February 21, 2010

A form rejection to my query ....

Woke up this morning and looked at my email and - tada! - there it was... yet another rejection letter. This time the rejection did not say "Dear Author." It didn't call me anything. There was no salutation at all. It did apologize, however, for being a form rejection. That leaves just one query letter out there without an answer. According to that agent's website, she only responds if she is interested in seeing more of your work ... so I must assume that I will likely never hear from her.

Time for another retooling of the query letter. I will also begin work on my synopsis today. I'll be using two books to help me do both of the above: Your Novel Proposal by Blythe Camenson and Marshall J. Cook and The Marshall Plan for Getting Your Novel Published by Evan Marshall. Though they give slightly differing advice, I'll try to pull out the best each has to offer. I also will consult a couple websites.

This 4th rejection got to me today - it created tremendous self doubt.

I know from my reading that many successful and/or famous authors have endured rejection and continued to soldier on. So, I went to google to search for some inspiration and came up with the following websites full of rejections - some of the rejections are laugh-out-loud funny

Famous Rejections by Susie Smith
James Patterson: first novel rejected 26 times by Debbie Ridpath Ohi
Writers and rejection: don't give up by Debbie Ridpath Ohi

3 comments:

Julie Dao said...

Rejections are always so difficult, but you're right that so many authors have gotten them. Just means you haven't found the right agent/publisher yet and they're still out there somewhere! Keep your chin up!

Roni Loren said...

Sorry about the rejections. It unfortunately is part of the job description for writers. Don't get too down on yourself. If you are considering retooling the query, I encourage you to check out the website Public Query Slushpile (http://openquery.blogspot.com/). The commenters usually give good advice on your letter. Good luck!

Thanks for joining my blog btw. :)

Mary said...

Thanks for your kind comments - I'll definitely go to that site you suggested.

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