It turns out I wasn’t mentally prepared to start getting rejections from my querying for When Life Hands You Lymes.
That’s not because I wasn’t expecting rejections, or that I didn’t want rejections (because, after all, that’s a part of the process). It’s simply because I wasn’t mentally prepared to receive any feedback so soon. From all the research I’d done I thought it would be weeks – possibly months – before I received rejections, and therefore I was prepared to settle in for a long wait.
So when rejections began trickling in, starting the very day I sent out my queries, I had to do some mental reworking and give up my expectations of penciling in “No Response” day after day in the planner.
After my third rejection in as many days, I came to the conclusion that even though rejections are great (they’re getting me closer to my goal and making me money) they’re not very helpful when they’re simply a form rejection. Therefore, after thinking about it for a bit I asked God for the gift of some feedback along with the rejections. I figured that way I’d at least know if I was on the right track.
It was exciting when the very next rejection I received was written personally for me, and addressed a way the agent thought I could improve the query letter. So yay!
I spent the weekend at my adopted parent’s house and caught up on some reading for review, so I didn’t spend time working on querying. I’m looking forward to jumping back into the game this week, though. Researching agents has turned out to be a very time consuming task, but rewarding and fun at the same time. It’s so interesting to get to learn what the different agents are looking for, what they’re like on a more personal level (mostly from reading their Twitter), and also learning tid-bits about the publishing industry from them.
Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you have a fantastic week!
