Short Post On Busy New Year And Newest Rejection

Happy New Year!


Already it is a busy one for me. I'm in the last strokes of writing my thesis and have several job interviews lined up every week. My personal for-pleasure-novel writing has been shelved until February. I miss it but the days just don't have enough hours these days. 


Just after New Year, Agent #2 of the first three chapters wrote a rejection. I guess it's a good thing I don't have the time to dwell on that right now.

Form letters

Well. You learn something new every day.

Today I received rejection # 5. And realized only now what is meant with a ‘form letter’ (I feel so DOH-worthy – only the smack to the head’s missing). Namely the same pre-written letter sent out to all rejected authors.

Which is fine, except it got me thinking about the other rejections I’ve received. The ones I blogged about in a previous post. I’m wondering if those particular ones were form letters, too?

They were only rejections to queries, of course, so no way for the agent to be specific. But the way they were worded led me to believe that those agents didn’t just send me a form letter. Now I’m not so sure.

Not that it really matters. When/if I start receiving form letter rejections as a response to my manuscript, then I’ll start worrying. At least now I might be able to tell the difference.

Synopsis Saga Part 1

There are several agents I plan to send more queries to as soon as I’ve gone through my manuscript once more – and written a synopsis. These are agents who want to be pitched with a synopsis along with the query and the first pages or chapters. I put them on the backburner until I wrote a good synopsis – a process a lot more difficult and time-consuming than I originally thought possible. But after receiving another rejection – the first to make me feel the discouragement blues, even though it was very nicely formulated – I know I have to tackle that witch with a B.

In essentials, a synopsis is a summary of your book, varying in length from two to five pages, depending on what the agent wants. Like the query, it should arouse interest, be clear as to the characters’ ambitions, and the conflicts they must deal with. Like the query, the synopsis is best kept simple. I personally found this easier to do in the query, because it pitches only the idea, and the major plot points and conflicts – the synopsis must be far more detailed and even include how the story ends, while at the same time keeping it so simple that the reader doesn’t have to back up every second paragraph because s/he is confused by run-on sentences or half-explained events.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was spot-on in saying, “easy reading is damn hard writing”. True, even for a synopsis.

It might seem a little hasty, writing the synopsis now when I’m considering some fairly big revisions. But I have a feeling that writing the synopsis will actually help me with those revisions, since some of them aren’t fully formed yet. Writing a summary will help un-muddle some jumbled ideas before I sit down to rewrite, which could save me a lot of time.

As soon as it’s finished, I’m sending the synopsis to my beta-readers, including people who haven’t read the novel yet. They’ll hopefully be able to tell me where it gets confusing so that I can smooth those parts out.

Author Anne Mini has several great blog posts on the synopsis subject.

Encouraging rejections

Edited to add: interesting Agency Gatekeeper's Blog post on how to query.

Well, I just received Rejection Number 4, and while they were all formulated in a very friendly way, this one leaves me with the most hope, despite it being a negative answer:

"Thank you so much for sending along your query and for giving Agency XXXXX a chance to consider your work. While I found your query intriguing I’m afraid I wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic to ask for more at this time.

As I’m sure you know, publishing is a subjective business and I’m sure there’s another agent out there better suited to your work.

I wish you the best of luck and the greatest success."

Rejection Number 2 was also very encouragingly put:

"Thank you for querying me but unfortunately I'm going to have to pass.

Please don't take this rejection as a comment on your writing ability, because it isn't intended to be one.  I'm sure another agent will feel differently.

Best of luck to you with the submission process."

Of course these might be generic answers which they send to everyone they don’t choose to represent. But I’ve read and heard that a lot of agents try to give individual feedback when writing a rejection, even if it’s not very detailed. Plus, if they had nothing good to say, I imagine they wouldn’t take the time to write as much as they did here, since they probably write dozens of rejections a day.

Considering all this, I’ll give them and myself the benefit of the doubt, and interpret these answers in a good way: sounds to me as if the writing is good and the story intriguing enough, but the book is just not quite right for them.

So here’s a big Thank You! to all agents who take the time to write such encouraging rejections. It softens the blow quite a bit, and actually makes at least this writer enthusiastic about sending out more queries to other agents.

On a side note: I changed my query a little, making it shorter and livelier, ergo hopefully more intriguing. Basically it’s what could become the book’s blurb – the first query was still a little too long and stilted for that, I think. This is still all guesswork at this point, of course, but I’ll be looking forward to other agents’ answers to the new query; maybe I can tell by comparing the answers to both queries whether it has improved or not.