30 Queries, 6 Rejections... and a Full-Blown Crisis of Confidence

Rejections didn't break me—my brain tried to do that first.

It has been well-nigh fifteen years since I last attempted to query agents for one of my manuscripts. Last time, I didn’t cast a very wide net and gave up after fewer rejections than I’ve received just in the past week. I never went back to look at my query letter or the manuscript itself. I simply moved on.

Times have a-changed! Back then, it was still primarily email queries, and there wasn’t a great way to track submissions and rejections aside from an Excel spreadsheet. Now, with things like QueryTracker, it’s easy to keep track of all the agents who passed on my manuscript.

But I digress.

That’s not really what I want to talk about today. Let’s talk about rejection.

Rejections are expected. A friend sent me a quote from Stephen King that perfectly encapsulated this idea.

When I set out to query this new manuscript—a YA paranormal romance—I was fairly confident in my story. I’d prepared myself to wait weeks, if not months, for a response. I’m not a patient person by nature, but I convinced myself I could handle the wait. I sorted my query list from fastest to slowest response time and queried accordingly. But the moment I submitted that first query package, something totally unexpected happened.

I’ll get the suspense out of the way: the rejection came the very next day. But that wasn’t the surprising part. What caught me off guard was the flood of failure I felt before the “no” even landed in my inbox.

That’s some bull crap, right there, my friends!

I honestly don’t know what came over me—fear, self-doubt, etc. Then my mind began to spiral and spin around all the “what ifs” surrounding my writing life. What if nobody wants my story? Do I quit writing? Do I self-publish? What if no one reads it? Then what? What’s the point of continuing? (We’ll save that last answer for another post.)

I think it's called impostor syndrome. I’ve struggled with this feeling for a long time—long before I knew it had a name, and even before I started querying again. But I didn’t let it sink its claws into me … for too long. I queried that first agent and a handful of others, then stopped for several days. The rejection came in. I sat with it. Figured out how much it bothered me. Then I pumped out 25 more queries. (The grave mistake I made? That’s a story for yet another post.)

To date, I’ve received six “no’s.” But they really don’t bother me anymore. Most were form rejections, but one was very nice and personalized—even offering for me to resubmit once I trimmed my word count.

There is hope. And I’m not done yet.