Querying Agents Is a Whole Mood
LA County Library hosts the Next Chapter Writers’ Summit, Sunday, Oct. 5, 2025, at the West Hollywood Library, West Hollywood Park and West Hollywood Aquatic Center. (Photo by Michael Owen Baker)
I’m still here on this website. I’m not on Substack or Medium, I didn’t start a podcast, and I haven’t yet published a book. So, still blogging. In fact, if/when (WHEN) I do publish a book I will still blog.
Current mood: querying agents. That’s the part of the book publishing process in which the writer sends a very specific letter and various sample pages to agents via email or a service called QueryManager, seeking representation for her manuscript for the act of selling it to a publisher. It’s like finding a REALTOR to help you sell your home, except that where there are far more REALTORS than houses for sale, in this case there are far more books for sale than literary agents.
But. There are a LOT of agents. As one agent recently told me, there are thousands of them, and it’s all about finding that one person who is right for you and your book.
I finished my manuscript last fall, just about a year ago, and a full ten years from the day that I started writing it. (During that ten years, I lived a lot of life, so even though it took me so long to finish writing the story, it became much richer and dare I say better for it.) I spent the next 8 months making sure it had no typos or formatting errors, and writing the synopsis and my first versions of my query letter. Then I started querying in earnest in July.
So I’ve been at it now for over three months. It takes me about an hour to do each query because I research the agent and what they are looking for, try to find anything they have said about their current taste online, maybe anything we have in common or something that would help me personalize my pitch, then I labor over just the right thing to say, then I click send or submit. Today I tried to do more of them, because I am realizing that it’s a numbers game – the more I pitch the more likely I am to find that one special person who connects with my story.
I even met that one agent in real life last weekend at a writing conference hosted by our local library system. It was a fantastic day – free of charge – featuring panel discussions and Q&A’s with published authors, one-on-one meetings with literary agents, and small group chats with editors. I had a 15-minute one-on-one with a lovely agent who had already been on my list to pitch. She was kind and gracious and gave me great feedback on my pitch. I also met other writers who are also in various stages of the pitching process. It felt great to be submerged in a community of creative people for a whole day like that. Kind of like the world of blogging back when we first started.
Days go by when I don’t hear anything from the agents, and then every now and then I’ll get a response. Almost all of them have been kind rejections. One of them was a request for me to send my full manuscript! But mostly it’s crickets. Prevailing advice for debut novelists is to get right into working on your next book while you are querying, to take your mind off of the waiting and channel your energy away from dwelling on rejections and into something creative and new. Welp. Writing this novel took a lot out of me. I am not ready to launch a new novel manuscript yet, but I wanted to at least keep writing, so I have been noodling around with a few ideas, and tonight I came back to this space where I used to work out my raw emotion, beating it into words and sentences and until I feel better.
And it worked. Until next time…
3 Comments
Julia
Bloggers forever! Love your insights and your post. Love you!
Teresa DeGagne
I loved this post, Kim. Thank you. I have “retired” from my school librarian position so I can pursue my dream of writing. Maybe I won’t publish, maybe I’ll just write for me and see what happens. I really had very little idea about what I do if and when I get to a completed item. This helped.
Charlene
That right agent is out there for your wonderful book, Kim. Keep pitching!