June 26, 2015 
Jessica 
Yesterday I had an interesting–and rather bracing–exchange with a writer whose work I read, admired, and ultimately, after much time and consideration, decided not to represent. I’d sent her a note that was well-meaning but bland; I wrote that I’d not “fallen in love” with the material, and without the ability to be a wholehearted champion for the work, that I didn’t feel I could represent it. I got a civil but pointed note back, urging me to reconsider–not my decision–but the very pat “didn’t fall in love” phrase that has become the book world’s answer to “it’s not you, it’ s me.” This writer pointed out that it’s patronizing and more or less reviled by authors. I agreed that it is an easy shorthand, the catch-all diagnosis of the publishing business. But perhaps we who work with words have a certain responsibility to be a little less lazy when stringing them together.
Still, turning people talented people down is never easy, and we agents are often wrong. I’m at a writer’s conference now, and every editor and agent here has a tale of the book that got away—or more precisely, the book we failed to see.
Taste is apallingly subjective, and sometimes it’s hard to put a fine point on exactly what drives my reservations. More often than not, it’s a combination of factors; undeveloped storyline, characters with whom I’d rather not pass 350 pages, utter lack of editorial vision for how to place it. Sometimes I read the testaments of lives of people far braver and more extraordinary than I will ever be, but I worry that the telling does not match the tale, or the story is suited to a smaller circle of readers than most publishers would wish to reach.
I grumble and occasionally rail at the rejection letters I receive as well, but is there a way to soften the blow? Many notes I send are form rejections. We try hard to craft one that is professional and respectful, though it is by definition impersonal. It would be impossible to respond to all the mail that we receive. But know that despite all the maladroit notes and form letters, the late responses and the missed chances, most agents really do get it. We get the frustration, the disappointment, we respect your efforts and exist to support them. True, the works in question are not our own, but they are our livelihood, a reflection of our taste, our ideals, and often long collaborative efforts. It would be absurd to imagine that my emotional stake in a book is as great as that of its creator, but we agents are right behind you.
I considered posting anonymously in case I piss anyone off, but since it’s not my intention to do that, hopefully anyone reading this will take it in the way I mean it-as simple advice from the trenches. The truth is that it doesn’t matter how an agent writes a rejection, it’s a rejection and no one’s going to like it, but writers need to toughen up. The agent is one of the very FIRST steps in this business and there will be a TON more rejection along the way, even for very successful writers. There will be rejections from the editor your agent just knows will buy it, bad reviews and days that make you want to pull all your hair out in frustration. If you seriously are putting that much thought into the rejection letter now, then you’re making your life a whole lot harder than it needs to be. Make a note of it in your files, send a thank you if it’s personal in some way, and move on.
One of the books that made me want to be a writer is a novel called BETSY AND THE GREAT WORLD by Maud Hart Lovelace. It’s YA and I’ve read it a dozen times starting when I was a teen. Betsy wants to be a writer (in about 1910) and she starts sending out her stories to magazines and when they come back with the rejection, she has the next place all lined up and she immediately sends it out again. She wants to be published, but she doesn’t lament her rejections and eventually she begins to sell. I’ve always remembered that and tried to do the same thing. I really think it’s the only way to go.
And for the record, when I was querying agents, I sent out 42 queries, received approximately a dozen requests for partials that didn’t pan out, eventually had multiple offers leading to an agent that couldn’t sell my book and lost interest in me (that book never did sell), wrote something new and started querying over again before DGLM’s Michael Bourret took me on and sold my first book RESTORING HARMONY.
I actually laughed when I saw the phrase “I didn’t fall in love with your book” in your post because I have a whole file full of those from editors. Another favourite is, “I wanted to love this book more than I did.” That’s what I mean, you have to just let those things go (especially at such an early stage) or you’ll make yourself crazy. Remember this is business, and you’re trying to sell art which is an entirely different thing. The more you can separate them in your head, the easier it will be.
Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now. I really only wrote this in hopes of helping (and also to say to Jessica not to worry too much about it because you’ll never write a rejection that makes someone happy).
