Well, I haven't gotten out as many queries as I would have liked to by now ... and I'm disgruntled by the ones I've sent out recently.
I've sent queries to two agents who are renowned non-responders. If you check the comments on Query Tracker for these agents, it's one C/NR after another. In fact, one of these agents is listed in the number one spot in the top 10 non-responding agents.
I also sent a query to someone who is listed among the top 10 most rejecting agents.
(Of course, these lists are based solely on data taken from Query Tracker and may not represent the agents overall, but still ...)
I just sent a query out to an agent who was very particular in her submission guidelines regarding how the query should be formatted, etc. When I checked my sent folder, my email program changed the font for the body of the email to a sans serif font, while the salutation was left in a serif font.
!!!
Why this happened only in the email to the agent who was very specific, I'll never know. What I do know is that it ended up looking incredibly cheesy and ridiculous, so I'm not expecting much from that one.
So, I've submitted eight queries so far and had one rejection. I sent out close to 40 queries the first time around, so I still have a lot of work ahead of me. I think I'm just in a "self-loathing" phase right now.
A year or so ago, I was doing some writing at the same time as my good friend Steph, and we would talk about how, some days, we just felt so ON, so good about what we were writing, and then other days - i.e., the self-loathing days - we'd start doubting what we were doing, wondering why we even thought we had talent.
Steph's done the whole query process thing, with the full requests and the R&Rs and the rejections and all that. I think she has three books written, but right now, she's rockin' out as a world-famous* photographer.
So anyway, yeah ... feeling a couple notches down from hopeful right now, but I know it's only a phase and I'll snap out of it soon enough.
*Okay, so maybe not WORLD-famous. Yet.
2 comments:
see http://problogservice.com/2012/07/11/stories-rejection-soothe-artists-soul/ . . contains some of my favorite stories of rejection - esp. ones Stephen King shares in *On Writing* . . MH
Ooh, I enjoyed reading that! And just before the article reader gets all smug, the article writer applies the smack down - "you have to write and rewrite and rewrite." Sigh. But seriously, can you imagine being the agent who turned down Harry Potter!?
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