A Year of Querying

I officially began querying my adult historical fantasy novel, The Blood of a Divine, on July 22, 2023. Exactly a year ago.

I prepared for the querying process months earlier of course; I finished the first draft of TBOAD at the beginning of February 2023 (a process that took 14-15 months total to actually write the book). I did multiple full manuscript edit rounds on TBOAD to have a ‘final’ draft completed at the end of June, when I felt it would be ready for agents’ eyes, and then throughout the month of July…I went through the painful, awful, extremely difficult task of writing a query letter and synopsis (multiple versions!) which I needed to send to the list of 31 agents I had put together in May.

And on July 22, 2023 I finally sent my first queries for TBOAD—but 12 months of querying later, I still don’t have an agent.

I’m not really sure how I should feel about it.

On the one hand, many people will say:

1. It’s likely to not get the first book you write published first

2. It can take people many years/books to get their agent

3. In the year 2024, it is more difficult than ever to get an agent and/or sell a book through traditional publishing

But despite all of these things, I see plenty of people announcing they’ve just gotten an agent all the time—writers who didn’t have to query their books for an entire year—and I go back to feeling self doubt, humiliation, disappointment, and pain for disappointing others who had confidence in me to have a published book by now (I know getting a book actually published is a whole different timeline, but I had people who really believed in me!).

But I’m still trying to remain positive while feeling all those feelings at the same time, telling myself:

1. Maybe it just takes longer to get an agent now and that’s normal

2. You still haven’t submitted to every single agent possible

3. Once you’re finished with your next book, you might be able to query it and get an agent who loves it AND your other book ideas

It is often said and true that everyone will have a different path to publication, but it’s also hard to not compare yourself to the sparkling gems of the book writing community who not only get an agent with their first book—but they also get an offer in their first month of querying and they are under the age of 25—and it makes me feel like a 33 year old failure to be 12 months into querying without a single full or partial request. And honestly…if I never saw these people on social media posting about it, I would never have to compare myself and I wouldn’t feel bad about myself. This is why too much social media time can be damaging to one’s state of mind!

But it’s another unfortunate truth that to be a writer in 2024 who wants to have books published and for those books to be sold, you need to have an active internet presence. (although there are advantages to being exposed to the publishing side of Twitter, like learning from others who have gone through the querying process, being able to check out agents, and learning what’s going on in the book business—for better or worse) That all being said, it’s so common for writers to write about every single win or failure in the querying process—it’s impossible to not compare yourself, especially when Twitter/X’s algorithm will put people’s querying updates at the top of your feed—even the ones you’re not following!

Twitter issues aside from how people react to public statements about success or failure in the writing community…it’s a lot of pressure to then post about yourself while you’re going through it. So we mostly see people talk about their successes and for book twitter, you’ll often see ‘vague’ posts—which means someone either has an agent/book deal that they can’t publicly announce—so it’s expected that if you’re a writer on Twitter, you will also eventually post a ‘vague’ tweet when the good thing happens for you.

So to be nowhere near having anything ‘vague’ to tweet for myself for 12 months… I feel like a wallflower at a party with nothing to celebrate. And I’m still trying to not let myself fall into thinking ‘if I don’t have anything to show for this book after a year of querying, then people will think it’s a terrible book and that I’m not a good writer’ which is the most vulnerable thing we are already doing when we query agents. We are literally sending pieces of our heart—a project I spent more than a year working on, in my case—to be judged for it and to be told whether our book/writing is good enough to be published. Like…that’s just the basic nature of querying!

That’s why the day I finally sent those 5 queries out—and believe me, I workshopped my first query letter several times over the course of a few weeks because it never felt good enough, but I had to rip off the band-aid after weeks of hesitation—it was exhilarating because I finally had the confidence to do the most vulnerable thing I could do with my heart and soul ❤ I finally believed enough in myself to not only write the book of my heart—not caring how marketable it would be, and caring more that I built a world and characters I loved, and a story I thought was good and that many other people will love—and I took that great leap of faith to send my work out into the world to finally achieve a nearly life-long dream I’ve had—the one thing I have always really wanted to with my life since I was a child, but always put on the back burner because becoming a novel writer just wasn’t a “realistic” career aspiration for me for so many years.

