Thursday, October 18, 2012

Query Time and Tax Season

Susie Sheehey is president of Greater Ft Worth Writers, in her second term. She writes women's contemporary and romance and has completed two novels in the past year, and is struggling at the half-way point in another. She lives with her husband and rowdy 4-year-old son who loves to push her buttons. 


I'm knee-deep in that time in my career again… Queryville.  Which inevitably conjoins with Reject-o-season. Much like tax season. It’s painful. ‘But necessary.’
Thanks to some help from dear friends, I had a query letter and synopsis written up fairly quickly and sent out to an agent whom I’ve followed for years. And after a glorious week of anticipation, tax season showed up.
It hurt. I won’t lie, my hopes were built up on this one. I thought it was a perfect fit for them and this manuscript felt better than any of my others. But I have to be grateful I received a response at all. Many people don’t hear anything back when rejected.
But that means I simply have to query out to the masses as I did before. Semi-slowly. Four or five at a time and wait for a few weeks. Which means I need to bust out querytracker.net again and rifle through all the profiles and submission guidelines.
I've since submitted this manuscript into a few online contests (another great reason to follow agents and editors on Twitter), and have received 2 full manuscript requests from it. I know it will be a while until I hear back, but it's 2 more manuscript requests than I've ever had!
Of course, with those 2 requests, I've received another half-dozen rejections. Always hand-in-hand. An ugly partnership.
At this point, I think I’ll take Queryville and Reject-o-season over the horrible season called Presidential Election campaigns. Publishing is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed school girl compared to the upcoming attacks of the political Olympics.
Follow Susie on her blog at susansheehey.wordpress.com
Follow her on @susieQwriter or Facebook www.facebook.com/susiesheehey.

1 comment:

Ruby Johnson said...

It's hard in the publishing field right now and some who were rejected 60 times in a better economy got published (i.e. The Help) I think that's why so many authors are going the Indie route. Keep up the submissions. You have a good novel even though it's depressing getting those rejections.

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