In my July post, I mentioned that I was distracted by personal writing news that could lead to something bigger. I asked if readers of these posts would be interested in my occasional thoughts on the publishing world, especially on book publishing. Thank you to those who commented here and those who reached out to me. There is some interest, so let’s give it a go.

In July, I got word that a novel of mine was a finalist for a book prize. In August, I was told that the judge did not pick my novel, after all. I cannot reveal which book prize it is until the publisher posts the news. I am surprised it is taking this long, but isn’t that the way? Don’t we writers wait for months and months, sometimes years, for responses from publishers? And even with this news, the decisions already made, everyone notified, the publisher is taking months just to get the word out. I am sure they have reasons, but still. There is so much waiting. We are always waiting, and usually, the wait ends in disappointment. If we are sending novels to agents, it is worse: Most of the time, we are simply met with silence. Silence after months and years of writing our novels in solitude.

There are so many things I could write about at this point, so many places this topic leads me. I will stay with the topic of submitting to agents. If any of you are beating yourselves up because agents are not interested in your manuscripts, stop right now. Most likely, it isn’t the quality of your work. You probably have a good or great manuscript–certainly one with solid potential. Please know the rejection (or silence) from agents is not about the worth of your manuscript. I feel it is important to say that firmly. Of the forty-two agents I sent a query letter and sample pages to–sample pages of my “beautiful,” accessible novel, the novel that is a 2026 book prize finalist (which was chosen anonymously), thirteen agents sent a rejection form letter, one agent said I was a “skilled writer” but it wasn’t a fit, and the remaining twenty-eight did not bother to respond. This is not the first time this has happened. I have five solid novels besides this one in my Google Drive that received hundreds of rejections or silence, and with those, I sent queries to at least one hundred agents each. Years ago, my most commercial novel received a few manuscript requests but then no interest. Years ago, too, I was ready to give up. I took it personally. I was depressed. I was angry. I had perfected my cover letter again and again. It made no difference. The result is usually silence, and silence is worse than a rejection form-letter because I had spent so many hours alone, creating a world with the intention of communicating that world to others, hoping that world would be received with, at the very least, acknowledgment. For those of us who write long works, we know all the things we are giving up or not doing to create those long works. When we come up for air and share our creation, the response of silence can be, in the worst moments, debilitating, or at the very least, discouraging. 

Communicating with agents today is worse than it was even a few years ago, and it is not the fault of my manuscript or my query letter. I have grown to disdain articles that tell writers how to snag an agent’s attention with a query letter; these articles and agent interviews again and again suggest that if we have a great manuscript and a great query, then we just have to get that great query in the hands of the right agent. This is just not true–not anymore. 

In a January/February 2008 interview with Jofie Ferrari-Adler for Poets & Writers Magazine, Lynn Nesbit, long-time agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates, says agents and editors are “nervous” about fiction because it is so difficult to sell. She says, “Twenty-five years ago an editor would say, ‘Oh, this has promise,’ and sign it up. Today, editors want to say no rather than yes. Unless they see it as a big book.” She goes on to say (again, in 2008, almost twenty years ago) this: “I also feel there are fewer and fewer civilians—I mean people outside of our business—who I meet who have time to read. They all say, ‘I’d love to read, but I’m just too busy.’ What worries me is that people are on blogs, Web sites—there is a lot of that going on—but they aren’t reading books.”

And here we are today, with entertaining reels, which have pulled readers away from books even further. Very few people are reading. And because so few people are reading, the big publishers aren’t publishing like they used to. And because they are only publishing what they believe will sell lots of copies (mostly romance and numerous fantasy genres), agents, who barely make a living in most cases, are desperate; they aren’t going to spend their reading hours on my upmarket/literary novel, which, at a glance of my query and my first few pages, they do not believe they can sell to a publisher. They can’t afford to try. 

I could go on, listing sources that paint a bleak picture. Instead, I want to remind literary writers that we are not alone in that silence. We may ask ourselves, Why do I do this? The answer is always the same, in one form or another: Because I have to. Because it is part of me. Because it is who I am. Because it brings me joy, despite the pains, the silence, the rejections. Because it gives me something that nothing else gives me. Because as everything around me breaks, I still have my words. 

I ask you not to forget that you have your words. Read them again, just for the joy of reading them, whether they are published or not. They are yours, and if you have the good fortune to share them with others, to have someone else read them and love them almost as much as you do, well, anything else that comes is extra, and special, and more and more precious, as in rare.

With that, I lovingly give you Volume 7, Issue 4 of Club Plum, our annual Literary Horror issue. I give you bad mothers and gone girls and vengeful trees. I give you working devils and frozen dogs and transformative dreams. And ghosts. And you, we’ve got you to carry all of this substance into the world. Whether by reading it or writing it, we’re together, taking the words out of the silence and into our imaginations, bringing them to life.

Yours in Words and Art,

Thea

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