When there's deafening silence, you have to listen more closely

Two great blog posts today from Rachelle Gardner and Janet Reid lay it on the line about what it means when you're getting no feedback from agents. (Here it is in short, if you're too lazy to click: it means epic FAIL.) This is not the first time I've heard this in recent weeks; several other agents have said as much on Twitter, albeit with a little less tact.

This revelation has put me into a serious funk. I've been hearing for years that when an agent sends you a form rejection, it doesn't mean that your writing isn't good, it just means it wasn't right for them. Coulda been anything, they say. "Go on, keep sending out those queries; did you hear how many times Harry Potter was rejected?" (Well, way less times than my book, actually. About a third as many times. But who's counting?) And so I did. Again, and again, and again. (To be fair, I did get two requests for partials eventually—and two polite letters saying it was well written but didn't excite them.)

If someone had been honest with me about what those silent rejections meant ten years ago, I would not have doggedly pursued representation for a manuscript that clearly was not even close. I would not have spent $4,000 on the Maui Writers' Conference (yeah, I'm that stupid) to pitch it to agents who had already rejected it during the pre-conference Manuscript Marketplace (pre-conference, but post-payment; no, I didn't feel at all like a chump getting on that plane for Hawaii). I would not have held onto that story for so many years, feeling brokenhearted every time I got a rejection letter but climbing back on the horse, because after all, it probably just wasn't right for them and someone would love it. It finally took a crippling depression for me to let it go and start something new.

That something new has so far received two form rejection letters. I consoled myself with thinking it simply wasn't right for those agents, rewrote my query letter, and got ready to send it out again. Reading those blog posts today gave me pause. Am I just going to keep repeating the same actions and expecting different results? How many silent rejections should I accrue before I get the message this time? Five? Ten? Twenty? If it weren't for the encouraging feedback I got at the Editors' Intensive, I would say that number was two.

So while I am going to send my little darling out there again, another dreadful possibility keeps me awake at night. Maybe, just maybe, I simply cannot write a query letter to save my life. I may have written a really great book...and a dozen iterations of an astoundingly bad query.

I've taken the WOW query writing class. I read Chuck Sambuchino's blog religiously. I follow Nathan Bransford. I have read dozens of other great blogs on querying. I have books on it. And yet I still managed to write a query that friends told me succeeded in making a really exciting story sound dull. (I have since rewritten it several more times, but how would I know a good query from a duck? I thought the first one was good after all.)

Maybe I'll finally figure out the answer to that one in another ten years.