The Query Trenches
Navigating the process of querying literary agents while maintaining your sanity.
In 2017, I graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing. Along with that came my thesis project which I was sure would be the novel that would get me and agent and would kick off my professional writing career. As part of the thesis submission, my novel had to be read by three professors, all of whom had been published professionally. All of whom had literary agents. Aside from a few minor suggestions—which I promptly addressed—the reviews were glowing.
I was ready.
I had to be. I had workshopped a query letter, I had a polished novel. It was time to start firing away to agents. When I began that process, I had no idea what to expect. The cohort I was a part of had a bit of exposure because one of the adjunct professors in the program was not only an author but a literary agent. It would be a conflict of interest to query him, but he did provide insights into the process. But something I’ve learned since then is that agents are not the best people to provide these insights. It’s other authors and your own earned experience.
And did I ever earn my experience.
I didn’t connect with other authors who were querying. Others in my MFA program weren’t there yet. So, I experienced this alone and without an understanding of what to expect. Sure, I expected rejection. I had grown used to that while submitting short stories to journals. But the rejection that comes along with querying agents somehow feels more final, more painful. Querying an agent is the first step in a multi-step process to getting a book traditionally published. Failing, as I’d come to label it, at the first step was brutal.
I also didn’t use any tools. I was so naive and lost. I manually searched for agents by looking through books I liked, Googling who the authors’ agents were, and compiling a list in a spreadsheet. Even in 2017, this was archaic. But I did it, and I built up a list of 20 agents to query. Knowing what I know now, I realize that was a tiny pool.
But here’s what made things worse. I didn’t even query all 20 agents. I queried—wait for it—seven.
Now, I’ve written about tenacity and how when you have creative optionality, tenacity is especially hard, so that contributed to this. But the other thing that contributed to it was how alone I was in this process. It was the first time I’d done anything like it, and every rejection felt like a door slammed in my face. I hadn’t learned from others, I hadn’t learned from my own experience.
When things got tough, I didn’t just give up because they were tough. I pulled back from querying because I didn’t know better. I was also going through a growth stage in my tech career and learning to be creative with code. So I rationalized to myself that I was fulfilling my creativity that way.
Writing never left me. Or, I never left writing. I just took a six year hiatus from the business side of writing. In late 2023, I dusted off a novel I had written right after I finished my MFA program. By then, I think it had been sitting in a metaphorical drawer for four years. Let me tell you, if you want space from your novel, give it four years. Just kidding, don’t do that. That’s way too long.
This space though gave me a truly fresh pair of eyes to read the manuscript and analyze it. It was good. Much better than the novel I had queried in 2017. I spent a year rewriting, editing, finding beta readers, reading out loud, printing, reading again, and editing again before I felt like it was ready. I also learned how to find community. I found other writers on Threads. I followed Book Threads and Author Threads and Writer Threads. As I found myself closer to querying again, I followed the QueryTrenches Threads. I read hundreds of submissions on Query Shark. I spent hours on Reddit’s PubTibs subreddit. I listened to The Shit No One Tells You About Writing constantly.
And when the new year rolled around, I felt ready to query. This time, I was mentally prepared. I had knowledge and a community and reasonable expectations. I knew of the tools and I knew how to research agents better. And I treated my query process like an experiment.
I knew that if I was not getting a bite on my query letter, I should consider two main things:
If the agents were the right agents for my book
If my query letter was doing its job
Through these early experiments, I refined my query letter and I got better about selecting agents. I’ll have to write an entirely separate post about the process I finally landed on for finding agents to query, but through all that trial and error, I found a group of agents that I felt were perfect. I, of course, had my favorite. I waited to query that top choice just in case there were any other tweaks I wanted to make. But I felt as prepared as I could possibly be.
Throughout this entire process, I received rejections. Plenty of them. On some days, I felt that old pain in my gut that told me I wasn’t good enough. Thankfully my wife was always there to remind me that I was. But in the round of queries where I felt like I had best refined the list of agents to match my book’s content, something changed.
I received an immediate request for a full manuscript from one agent. Then another. With this confidence, I queried my top choice, and received a full request from that agent as well. Within a couple of days, my top choice agent wanted to have The Call.
Two weeks ago, he offered me representation, sent me a template contract, and told me to take the time I needed to notify other agents and give them a chance to respond.
Since then, I’ve accepted and am officially an agented author! I’ll write more about this soon, but I am happy to be able to say the tenacity paid off. The experience paid off.
But I couldn’t have done it without finding the resources I did, finding the community I did, and finding the tools I did. I’ll link to as much as I can below, but if you’re querying, keep at it. It’s hard, and nothing is guaranteed. And remember, if it doesn’t work out, you can ALWAYS write another book.
Resources