Into the Query Trenches

Yesterday marked the first day in battle beneath a cloud of silent suspense where I sit at my computer refreshing my email obsessively waiting on news from beyond the trenches I am in. Fourteen months ago, as a blank word doc glared at me on the screen, I began dreaming of this moment. Though I had intended to be query ready by Spring 2026 which obviously was a missed self-imposed deadline.

Due to life being all that it is, only seven of the fourteen months that have elapsed since beginning my manuscript were spent actively working on it. I wrote in the evenings when I got home from work and I wrote on weekends whenever possible, but I ran into a snag early on. In fact, this snag came up long before I completed my zero draft.

I wasn’t convinced that I was telling the story the right way. I gave copies of my pages to a beta reader who I know personally to get general feedback and unfortunately, I still wasn’t convinced when she came back and said that she liked it. As is the problem with beta readers who you know personally, I was concerned that perhaps she was telling me what I wanted to hear rather than what I needed to hear. So, I sought professional advice and hired an editor who offers book coaching services to read my first 20,000 words.

What I wanted to know from the beta reader and the book coach was whether my POV was working because I accidentally found myself writing in second person point of view. I was writing without thinking about anything other than getting the story I had in my head down on paper, and when I looked up there it was on the page. You.

I rewrote my first chapter in first person and third person for comparison and hated them and I’m not sure why. They were too clunky I suppose. When it comes to books that I read, I prefer third person POV over first, so I was surprised that third person was the worst of all of them. I decided to move forward with second person after I received additional feedback from the book coach who took extra time to sit with my pages. With some more conversation between us, I ultimately decided that second person was the way this story needed to be told.

But second person is incredibly rare so I was setting myself up for an even more difficult query experience than it would have been anyway.

With about 34,000 words written on my zero draft, I set it down and found every book I could that is written in second person and devoured them in order to familiarize myself with the mechanics of storytelling within second person. And when I say I read them all, I read the ones that came up on google searches. Even then, it did take some digging and there are likely many more that I didn’t find. I even discovered a small city library in Connecticut that featured second-person novels and read the books on their list that weren’t already on my radar.

Once I’d finished reading those books and studying the craft, I went back to my zero draft and got another 30,000 words written. So, I had a zero draft of about 65,000 words. That was when the work really began. Edits. I had to take this vague rambling of words and turn them into a cohesive manuscript. I focused on structure and character first. By the time I was finished with the fifth draft, I was happy with the structure and pacing, so the last thing I needed was to do the line edit.

Following the advice I received from the book coach, I did what I could to elevate the writing. I decided to take it in chunks. I rewrote each chapter in order. When I finished a chapter, I read it aloud to my husband (who was fighting to not fall asleep through most of it, books aren’t his cup of tea). As I was reading aloud, I was able to more easily identify sentences that weren’t working, repetitive sentence structure, typos and punctuation errors. So, I fixed anything I found, then plugged the chapter into a compiled manuscript.

That compiled manuscript was a fully rewritten draft six which I proofread and am now querying with.

About the Query Process

Once I had a complete draft that I believe is query ready, I wrote and rewrote my query, then rewrote it again a few more times before I was moderately happy with it before starting on the synopsis. And for anyone who hates writing synopses, you’re not alone! I watched dozens of how to videos on YouTube, read blog after blog, and still wasn’t getting anywhere with my synopsis. I wasn’t having an issue with not including spoilers or withholding anything; after all the point of the synopsis is to clearly state the major plot points and give away the twist and/or ending. My problem was that the synopsis was boring. The verbiage was boring. When I read it back to myself, not even I was enticed to read my manuscript.

Eventually, I found a piece of advice at the very end of a forty-five-minute YouTube video that unlocked it for me. If my synopsis ends up working, then I’ll share more information about the advice I found and go into how I wrote my synopsis. I’d hate to put that information out here for anyone to read if indeed it was bad advice. But it was at least good enough that I was able to crank out my synopsis very quickly in a way that both made sense of the plot points and was mildly interesting. So, stay tuned for that.

I found agents to query on Query Tracker and started forming a list of agents to query. I looked every agent up on Publishers Marketplace (yes, it’s a paid subscription, and no it isn’t cheap, and yes it’s worth it). I plugged the agents I felt might be a good fit into an excel spreadsheet with all of their information. Name, agency name, email address (if provided), agency website, Query Tracker profile link, any information about what they expect within their submissions as stated on the agency website, manuscript wish lists, etc. I put everything that could be helpful to me during the query process. I also made sure to put the average reported response times for each agent into the spreadsheet.

From my list, I pulled the fast responders to batch first (each batch is a group of ten). I sent out the queries yesterday to test my query package. And this is the hard part, waiting. If I get nothing but form rejections (or no responses) then I know I have a problem and can address the problem before querying the next batch.

It’s imperative that you not blanket query or send all queries out at once because once you’ve queried an agent then that’s it. If they all pass, then that project is dead because you ran yourself out of options before knowing whether your materials work. There are a few big no-no’s that I want to quickly address while discussing things not to do. Do not send out a mass email cc’ing or bcc’ing multiple agents. No “Dear Agent.” Each query should be personalized for the agent that you are querying.

And in case you are wondering, out of the ten I submitted yesterday, I’ve already received one form rejection from an agent stating that she doesn’t feel she’s a good fit for this project. I anticipated getting rejections, so it’s not hurting my feelings. I have no disillusion about what this process will be like (I’ve been in the query trenches before with a different project). But to receive it less than 24 hours later is a tad alarming. As tempting as it is to rewrite my query now and try again, I know that I must wait until I hear back from the rest of the batch (within a reasonable amount of time) before I make changes and query the next batch of agents.

What am I doing in the meantime?

While I’m waiting for responses to my queries, I’m going to get back into doing my writing dice exercises because I spent all of August rewriting my manuscript and that soaked up my spare time. I also am going to start working on my next project. I have two ideas for novels that I want to write, so I’m going to do some prewriting to decide which one I’d like to focus on next.

For anyone who is in the query trenches with me, I wish you the best of luck out there!