Lessons After Three Years Querying

Everything I'd tell my past self before facing the trenches and writing more books.

For those who may not be aware, I spent three years querying before I landed my agent. I went from anxiously waiting for replies that never came to getting multiple requests the same day I posted my novel, Ravenous Appetites, was query-ready, and offers within days. I still stand by what I’ve always said, that the publishing industry combines luck and timing, but there were also a few key lessons I took away from my experience. Here’s a breakdown so you don’t make the same mistakes I made:

Pitching Is Key

My first mistake was not working on my pitching skills. I wanted to convey too much all at once. I was in such a rush to explain how cool the worldbuilding was, and the stakes, and the romance, but also mention this other backstory, that my blurb was too messy.

I can’t stress this enough: find your elevator pitch. Getting your concept down to one single sentence is going to help immensely both in drafting the book and writing the query letter. This means being prepared to omit certain elements. If romance is a subplot in your story, you won’t be able to dedicate that many lines to talking about it, and it won’t even be mentioned in your elevator pitch. That’s okay. An elevator pitch only needs to convey the main concept to hook the audience. Once they’re hooked, you’ll introduce the rest.

No matter how well-written your book is, if you can’t pitch it, traditional publishing won’t pay attention.

Pitching also includes writing a compelling blurb. I shared a few tips about that in my post about my query letter.

Nail The Concept

Write what you love, yes, but traditional publishing is a business. Your book will need to be marketed in a way that makes you stand out, so if you want to take this route, that’s something to keep in mind. Sometimes all you want to do is write that 7-book-long series with multi-POV that reads like LOTR, but that’s not doing you any favors when you face the trenches as a debut author.

When I started drafting my latest projects, I was writing what I wanted, but I was also taking into consideration the outcome from an agent's and even an editor’s perspective. I wanted to write dark academia, but I also trimmed down on wordbuilding aspects because I knew crowding the academia aspect would make it harder to pitch and also harder to keep my manuscript around the dreaded 100k-word range. At the same time, I was aware that dark academia books were still quite popular, which meant there was a place in the market for me.

Don’t write for the market, but don’t ignore the market either.

I wrote books with concepts that wouldn’t sell at the time. That doesn’t mean they won’t ever sell or that they were poorly written. I’m glad that I wrote them because they taught me a lot about craft, but I also understand why agents didn’t pick them up.

These years have given me the perspective to understand why something didn’t work out without feeling like a complete failure. Let the rejection sink in, evaluate it, and move on. Those experiences will help immensely in the future.

The Balance Between Generic and Demanded

You know how I was talking about making sure your concept fits the market? Well, be careful with that because you do want to remember to stand out. I call this the Christmas Movie Paradox. They’re all the same story, but each has this one little thing that allows you to say “no, in this one, she owns a bakery, and he works in a private equity firm wanting to turn the bakery into a Starbucks”. This is important because the differences between them appear in the pitch itself. They follow the conventions of certain tropes and genres, but can be quickly set apart conceptually without you needing to go in-depth overexplaining how your book stands out in a crowded market.

At some point, I wrote a book with generic concepts. The execution was meant to differ from what I had read on those tropes, but they were still being pitched as such. In no detriment to the story, the pitch and blurb screamed “we have too much of this”. The tweaks to the archetypes weren’t that noticeable from the blurb alone, and while I had plenty of comps to indicate that there was a demand for it, my own story was presented as too generic.

Think about “brooding dark-haired love interest”: we have a LOT of those, but they’re popular, right? Yes, but they won’t make you stand out unless you pair them with other elements that will pique their interest.

It’s risky to bet on the execution of your writing alone if you deliver a generic, overdone concept.

Debut Authors vs Popular Authors

Stop looking at bestsellers without the context of their careers. This is especially true in the fantasy genre, where we are seeing people landing book deals because they went viral on TikTok or they self-published and sold very well.

You’d think that because those books are bestsellers, surely agents and editors are looking for similar concepts in debut authors.

That’s not how it works. The self-published author with a 180k-word book who then went trad is a unicorn story, not your point of reference. It’s not the same for you to query an agent with an overdone concept than for a publishing house to see a TikToker gain a massive following with her overdone concept. The latter has guaranteed sales; you’re just contributing to the slush pile.

Instead, check debut authors who went through what you’re in now. Look at the success of a writer who queried two years ago, landed an agent, and is now publishing books in your genre. Odds are you’ll see trends for those authors that differ from other bestsellers who went through a different process.

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This also means you have to follow the general advice you’ve seen everywhere: keep your word count closer to 100k words or less, work on your pitch, and know how to place your book in the market without comping to multi-million-dollar sales. The points I’ve stated here are advice I haven’t seen mentioned often in ‘querying tips’ articles, which I think could help someone who’s currently about to draft another manuscript to brave the trenches.

You’ve got this! Keep going!