If you’ve sent out several rounds of queries and received a string of rejections—or even just radio silence—it’s easy to get discouraged. You’ve gotten great feedback from your critique partners and beta readers, so why aren’t agents champing at the bit to represent your book? Yes, this may be a sign that your manuscript needs more work, but don’t jump there right away. After all, there are plenty of reasons an author might struggle to get agent interest—and most of them don’t have anything to do with the quality of their novel. Here are a few possibilities:
1. The Agents You’re Querying Don’t Represent Your Genre
This seems obvious, but when I was interning for a literary agent in college, I saw authors querying genres we didn’t represent all the time. If you’re shopping a sweeping fantasy epic, you’re not going to have any luck pitching it to agents who are looking for realistic fiction. If you’re selling a mystery for young readers, an agent who reps adult mysteries is not the right agent for you.
So if you’re getting total radio silence on your queries, it might be time to revisit your pitch list to be sure you’re setting yourself up for potential success by pitching agents who are looking for the kind of book you’ve written. Agents will usually list on their websites exactly what they are and are not looking for. Beyond that, it’s always wise to look at an agent’s list to see whether it includes comparable/complementary titles to yours. If not, they’re likely to pass. (Another route for finding the “right” agents for your query list is by identifying comparable titles published in the last five years and then looking up who represented those authors.)
2. Your Query Letter Is Falling Flat
Agents get dozens, if not hundreds, of queries per day. That query letter is like your elevator pitch—it’s got to show them, quickly and succinctly, why your book is worth their very limited time. If it doesn’t do that, unfortunately, that query is going right in the trash. So, if you’ve ensured you’re querying agents who represent comparable books to yours, your next move is to polish up your query letter.
Jane Friedman’s blog has some excellent resources on writing effective query letters. Check it out to get a better understanding of the right content, structure, and tone to aim for. For more insights, I love the podcast “The Shit No One Tells You About Writing.” Every episode begins with agents critiquing real authors’ query letters. I highly recommend it for some real-world examples of what works and what doesn’t.
3. Your Synopsis Isn’t Doing Its Job
If a query letter piques an agent’s interest, the synopsis is the next indicator of whether the book will be worth her time. It’s not easy to distill an 80,000-word novel into two pages, and it hurts a little bit to strip your masterpiece of all its color and nuance in order to create this kind of distillation. It can feel very transactional. But it’s also critical, because it helps agents understand what shape your novel is in. Based on what they see in the synopsis, they’ll have a better sense of whether they can invest the time and resources required to champion your book. If they like what they see, they’ll read more.
(Read my recent blog post for more on writing a synopsis that sells.)
4. Your First Ten Pages Aren’t Hooking Agents
If you find you’re getting requests for the partial manuscript and then losing agent interest, it may be that your opening pages aren’t grabbing agents the right way (which means they aren’t likely to grab readers, either).
If this is the scenario you’re in, you might focus your efforts on your opening pages. One common trap authors fall into is starting their novel before the story really begins. Are you giving readers too much of the protagonist’s “normal life” before the inciting incident? Does a ringing alarm clock open your novel? If so, consider slashing that first chapter so readers open the book just at the precipice of the inciting incident. Is there too much exposition in that first scene? Conversely, will readers find themselves too adrift?
An editor can help you make sure your first chapter is in prime shape to hook readers, but if you’re looking for a DIY approach, the same podcast I mentioned above includes agents’ critiques of each author’s first five pages, which you may find helpful as you revise your own.
5. The Novel Isn’t Quite Ready
There is, of course, the possibility that agents are requesting the full manuscript and then passing. In this case, it could mean there are structural or stylistic issues they don’t feel they have the capacity to help you fix (or it could simply mean they’re not excited about the novel, which is nothing personal).
If agents have been sending full manuscript requests ahead of their rejections, even if you’ve gotten great feedback from writing groups and beta readers, then it might be time to take a look at the novel itself. A full manuscript critique from an editor can help you identify any issues that might be obstacles to representation—and show you how to fix them.
Are you in the process of querying a manuscript? I’d love to hear how it’s going! Share in the comments below, or send me an email!