My Querying Nightmare
 

This actually happened to me: I screwed up a bunch of queries. By "screwed up" I mean majorly and by "a bunch" I mean fortyish. Fortyish before I realized my mistake. Yes. I did that. Here's how the unfortunate circumstance went down, and what I learned from it. 

​

I was nervous when I first started querying, but it was lessened by the fact that I'd been a budding playwright many years prior, and had several works presented in public workshops and staged readings. It's a good experience for a writer because after the actors are done reading your play aloud, you get immediate feedback from the invited audience. Sometimes it's not terribly helpful advice—like when someone said they didn't like any of my characters' first names in one particular play. Noted, I thought, but I certainly wasn't going to change them. But other times, a random person could, and did, make a great suggestion. Feedback is gold. It helped me become conditioned to people not being quite as into my beloved work as I was, so it didn't hurt my feelings when they said so. It made me want to make my work better. 

​

I knew querying literary agents would bring about rejections. I thought I was being careful to prepare my adult conteporary fantasy novel submission materials exactly as they were required to be by each individual agency. I'd been querying for about two months when I happened to glance at the bottom paragraph of my query letter—and saw a glaring typo. My heart froze because I was positive that before I sent anything to anyone, I'd spellchecked it all multiple times. It wasn't a casual misspelling, either, it was a very obvious, repeated word. To me, it screamed, I don't bother to proofread my stuff before I send it to very important strangers who might be able to help me launch my novel writing career.

​

Panicked, I went back and looked at all the querying documents in my Google Drive. I knew I'd done several versions of the query letter itself, the goal being to improve on the previous one each time instead of having one big, unruly document, but I'd named the various documents almost exactly the same thing. There's the mistake. To my horror, I realized the document I thought I was sending never left its digital parking spot, and instead, I was sending actual professional literary agents the one I hadn't edited and spellchecked. For the love. I knew I looked like a moron. Lesson learned. I don't name different document files similar things any more, that's for sure!

​

Immediately, I started using the right document. I didn't resend my corrected query letter to agents with an "Oops" note; they get a blizzard of emails on the daily, anyway, and I didn't want to call out the fact that I'd done something dumb if they hadn't read it yet. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do. Querying has taught me that you have to have blinders on when it comes to dealing with rejections. You can second-guess yourself all you want, but it won't help in the slightest. I'm currently at 70+ rejections for the book. Instead of getting depressed about it, I realized it's just another part of the game of Getting Published. Every author gets rejections. Literally every one. 

​

When we query, we're trying to find the agent out there who sees in our work what we do. That's a hard person to find, but I remain hopeful that I will. So, if you're querying and getting rejected, wherever you are in this world, congratulations, and welcome to the club.

​