IX- When you’re ready to be done with trad and you haven’t even started…

My writing journey has been…something.

I’ve been trying to get a literary agent since 2012. Four books, hundreds of queries, a paltry handful of full requests, zero success. Around 2021, I did a complete overhaul of my first Seven Strands book and queried a couple small presses, which is how I ended up at Shadow Spark. I can’t articulate how amazing it felt to finally have someone be like, “This book is awesome, pretty please let us publish it??” instead of the usual “no thanks, not the right fit, it’s not you it’s us, someone else might feel different, good luck” response I was 100% expecting. SSP has been awesome every step of the way, letting me do things I’d never get away with in trad: design my own covers, include my own maps, set my own schedule for releasing books. I get to do my series the way I want it. (Oh, and I get to release the entire series, no matter how the first books perform. Luxury!)

I’m not unhappy as an indie author.

I’m also, frankly, not very good at it.

I’m not a marketer. I’ve never had the kind of friendly, personable, go-get-it, keep-bothering-people personality that it takes to sell anything in this shiny, shitty, saturated economy. And I mean, I’m not looking to sell millions of copies and get recognized on the streets (that would stress me out, tbh). I just wouldn’t mind some resources, you know? The scraps of outsourcing you can do as a trad author without bankrupting yourself.

I decided, early into my indie venture, that I would keep trying for an agent with my standalone books. Ideally, I’d like to be a hybrid author, with one foot in each pond, and I could then see which path I like better. So, as I’ve been writing The Seven Strands, I kept querying the two standalones I’m not willing to give up on yet, and I wrote a third: Dragon Singer. Honestly, writing-wise, I think Dragon Singer is the strongest story I’ve ever written (with my fanfiction series coming in a close second). When I started querying it, I had high hopes. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. Even if it didn’t land me an agent right away, surely plenty of them would read it, like it, give valuable feedback.

Friends, it has been two years.

I’ve had a grand total of three—count them, THREE—full requests in that entire span of time. One ghosted me entirely. One claimed they liked it, sat on the full for seven months, and then came back saying they just didn’t have the time. One enthusiastically requested the full and then rejected it with a form letter informing me that they’re only interested in authors whose identities match their characters.

(Why they didn’t reject it at the query stage instead of getting my hopes up, I have no idea. Especially since they publically promised to give feedback on every full…except mine, I guess, which was another layer of shitty on top of a painful, frankly baffling rejection. That’s a whole other rant, though.)

None of them actually read the story. None.

I’m still querying it. I believe, wholeheartedly, that Dragon Singer deserves a chance to find an audience. The few partial requests I’ve gotten have actually been the most helpful, but of course once you fix the problem that agent points out, you can’t re-query them. You get ONE CHANCE, and once you run out of agents in that genre, well, sucks to be you. Better shelve that book and write another one.

The worst part is, you aren’t allowed to be bitter on main. It’s unprofessional. It marks you as immature, a complainer, someone an agent wouldn’t want to work with. You have to stay positive. It only takes one yes. Another agent might feel differently. Chin up, shut up, don’t blow your ONE CHANCE. Somehow traditional publishing has become a landscape where ignoring and ghosting people is somehow less unprofessional than calling out how messed up that is.

Well, this is my blog, and I’m gonna say it. The querying system is shitty. Hell, people even call it “the query trenches!” When your system of acquiring new talent gets compared to fucking World War 1, shouldn’t that be your sign that it’s not a good fucking system??

Story time: I went to a writing conference back in April. One of the panels they had involved people submitting their first page, having it read aloud, and a group of agents giving feedback. And let me tell you...thanks to all the "Your inciting incident should happen IMMEDIATELY because agents have THOUSANDS of queries to get through!" and "Wow us in x number of pages!" and "Your story needs to jump right into the action!" and “If I don’t know the MC’s motivation at the end of the first page I’m not reading further!” advice trad publishing gives....almost every one of those first pages started the same way.

"Clever snarky self-deprecating first line! Boom! Pow! Things falling down! Gunshots! There's a battle happening, our MC is running for their life, and they’re thinking about how it’s all their fault!"

It was SO BORING, and yet I have no doubt those stories were fantastic once you get past the start. I don’t blame those authors at all, and you know why? Not a single agent on that panel pointed out how all these beginnings sounded the same, let alone self-reflected on why that might be. What the gatekeepers want right now is a VERY SPECIFIC FORMULA so they can get through their inboxes quickly, as much as they loudly insist they want New and Different. If your story doesn’t fit that narrow mold…if it really IS different…everyone knows it’s not getting past the first hurdle.

Frankly, I’m kinda fed up with the whole business. I have been patient. I have waited my turn. I have stood in the fucking line while people who’ve been querying for mere months do all the things I’ve been doing and get agents. I’ve browsed Barnes and Noble and Publisher’s Lunch, reading back cover copy that sounds like variations on the same damn book, over and over. I have honed the hell out of my writing. (I’m still learning; I’ll always be learning). I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. No agent I’ve ever spoken to can tell me what I’m doing wrong. My query letters are fine. I write good stories.

It’s not enough.

There’s the bitterness. It does help to give it a voice every once in a while.

Sure, “another agent might feel differently”…but when no agent in a decade has ever “felt differently” enough to offer representation, isn’t that a sign that the gatekeepers of Trad Publishing are not interested in picking up what I’m putting down? At what point do I call it and throw all my energy into the indie scene?

I’m going to be 41 this year. I’m not getting any younger. Even if I were to get an agent tomorrow, it would still be literal years before I saw that book in a bookstore. I’m tired of sending my work to people who say “nice read, but not rarified enough for my very specific particular taste” and clamor to sign the latest young, savvy, personable Booktokker who can sell a million copies of something just by being pretty. I’m tired of throwing my work at people who don’t have time for it, or worse, who reject it for reasons that have nothing to do with the work itself.

I’m tired.

I’ll keep querying, sure, because it costs me nothing and you never know. But I think, for the time being, I’m only leaving, like, one egg in that basket. The rest, well…I’m gonna finish The Seven Strands, open my Etsy shop, start writing the next thing, do some pottery, get my money’s worth out of Canva.

Maybe learn how to market.