One Step Back

Rejection always sucks.  No doubt about it.

Our dream agent — the one who was so enthusiastic and speedy in her praise and interest — has decided to pass on THE LAST PRINCESS, despite our revision.  She did say that our efforts were very good, and that we satisfied many of her concerns.  Interestingly enough, the major reason she stated for deciding not to represent this book was not one she had mentioned in her previous comments.  So I’m not sure how she expected that aspect to change.

It really doesn’t matter. She said no; there’s no point in begging or pleading or asking why.

December and January are notoriously dead months for agents, so we won’t be renewing our querying efforts again until February.  This is probably a good thing, because I don’t want to try to compose query letters feeling down.  Time will heal.

I’m philosophical.  We’ve had rejections before; this is not much different.  Sure, we got our hopes up.  It happens.  That just means there was more than ordinary interest.  There’s nothing bad about that.  But there are two other very positive things about this experience. First, it didn’t take very long.  It would be fairly standard to wait three months to hear back on a query, then another several months to evaluate a full manuscript and provide the kind of detailed feedback we received.  We got through that in little over a week.  Some authors take six months to complete an R&R.  We did it in less than two.  And we had our final answer less than a month after that.  So this could have taken over a year, and we got through it all in about three months.  Second, we got excellent professional feedback on our manuscript, and as a result of our revision, we have a much more marketable and appealing book.  So this one step back is really kind of two steps forward.

In the meantime, we’re moving forward on our second book.  And the more of that we have finished, the better we look when an agent does take an interest.

Advertisement