I never grow tired of pointing out that it’s all a crapshoot, whim-driven and largely accidental in nature. It’s just the mercurial nature of the field itself; in an endeavor that requires mathematical precision and predictability, say putting a rocket in orbit, one can rely on rational factors to be in play when submitting a design to the selection committee. But writing has a thousand places where the selection process can go sideways; one expects this and rolls with it as Joelle pointed out. For instance, although I mostly visit this agency on a drop-in hi-how-are-ya basis these days, I somewhat accidentally ended up having an agent look at my project at large recently and got a detailed analysis of why it supposedly wasn’t ready for primetime. I’d have taken it a bit more seriously if the complaint points hadn’t been exactly what the last agency that turned it down raved about! This sort of thing’s a lot easier to take in stride if you’ve already been nationally published, (NOT self-published) and I have, so if you’ve got a Park Place property with a hotel on it there’s no point getting worked up if the person you’re showing it to has a Monopoly board that doesn’t go past Marvin gardens. Pick any 5 books off the NYT bestseller list and turn it over to any kid in a writer’s group and they’ll find a baker’s dozen escape hatches on top of the dozens of rejections the book accrued on the way to where it is now. Just another day in the lottery……….
Thanks Joelle and Kevin. I agree, it’s certainly necessary to develop both a thick skin and a sense of equanimity about the fact that you are going to receive wildly conflicting feedback from different editors and agents (if you receive feedback at all). Sometimes it’s impossible to pull out any coherent message from rejections. I’m at a writer’s conference in Texas now, so I’ve been talking to lots of folks who are puzzling through this, and I know it’s not easy.
Thanks for the reply Jessica; (or DGLM whomever) and I agree it’s a hair-puller sometimes… The reason I’ve stuck with my project at large this time is that I was lucky enough to encounter a West Coast agent of some stature who more or less broke the 4th wall and admitted (after a string of superlatives I won’t bore you with) that like a lot of YA tour guides she simply considers WWII a fictional no-fly zone and is personally creeped out by anything even peripherally connected with the 3rd Reich and the great unpleasantness they caused. She advised me not to change a word of it, although I admit I’ve polished up a few rough places since then by way of passing the time. Hope your conference goes well and that you have a pleasant ride home…
Sat Nam! (Literally \”Truth Name\”–a Sikh greeting)Jessica, as someone who\’s been rejected by you, I want to tell you that yours is one of several rejections I treasure. The \”I admire this, but…\” rejections are what every writer worth his or her wordcount receives.Blessings,Siri Kirpal
First of all, we don’t know how many rejections this person has gotten. It could be 2, it could be 20, or it could be 200, so perhaps this writer has already been “toughened up” along the road to publication. We can’t assume anything.
I also understand that the amount of queries an agent receives makes it impossible to give a personal reply to everyone and it’s necessary to have form rejection letter. However, when material is requested, I can see how a writer would hope for something less generic as the reason for being rejected. Apparently, you requested the manuscript and as you stated, “I read, admired, and ultimately, after much time and consideration, decided not to represent.”
IMO, saying I just didn’t fall in love with the material, says nothing and doesn’t help the writer, so I can see her frustration. What you wrote in your third paragraph is exactly what a writer would like to know: undeveloped storyline, characters with whom I’d rather not pass 350 pages, utter lack of editorial vision for how to place it, …worry that the telling does not match the tale, or the story is suited to a smaller circle of readers than most publishers would wish to reach.
Those reasons are helpful because it gives a writer something to work with. Just one of them would have been one hundred times more beneficial to the writer than saying, “I didn’t fall in love with it.” Of course, this is the way I see it and I haven’t even begun to query. I hope to later this year, so I’m off to buy a suit of armor.
Opps! For some reason my comment above came up as anonymous when I have no qualms stating who I am.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve already received plenty of rejections, but I don’t think it’s right to respond to an editor or agent like that. Like Siri said, I’m always excited when I get a personal letter of rejection, because even those are so rare.
Sure it’s nice to get feedback, but does any author really want submissions to take even longer if every submission had to be critiqued? I know I don’t. Waiting is almost an art for authors these days. The best way, in my opinion, to soften the blow is to give the response as quickly as possible.
Useful feedback is just icing on the cake, and it should be rare. It means you’re oh so close.
