Shopping Fiction: A Primer

So I’m resuming this blog, which I left for dead some time ago, because it will give me something to write while I shop around my new book, Resistance. What’s more, it will give me something to write other than the book, and I desperately need something else to write.

The problem with writing books isn’t writing books—it’s selling them afterwards. So I’d rather do the first and avoid the second. I’ve spent plenty of time (I think) working on this book, and my natural tendency is to keep polishing and polishing, all the while shying away from the part that will actually get it sold—namely, shipping query letters and manuscripts off to people who might be willing to represent me or buy my manuscript.

I know I have to shop it around. I have a hard time getting myself to do this. The following story should help illustrate why.

I have, so far, queried exactly one (1) agency about this book.

A year and a half ago, or so, I was working as a waiter at a restaurant in downtown Chicago, having been fired from a lucrative corporate job some time before.

Now, this restaurant was a stressful, demanding place, run by Greeks who had a ridiculously long set of rules, which frequently led to diminished tips and general unpleasantness amongst customers and wait staff alike. (Indeed, the first day I showed up there looking for work was the first day I’d set foot in there for three years—thanks to an unpleasant incident the last time I’d tried to be a customer there, it was the one restaurant in Chicago that I absolutely refused to patronize.) Granted, I had come to love these Greeks, like one would love a crazy aunt or uncle—they’d given me a job when I was a desperate unemployed nobody with little experience in food service who needed cash, pronto; also, I probably learned more life lessons in a year and a half there than I had in five years in a cubicle. Still, it was not my dream job.

So when I found out there was a literary agency upstairs, I—budding unpublished author that I was—figured I’d miraculously found an escape ladder.

Now, I’d sent queries to literary agents before, for a couple different book-length projects, but this promised to be different. Those had been blind queries to people I had never and would never meet; this was an opportunity to personally speak to a literary agent and win them over with my suave charisma and roguish good looks as well as my eloquent prose. Everything—my loss of a well-paying job, the strange turn of events that had led to me waiting tables in a restaurant at which I’d once refused to eat—seemed designed to get me in touch with these people. Clearly this was all preordained by God.

I went up there and introduced myself one slow February afternoon, and it went well enough. The only problem was that I didn’t have anything to offer right then. The previous book had already been published through a publish-on-demand company; they told me it was not worth anyone’s time trying to sell something that already had a publishing history. And the current book was only 2/3rds finished; they told me it was a waste of time to try and sell fiction without a completed manuscript. Come back when you have something finished, they said; they also admonished me to study their submission guidelines, which were posted on the Internet. (Apparently, some authors neglected to take such simple precautions.)

So I went home. I had more research to do to finish the book, so I left struggling America and went to Europe for research, and returned to somehow land back in corporate America. I finished the book. I polished the book. Seasons changed. Presidents changed. I read their submission guidelines. I wrote a query letter. I polished the query letter. I wrote a synopsis. I polished the synopsis. I polished the book again, just for good measure.

Then finally came the fateful day, the golden blue glorious morning when it was all done and I had no more reason to dilly-dally. So I printed out a query letter and patiently wrote out my address on a self-addressed stamped envelope, and put the whole bundle together, and went to have breakfast with a buddy at my favorite breakfast spot (Not the restaurant where I used to work, ha ha!) and then went to the restaurant where I used to work, and told them of my grand plans, and walked upstairs to deliver my query letter.

I spoke to the receptionist and explained my purpose. Mid-explanation, the agent came out, and I explained myself to her, and introduced myself. She used hand sanitizer on herself immediately after shaking my hand.

Still, I was cautiously optimistic. Surely the query letter would win them over.

That was on a Friday. I got their rejection letter in my mailbox on Saturday.