After spending days researching all about how to get an agent and carefully crafting the perfect “query letter”, I started sending out emails to agents. Now, I purchased the big resource book by Jeff Herman to select those agents who work with this kind of non-fiction. Sitting in a massive comfy chair at the local Barnes and Noble I used red tabs to mark some 60 agents to send my query letter. I then started emailing the letter to the first five I felt would be most interest in the topic.
Within a few hours my first one came back. I could see it in my Google mail in boxm staring back at me; my ego prepped for some smart bu well written decline of my work. It is a right of passage to be rejected many times before I could earn my way into the world of the published. I thought I was prepared. But the short phrase from the agent was cold. It starts with “I’m am sorry. This project is not right for us.” I could just imagine the agent scanning a hundred query letters and copying pasting this phrase into each one. She/he has a dozen projects already on her docket to do. I would liked to have a least some paragraph indicating if I had writen the query letter well, or did I make some mistake that gave them a way out without any thought. The next three rejects had the same general phrasing. My demon voice started to chatter again. “You are already a failure man. Go get a real job. Nobody wants your work. You are a fraud.”
At this moment I became conscious again - that getting rejected is all a part of the testing the gold with fire. So I shall continue writing, re-writing variations of the query letter to see what works. I shall continue to work on the chapters and shall listen to my muse’s song.
I will let this community review really creative rejection phrases as I get them.
Feb 13, 2010 @ 23:58:29
It is interesting how Agents require beautiful writing as a requirement. However, most books published by same agents are rather common narrative books telling stories, but I don’t find any literary brilliance in those I review.
It seems to me that the subjects marketability is more important than the eloquence, style or voice of the writer. I am reading a book I am enjoy now by Will Bowen. The topic is compelling and the content is inspiring but the writing is not distinct.
I recently decided to ditch the traditional introduction to my query letter and try my real voice as poetic as what I feel in the moment to write.
The is what I wrote…
“We can’t anticipate the moment something extraordinary when the old dies; from ashes and clay is born the new. But this is a human archetype crafted only from the imagination of a thousand civilizations long time forgotten. And so shall we participate in such a demise, burnt up in the flames of irrelevance. And we are blind to what is most visible to civilization not yet conceived.”