How’s The Querying Going Emma?

Not great. In fact, I would rather you didn’t ask.

Rejections can bring you down.

Somehow, somewhere in my deluded brain, I thought that I could be the exception rather than the rule and that I would only have to deal with a small number of rejections.
I thought that by just getting a bunch of queries out there, my book would appeal to someone. I thought that the rejections would hurt less because I wasn’t investing a lot of time and energy into each one.
I was so wrong about all of it.
If you have been here before, you will know that I didn’t even get my editor to have a look at my submission materials until three months into the process. I didn’t get anyone to look at them because I was worried they weren’t any good. Can you see the logic? No, that’s right, because there isn’t any.
I basically set myself up for failure. Although I was right, each rejection was not that painful. The weight of all of them combined was.
So I came to my senses and redid my submission materials. After feedback from my editor, I redid my bio, query letter, and synopsis. After a critique from some literary agents at an online festival, I changed the beginning of my novel.
Since then, I have thoroughly researched each agent, becoming much more selective. I have even been spending time on Twitter to get to know who is open to queries, what they are really looking for and finding out if our values align.
The…