I queried the old version of my novel to maybe 40 or 50 agents before taking a break. I had found a handful of tweaks I wanted to make to the manuscript (mostly minor, some more significant), and after sending my query letter to dozens of agents without so much as a nibble of interest I thought I needed to really take a look at the query letter and see how I could improve it.

Over a greater span of time than I would have liked, I fixed the issues in the manuscript and came up with what I believe to be a much improved query letter, and am finally ready to start querying again. I’ve been spending a lot of time on Query Tracker (Quick aside, is there anything more tedious in the entire writing process than looking for agents to query?), combing through filtered search results looking for agents who I believed would be a good fit. The novel is a crime thriller, rife with dark humor and escalating violence—even if an agent says they’re looking for thrillers, this may not be their cup of tea.

After several hours here and there, searching one by one, I came up with about six or seven agents. Of those, three seemed much better fits than the others. Late yesterday afternoon I decided to go ahead and query those three first, just to scratch the itch and get back in the game. The last one I sent was to an agent who appeared to be the best match of all—loved thrillers of all types, and mentioned specifically a couple popular thrillers that are at least in the same ballpark as my book. I sent that last one around 5:30pm, glad I got a few queries back under my belt. Just before 7:00pm, I got a reply from the agent I had just queried.

“Unfortunately this does not sound like a good fit for me, good luck yadda yadda yadda.”

I’m back, baby!

Look, I’m not the most experienced writer, but I’m by no means a rookie. I’ve gotten so many rejections that they mostly stopped having teeth years ago. So when one comes back that fast, all you can do is chuckle and say “Well shit, that was fast.” But I believe I’m not alone when I say I’d rather have that 90 minute rejection than to be left hanging for months, as is sometimes wont to happen with agents. So I’ll stick that rejection in my cap and get back to Query Tracker. Anyone else out there submitting or querying, don’t take the rejections personally and good luck!