeful—as always—but I’d been there before with other manuscripts so I sighed and thought, great, another rejection. Except when I opened the email it was an offer of representation. I’m not ashamed to tell you I burst into tears.
(20 Literary Agents Actively Seeking Writers and Their Writing.)
If you’re a writer querying agents, you know how tough it is out there, and at that point I had been in the query trenches a long time. Over the span of 12 years and eight books, I’d racked up over 300 rejections (but who’s counting?). The ninth book I wrote, I decided to try a completely different subgenre: historical romance. The result was Never Blow a Kiss, the book that found me my agent and a home at Forever/Grand Central Publishing.
If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you (1) Are a writer who wants an agent; (2) Want to be traditionally published; and (3) Are already doing everything right. You’ve studied dozens upon dozens of posts from Query Shark, you’ve read sample queries in publications like this one, and you’ve scoured “how I got my agent” blogs until your eyes have bled. You’ve joined Querytracker and have carefully selected your top agents open to queries that represent books in your genre. You’ve studied the MSWL of your dream agents. You’ve polished your work, read your pitch out loud, sent your queries in batches, and you’ve been polite in all of your correspondence.
And you’re still getting nos. I’ve been there. It’s beyond frustrating and crosses the line into heartbreaking at times. There is no magic answer for querying, but here are four things I either did, or would do differently if I had to query all over again:
1. I would enter my manuscript in writing competitions before querying.
For Never Blow a Kiss, I did something I’d never done with my other manuscripts: I entered it in several competitions before I queried it, and the advice I got back from published, seasoned romance authors was invaluable. Those first chapters would not be the same without the no-holds-barred critiques I received from some of the judges, and I will forever be grateful.
They didn’t know me and they had no reason to spare my feelings about what wasn’t working, and I’m convinced Never Blow a Kiss would be languishing on my computer this very moment if I hadn’t polished the first chapters with those comments in mind. The best part is that you’ll get the benefits of established author critiques whether you win the competition or not.
2. I would sign up for at least a one-month membership of Publishers Marketplace.
This one costs money, and as a querying writer I never saw any reason to spend $25 on a subscription I didn’t think would benefit me. And yet when I finally signed up for a month, I was stunned to discover that several of the agents I’d queried in the past were not the best fit for me or my writing—at all.
While some of them said they represented romance on their websites, their sales didn’t reflect that. Other agents had made sales only to certain presses, or only to digital presses (there is nothing wrong with digital presses; there are some lovely digital-first presses out there, but I personally wanted the option to submit to print publications as well). Others hadn’t made sales in over a year.* I was able to analyze what agents had just sold, and what editors were buying. Seeing this information when I was querying would have helped me more precisely target who I wanted to send my work to.
As a side, I realize $25 may be a hardship for some people, and in most of the writing groups I’ve been in group members can be very generous in helping other members find information about specific agents if they ask!
Check out Lindsay Lovise’s Never Blow a Kiss here:
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3. I would attend in-person conferences.
A lot of conferences cost money, but some are free. This year I attended the Yale Popular Romance Fiction Conference, which was free (and fantastic), and the entire time I was there all I could think was: I should have been doing this all along.
I should have made it a point to attend conferences when I was querying, but I never did because I felt like a fraud. And because I didn’t feel like a real writer, I didn’t think I belonged. Plus, it can be really hard to arrange the responsibilities of our lives around conferences!
Since then, the seminars I’ve taken at conferences, the marginalized voices I’ve heard, and the friendships I’ve made have been incredibly valuable. The community of writers can be so powerful, and you never know who you will meet or what new skill you will learn. I can’t help wondering how much further I’d be in my writing career if I’d put myself out there earlier, if I’d forced my introvert self to make those connections and learn those lessons. I’ve attended virtual conferences, and as great as they can be, in my opinion they can’t compare to in-person networking.
Oh, and by the way, I quickly learned that absolutely no one was judging me at the conferences based on my publishing success—or lack of. In my experience, attendees are focused on learning from one another without competition or ego.
4. I would cut my first two chapters.
This advice will not apply to every person or every manuscript. For me personally, I noticed time and again that my story was starting in the wrong place. Even after I partnered with my agent, Never Blow a Kiss was still starting in the wrong place. After one rejection from an editor, I took a good hard look at those first two chapters. I ditched the prologue, nixed the second chapter, and restructured the entire beginning. (And that’s when I started getting publishing offers!)
Writers hear all the time that they need to jump into the action, that they shouldn’t info-dump, and that prologues are the devil incarnate—but hearing this information and seeing it your own work can be two different things. I’d like to think I have this down now that I’ve sold four books and I’m writing my 13th, but sometimes I still get several chapters into a new manuscript and realize with dismay that it all needs to go.
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If you’re wondering if this could apply to you, take out the first several chapters of your book and see if the manuscript still makes sense, or if it could make sense with a few tweaks. If it does, your opening pages might benefit from some word slashing.
In the end, querying success comes down to so many moving parts that go beyond what we can control as writers: what the market looks like, who is already on an agent’s existing author list, the editors an agent has connections with, and just plain luck. Some of you might already be doing the above things, and in that case I hope your pitch hits the perfect agent at the perfect time. If you’re not doing the things on my list (like I wasn’t), I hope at least a few of the suggestions have resonated with you and you can work them into your writing plan.
Lastly, if at any time you’re feeling low about a rejection and aren’t comforted by the person with 12 rejections heroically telling you to keep your chin up, I humbly offer you the visual of 300+ rejections crammed into this author’s inbox. You’re not alone. You’ve got this.
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*Not all agents and editors submit data to Publishers Marketplace.