I agree about it being inappropriate to respond to the rejection like that. Smacks of “sour grapes”. Fact is, this agent didn’t like it, has a right to not like it, and doesn’t need to be told how to do his/her job.
Given how many rejections you must dole out, there’s only so many variations on “this didn’t work for me” that you can write. Even when providing personalized rejections on a full. (I’m up to about five of those now. On every single one of them I received some variation of what you wrote above.)
One thing that stood out for me, at a time when there seems to be a rising trend of the opposite: you actually still send rejection letters. That matters. In fact, I’d say it’s way more important than the originality of your response. Rejections are how we thicken our skin. Frankly, I think it’s more offensive when agents choose only to respond if interested, because no answer leaves writers anxious, frustrated, and without closure. Thank you for being an agency who responds.
It\\’s so easy to self publish and sell, or try to in numbers that make the effort worthwhile. Why waste time on an agent, who herself will, if you\\’re that one in a hundred she agrees to represent, have her own battle to have your work considered. And if you are considered, the odds are you\\’ll be rejected. I was. Most are.
Jessica again (somehow I log in only as DGLM), but thanks for the lively, candid and often very generous replies. I know that “getting it” intellectually–understanding that rejection is par for the course in this business of ours–is different than “feeling it,” which (as I can attest) is hard.
Rhett, that wasn’t the point being made. Of course agents aren’t going to give feedback to everyone. The point was, when they do, a valid reason (something a writer can go back to their manuscript and work on it) would be much more beneficial.
Jessica said she told the writer, “I wrote that I’d not ‘fallen in love’ with the material….” and I say, it would take the same amount of time to write what she wrote as to write one of the following: there were too many holes in the plot, or I didn’t feel sympathetic to the protagonist, or too much editing is needed, etc. Any of those reasons would have been more helpful than the standard, I just didn’t fall in love with it.
Then again, I could be wrong here and nothing was wrong with the MS and the only thing Jessica could say was what she did say. So, I’ll shut up now and go back to my writing. Lol.
Several of my peers and I have been discussing this post today. I am an indie author, but I tried to traditional route for about 20 rejection letters. I never got offended or worried or out of sorts because of the rejections. What I did learn was that if I was going to be putting so much work in, I might as well just self-publish and not bother splitting the royalties between myself, an agent, and a publisher. Now it\’s just between me and the retailers and I get the better end of the deal.What we have been discussing is the cyclical nature of the traditional publishing industry. You rejected a work that will probably sell, and you can\’t really define why you rejected it except that you just kind of know it isn\’t right for you to try to sell to publishers. Which happened to all of us–rejected without a clear understanding of why. I\’m not amazon\’s best seller or anything, but I do have a book that remains in the top 100 (for it\’s genre) on a daily basis and has been there for months now. Sure it slides around the top 100 and sometimes it slides off, but it always gets back there. I don\’t even have to promote it anymore. The point is, I am making more money now than I would have been if I had kept with the traditional publishing industry. I might not even be published yet, or accepted by a publisher, or even accepted by an agent. In the last six months, I have read a better \’Twilight\’ than \”Twilight\” and a better FSOG than \”Fifty shades of Grey\”– the indie authors who produced the better characters and better story lines, and better all around books, are totally unknown, but still, they were better (don\’t get me wrong, I LOVED reading Meyers and James\’ series).Again the point here is to simply say that comparatively, I find traditionally published works mediocre in comparison to indies who put the same effort into their books and only ever receive rejections. And that is problem that this blog post seems to be a symptom of–the traditional route values mediocrity in writing because that\’s what sell, but it may only sell because the publishers push it to sell. If excellence was prized (as it has been for so long, i.e. Isaac Asimov, Piers Anthony, Stephen King, Terry Brooks, etc), a lot more indie published authors would be traditionally published authors and there wouldn\’t be the kind of competitive tension that I can see as an indie.I was tempted to enter into a contest for indie authors to win a publishing contract with Mills and Boone. Then I realized that I can write my novel and publish it in a timely manner and not have to share the royalties with anyone else. Why would I want a publishing contract when I can do all the same work and get all the credit?