It won’t take much.

I’ve been querying agents, seriously, for going on 4 years now. The two books I’m pitching can be traced back to just before/just after the start of the pandemic. While I left the classroom to try to make it as a full-time author in 2016, nothing I wrote of that time has survived until now. That was my experimentation phase. A lot of posturing, playing around, starting this website, freelancing, and thinking I could do more than I was actually capable of.

In hindsight, I guess it’s kind of nice I had my delusions of grandeur so quickly in my writing career, however much longer it’ll be.

Rejections from agents used to be hard. I wrote a novel back in 2015, fixed it up, had a person or two read it, then felt it good enough to start querying. I think I made it through 6? 7? agents before pulling it back. Those six or seven rejections were enough to make me think I wasn’t the prodigy under 30 who sold their first book ever to a multi-million dollar sale with an Amazon movie deal linked to it.

I was human after all.

Fast forward to now: I take rejections in pretty good stride these days. Being a stay-at-home dad to three boys under the age of five certainly helps keep the mind preoccupied, but I like to think it’s because I’ve learned something since those early days of pitching and researching literary agents.

I’ve learned to not take it personally.

And that came through because of my own reading experiences. I’d see a highly acclaimed book recommended online, go to my local bookstore to grab it, excitedly start reading it, then wonder what the ever loving hell everyone was talking about because oh my goodness was that not a good story for me. I’d think, “What’s wrong with me? Am I just not seeing the genius? Did I miss a chapter or something?”

But no. That’s not it. It’s nothing magical. The book just wasn’t for me. And that’s okay. It taught me that things I write will one day NOT be for everybody. That’s why some agents pass on a pitch. They can take a look at five pages of a piece of work and decide it’s not of their taste. AND THAT’S OKAY. You learn to live with it after doing it for long enough. Agents are human, after all.

But see, that’s just it. It doesn’t take much. It won’t take much. It didn’t take much.

I started this post more than a month ago, June 3, to be precise. I never finished it, but understand its importance now.

Shortly before starting this post I received a rejection letter from an agent. Nothing crazy. In fact, I can’t even remember the agent’s name at the time of writing (July 11). I had a free afternoon gifted by my wife, went to Changing Hands Bookstore, wrote and drank some pints, then decided to pitch an agent. Any agent. I hadn’t submitted a pitch in weeks and was feeling it, that emptiness, that sensation of no sensation. Found an agent. Made sure they were open to what I was selling in the loosest sense, then hit “Submit.”

Two days later they sent back the rejection.

And I cannot tell you the mental damage that rejection letter did. My entire day was spent in a funk, and that funk seeped out into my parental duties, affecting my boys, my wife, my home, everything. I was not a happy camper, to keep it brief.

How? How did one rejection from an agent I barely researched or knew do that?

I still don’t know. Truly. The best I’ve been able to come up with is: I expected failure. I got failure.

When I pitch an agent, when you pitch an agent, there’s a lingering seed of hope left behind once you hit ‘Submit.’ You don’t know whether or not it’ll blossom, but you hope it will. You spend so much time researching, imagining, daydreaming, reading, and hoping this one agent will work for you. (If you do the job right, that is.) You check their status, their Instagram page for any books they’ve loved recently, their Publisher’s Marketplace profile for recent deals, everything, to make sure it all lines up with what you’re selling.

This time, I didn’t. You can harden yourself, prepare yourself, tell yourself that every ‘No’ you get doesn’t mean anything.

This time, I expected failure, I got failure. What else was there for me to feel?

Thanks for reading,

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