Selling My Soul (In a Good Way) is a weekly journal
about my efforts to get a debut novel published.
It’s time to put a quiet end to my Substack adventure. I need to wake up and smell the rejections. This is the thirtieth week where I’ve mused about my hopeful journey to get traditionally published.
I’d hoped, when starting to send query letters to literary agents back in April, that a little feedback would come from a few agents. Any feedback, however minor, would’ve helped me revise the novel I’m trying to sell. Perhaps most foolishly, maybe one or two (or three??!!) agents would’ve requested a larger sample of THROUGH A FOREST WILDERNESS . . . and that had the potential for one of two outcomes:
- A rejection with helpful enough notes to give more insight on needed changes or,
- Having a literary agent who “loved” my work and wanted to represent me.
Didn’t happen.
Seventy-eight (78) queries were sent. I launched the first query on April 18, 2025. The most recent date for an emailed query was October 2. In that time, thirty (30) agents sent back a boiler plate NO. Doing ye olde easy math, forty-eight (48) have mostly answered with a silent NO.
Two literary agents from the Manuscript Academy, paid by me, provided a little helpful feedback, mostly on my query letter. I took their advice, tweaked the query, and . . . not much changed in terms of responses from agents.
The soul blow to this adventure was hiring a freelance editor to read the whole shebang*. She professionally raked me over the metaphoric coals. Which leads me to two choices:
- Abandon the ship, er, novel or,
- Make major revisions.
Choosing #1 or #2 equally cause me to not “waste” my time on weekly Substack ponderings. So, in a sense, farewell. Thanks to those who have read Selling My Soul over the last eight (8) or so months. I may continue posting something at my blog here. Not sure about that yet. Will I keep writing, in general? Yeah, how can I not?
Take care!
*From Mirriam-Webster about shebang: Usage evidence indicates that the word may have been first used in reference to a type of crude shelter. Walt Whitman used the word in that way in Specimen Days, a prose work of “diary-jottings” and “war-memoranda” from 1862 to 1865, in which he writes of the terrible conditions of the soldiers living in “shebang enclosures of bushes” and of soldiers coming “out from their tents or shebangs of bushes . . .”
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“You can’t edit a blank page”― Nora Roberts
Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash