Just write another book

bluntly with love

Sometimes when I’m participating in some sort of conference or agent-advice-giving forum, I speak with writers who tell me they’ve been querying their novel for years.

This isn’t counting the years spent writing the book, editing the book, getting feedback from beta readers and professional editors and incorporating that into their finished, final manuscript. This is querying years: years spent sending out queries to agents, revising the query and the manuscript based on feedback or lack of feedback, sending to more agents, tweaking the comps, trying a new pitch, continuing down a list, trying a third agent at the same agency.

I know that it is often luck and chance that changes a querying writer’s prospects overnight. Sometimes removing that one plot point that seemed a sore point in rejections gets 10 full requests; sometimes a change in the market means what you’ve been trying to sell for awhile is suddenly what everyone wants.

But sometimes, you just need to write another book.