Excellent! But No.

When you query your manuscript, asking agents to read your work and decide to represent you and what you’ve written, more than half the time you never hear back from agents. Most say on their websites that after four to eight weeks—give or take a month or two…because, you know—if you haven’t heard anything, then you can consider your MS rejected. It’s rough, not knowing, always wondering.

Sometimes it’s rougher to hear back from agents. You like to know that they’ve rejected you so you can have some closure and move on, but when the rejection’s a form letter and first line reads Dear Author, it hurts. You’ve put all this time and effort into that query—EVERY query—and you wish the agents would at least paste in your name. Only some do.

Some of those not only paste your name into the email, but they also send you a personalized rejection. It’s hard to say if these hurt the worst or the least. They’ve taken the time to look at your stuff—you KNOW they have because they’ve taken the time to write you back—but they don’t want you and your MS anyway. On the other hand, some of these agents will give you helpful hints. They might tell you to try querying some other agent who might be a good fit. They might tell you what exactly led them to reject you, which sometimes is as easy as it’s not for me. (And you get that because when you go to a bookstore, you don’t pick up every book. Of the books you do pick up, you only buy a select few. You’ve read the inside cover or the back and you’ve decided in a few short words if the book interests you or not. More often, it doesn’t interest you. You move on to the next one.) They might tell you something you’ve never heard before, something you’ve never expected, something that makes you love the agent even more.

All three of these have happened to me. One agent told me to query another…but it was the day AFTER I’d gotten a rejection from that other agent. Several agents have said they liked my writing, but the concept wasn’t right for them. Another agent told me my writing was great, the concept wasn’t right, and I could query again sometime with another MS.

And then there was the agent who told me that my pitch (aka query) was excellent, my writing was excellent, the concept was excellent…all great signs that the agent was going to ask me for a partial or full manuscript. Then came the rejection. Basically, I love it, but….

Seriously?

No, seriously???

So close! So very, very, very close. And still a no.

I won’t put the part that came after the but here—it’s not really relevant. Honestly, it sucked to be so close and yet miss completely. But there was also the part of me that was so excited, so happy, because the agent had told me what none of the others had. The agent loved not just my writing, but also the CONCEPT of my story. That meant there was hope, huge hope, that some other agent would feel the same way and not have that but to put after all the good things. That meant I had a great reason to keep querying.

So I’m querying.