I’m still working on The Widening Gyre, Book 1 of The Remembrance War.  Looking at my stats, I’ve sent it out to seventeen agents. Of those, six did not respond at all, which is the annoying way to say “no, thanks.”  Eight responded with form rejections, for a total of 14 outright rejections.  Three agents asked for more pages and a closer look.  All three passed.

What this tells me–and there is some element of Rejectomancy in this, but a good kind, I think–is that the query letter works. I mean, three doesn’t seem like a large number, but it actually is; the vast majority of queries get rejected, so a 17.6% success rate is pretty good.

But the submission isn’t getting picked up. Now, here’s where the bad parts of Rejectomancy show up.  It could just be that I haven’t hit that Magic Agent yet–the one who will read my book and say “Holy shit, I can sell the crap out of this.”

But it could also be that the first 50 pages are a bit weak.  And I think that’s true.  I’m going through them now, tightening them up–making some wording changes, some deletions, some additions–and then I’ll send it to a new wave of agents.

If I haven’t gotten any bites by the end of my next cycle of twenty agents, I’ll send it to Tor directly via snail-mail. They accept un-agented submissions, but it’s not the preferred way, and it can take quite a while.

It’s a process, and a numbers game.  A fellow VP alum took two years and nearly two hundred rejections before she signed for a three-book deal.  Jim Butcher got 300 rejections before he sold his first Dresden novel.  There are worse stories.

Onward and upward.

My novel has now gone out to a total of 9 agents.  That’s really not many at all, but I’m holding now until I hear back from a few more.  Otherwise I get overwhelmed.  Also, doing research on good prospects takes time.  Setting aside the obvious bad idea scam agents, there are some agents who are probably good, but not quite what I want at this point in my search.

Anyway, I’ve had two hard rejects (where I actually got a rejection note) and one “soft” reject (“If you haven’t heard from us in a month, we’re not interested”).

To give non-writers some perspective, I know bestselling authors who got upwards of 300 rejections before they ever got something accepted.  So I’m still in the beginning of the process.  But man, I’m hoping most of those were short story submissions, because I’m not sure I can handle 300 agents.

But, well, nothing says this book will be the one to sell.  Might be another one. And, well, that’s okay.  I mean, I’d prefer it be this one; it was fun to write, and the beta readers liked it well enough.

Of the agents currently holding my query, the shortest length of time is 1 day, the longest is 63 days.  From what I understand, the two agents at 63 days could take months before I hear anything.  That’s what this business is like.

One of the agents has had it longer than his average turnaround time for either rejections or representation offers.  It’s hard not to read anything into that, but I’m trying my hardest not to–for all I know he’s been busy and hasn’t even looked at the query yet.  Or maybe he didn’t like it but knew someone else in his agency might and is having them look.  Or maybe he’s thinking about it.  Or maybe it got lost in his spam filter.  See how damaging this can be if you think about it too much?

At any rate, I’m still working on a crit I am way behind on.  Once I get that done, I’ll be returning to work on The Ceremony of Innocence, book 2 of The Remembrance War (titles, of course, subject to change).

Onward and upward.