The Art and Science of Query Letters
Rejection is not a topic most people enjoy. In life we have to deal with rejection on occasion, but writers spends hours of purposeful activity knowing the almost certain result is rejection. I do it all the time.
Here is how it works:
In the "old days" publishers allowed writers to send in completed manuscripts to the publishing office. Those manuscipts would get thrown on a pile in the corner called the Slush Pile. Whenever an editor had a few spare minutes, he/she would dig through the pile and look for a promising manuscript (one without grease marks and coffee stains). That editor would spend 2 or 3 minutes paging through it, probably reading the first paragraph or so. Then it would either be tossed in trash or put on a "maybe" pile. Editors sorted through thousands of manuscripts before finding one worthy of publishing.
In the "new days", editors don't have time for all that nonsense. So now they refuse to accept any manuscripts. Instead, literary agents are the gatekeepers. Writers must send carefully constructed (hours and hours of work) query letters to agents, discribing the book and asking the agent to represent the manuscript to a publisher. The odds are astronomically terrible.
One agent posted that in the last several months she has gotten 750 query letters, found 25 that interested her enough to ask to read the whole manuscript, and then signed 1 client. Another agent's website says that they receive about 10,000 queries a year and sign a handful of clients.
Once an author is fortunate enough to have an agent agree to represent them, then that agent begins taking the manuscript to editors, who also do a lot of rejecting. The odds at that point are about 50% of having a publisher offer a book deal.
I have been in the querying process for several months now and surprisingly, I have not been too discouraged. Part of the reason is that the book I wrote was sort of an accident anyway, so although I have since worked VERY hard in revising and polishing, it sort of feels like the book was a gift from God, and it makes the rejection less painful. Another reason is that along the way I have received a couple of very encouraging rejections (imagine a 15-year-old girl hearing "you are amazing and beautiful and smart and just what any boy out there would want, but just not me").
So today I sent out a bunch more.
Agatha Christie was rejected for five years before finding a publisher.
"The Help" was rejected 60 times.
Gone With The Wind got rejected 38 times.
C.S. Lewis was rejected for years before he sold the Narnia books.
Author Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries) kept her rejection letters in a bag under her bed which became too heavy for her to lift.
So, it's not just me. Being rejected is just as much a part of being an author as is the daily discipline of writing. So far, out of 20 queries, I have 11 rejections, no word on the rest, except for one glorious request from an agent, asking to read the full manuscript. In a blog post, that agent said he only asks for fulls if he is crazy about the query. That sounds hopeful. . .
