Agent Queries - A Write of Passage

First of all, a novel is never finished, merely abandoned.

I heard George Lucas say that about movies once. I may have even mentioned something like that in a previous blog post. I definitely feel that way about writing. I could literally rewrite my stories forever.

I've rewritten my novel manuscript several times (depending on what you count as a rewrite, it could be as many as eight times), and even though it's not 'finished', it's ready for the 'Publication Process'.

What does that mean to me?

I firmly, firmly believe you shouldn't submit your work if it's not up to scratch. You shouldn't be relying on editors (of various kinds) doing your job for you. I also personally don't believe in hiring editors to review my work prior to entering the publication funnel. A professional writer should be able to edit their own work - copy edit, proofread etc. etc. You claim to be an author? Then prove it.

But I also recognise that an agent and a publisher's editor(s) will demand rewrites and edits and changes. That means I have more rewrites in my future. I get that.

In the meantime, the manuscript is as good as I can get it without the specific requirements of an agent/publisher factored in. It's time to find an agent.

Anybody that might be reading this already knows the agent querying process. If you don't, there are thousands of blogs, articles, videos and other resources to learn from. I've read and watched them all.

In this post I will touch on a couple of gaps in the market for querying advice.

One: writers are told to develop their wish list of agents. To find the agents they really, really want to represent them. They're rarely told how to land those particular agents. The implication is that new writers should query the agents on their wish list. Query them first, I guess? Right off the bat I thought that was a bad strategy. When I began querying, last month, I knew very little about the practice. I'd read about it. But that's not the same thing.

My query letter would probably evolve as I received feedback from agents. (It has.) My manuscript might change as a result of agent feedback. (It did.). I might learn about which agents to avoid. (?)

I started out building a list of 20 or so agents (all of which met the basic criteria: accepting queries in my genre and with some fundamental bona fides). That first 20 were known to provide a response quickly. Assuming those first 20 would all reject my submission (good assumption for any writer), they would at least provide me fast feedback. That seemed to work. Most of those rejections provided no feedback. A couple did.

"Sounds interesting..." Better than nothing. An indication I'm not completely out of my mind.

"Unfortunately, I wasn't drawn in as I want to be to pursue a project." Does that indicate the opening pages weren't doing enough? Do they need to 'draw in" more, right up front? I rewrote the first chapter, halving its length, and hopefully ramping up the 'drawing in' before querying more agents.

"You have a lot of potential, you're a skilled writer. However, my editorial vision for it didn't coalesce..." That was nice of her to say. Doesn't help me tweak my query letter or book, but it gave me a morsel of hope for the future.

"We appreciated your knack for setting an immersive scene; your descriptions of Kyle's surroundings were vivid and allowed us to feel as though we were beside him. However, we felt there was slightly too much exposition for us to connect fully with your narrative. Even though we found great qualities within your query and synopsis, we didn't connect with the sample pages as strongly as we had hoped to champion the project." That kind of feedback to invaluable to a writer (as I'm sure they know). It's only one data point, but it helps to validate the hours put in on setting and atmosphere. It also corroborates the other feedback - that the opening chapter needed to be rewritten. Strangely, the complaint was over exposition. I actually feel like there is almost no exposition. At all. Maybe it's a typo. Rejection hastily written. Or maybe a different definition for the word exposition.

Bottom line. I took some encouragement from the first round of querying. I rewrote the opening chapter to make it shorter (half the length) and pack more of a specific punch. And I rewrote my query letter. I'm now on version four of my query letter. And I've changed the working title of my book.

But that's a story for the next Agent Query blog post.