In 2021, life nearly ended for me as I knew it permanently when I suffered a partial paralysis in my body that took 8 months to repair through so much daily discipline, rehabilitation exercise, pain, and mental perseverance—and once I had healed myself, after having lost out on nearly a year of normal experiences in my life, after I’d lost my job and wasn’t sure when/if I wanted to go back to the same type of job after that lifechanging injury, and just in a post-Covid life where the number of days I have left to live are never guaranteed…

I had to finally just do what I always wanted to do with my life.

So I wrote The Blood of a Divine with the intent to get it traditionally published—and I also intended to finally begin my career as a novel writer.

Some will say that writing a novel is an accomplishment in itself—and it truly is—but I want more. I know my book is good. I know I’m a good writer. I know I want this badly enough. I know I want to publish more than one book and that I’m ambitious enough to believe I AM good enough to become successful with my writing. I know I deserve to have a literary agent, and I know that my writing and my work ethic is up to par with bestsellers and household names, even if people of my ethnicity and sexuality are sorely underrepresented in the publishing industry.

I used to tell myself “If I go a year of querying without getting any good news, I should give up on querying this book.”

But today, I don’t feel like giving up. I don’t think my querying journey is over yet, and I’m not going to shelve The Blood of a Divine. Unfortunately, my querying stats would probably not give anyone confidence, but at this point in time…I’m trying to worry less about numbers and trying to focus more on my craft and writing more books, and hoping that the agent I’m meant to work with simply hasn’t offered that “yes” just yet…and that hopefully it won’t take much longer to get that yes.

Also, a year later, here’s what I do have:

1. A short story published in a literary magazine

2. A newsletter

3. Social media accounts with hundreds of other writers to connect with & supportive writing friends

4. A manuscript that was edited and revised a bit throughout my year of querying and is now the best version it can be, thanks to agents’ personalized feedback

5. Another novel almost completed

6. Plans to independently publish my own short stories & illustrations (stay tuned!)

7. A hell of a lot of book ideas, and a few I’m even already working on

So what do I have to show for a year’s worth of querying? Maybe nothing in terms of an agent or a publishing deal, but I AM growing as a writer and I am publishing things, and I feel even more certain that being a writer, doing this until I’m old…it’s The Thing I want to do most in this world still and it is still my dream to be a published novelist ❤

And I would also like to just say thank you to everyone following my journey through this newsletter. I’m not sure what you expected. I’m not sure if you expected me to be more successful than I am now. I’m not sure if some of you now regret following this journey and feel embarrassed for me (or maybe some of you always believed this was a hopeless endeavor and were too kind to say how you truly felt.) But for those who always believed in me and still believe I can get my books published someday… thank you ❤

I started this newsletter in anticipation of the day for when my dream came true and I became a published novelist, so I wanted to record my journey to publication so I would never forget how difficult it felt—but also how hopeful I felt—when I was just starting out. Well, unfortunately I did truly believe that if it was going to happen, it would have happened before a year passed, but I’m glad I still recorded this journey through these newsletter posts. Maybe someday, when I do finally make my dream come true, this newsletter will be a helpful guide/proof for anyone just starting out on their querying journey that it’s not always an overnight Cinderella story to success.

And just because my dreams didn’t come true instantly, it doesn’t mean I should give up on them.

Anyway—back to normal business—here’s what you may have missed in my social media roundup:

1. While I’m still querying The Blood of a Divine, I’m going to be sharing a character spotlight series each week—which will maybe help me feel better about querying lol and also give you all a bit more insight into the TBOAD characters! This week, I started with Brennan—our ghost hunter who also is a freelance writer because ghost hunting doesn’t pay all the bills… 👻

If you’d like to leave a comment/share your favorite new thing you learned about Brennan, you can do so on the social media versions of this post 😊

[Character Spotlight has been deleted and is now only available in subscribers’ inboxes if they had been subscribing at the time the post was published]

2. I received a physical copy of Bleeding Hearts Beat Still, the pride month issue of Haunted Words Press where I got my first short story officially published :’)

It felt very special to actually hold it in my hands and to see my name among other amazing writers who have had their works featured in several lit mags. Unfortunately it’s print-only for now, but you can order the physical zine to support what is otherwise a free-to-read lit mag the rest of the year.

We’re just getting started, y’all! 💪 I have a few more short stories I would like to publish this year, and a couple of those may be published independently—but with accompanying illustrations!

3. I finally reached 200 followers on Instagram! So I will be posting romantic TBOAD art for everyone to see very soon… 👀

And that’s about all I got for you today! Hope everyone has a wonderful week 🌸

-Jazmin