Being rather new to the querying scene, I have become painfully aware that I have a lot to learn about the process. I always wondered why writers referred to querying as being “in the trenches.” Now, I get it. The term trench conjures up mental images of high muddy walls cluttered with debris. The debris in this case are the fallen writers, who have given up on querying after receiving one too many rejections. To those of us left fighting, those muddy walls are a daily reminder that we cannot see over them. The only way to push forward is to continue further down the trench, and what ray of hope can be found there, when all that is in front of you is more of the same muddy trench?

I understand now why writers give up on traditional publishing and opt for do-it-yourself-publishing, despite the upfront costs involved. I’ve only been querying for an exact total of 56 days (which is tuppence when you take into consideration some agents have noted it will take them over a year to respond) and already I’ve learned one of the most valuable lessons in the business. Until yesterday, every single rejection I had received was a simple, “Not what we’re looking for at this time, this is a subjective business,” copy/paste reply. (To be fair, there was one rejection where the agent raved about the manuscript but had already signed a contract with an author on a book in the same genre. Whiskey was my friend that day…) Yesterday, however, I received a rejection with some personal feedback.

Right away, I was interested to know their personal opinion after so many non-descript rejections, but as I read through it, I became more and more stumped. The two items they felt were missing from the manuscript were in fact included in the sample pages of the prologue and first chapter I provided them. Worried I was losing my mind, I went back to my beta readers and asked them if they felt those two items were missing, and they all gave a resounding no.

This led me to realizing something about the whole querying process. Every single one of my beta readers raved about my manuscript. I’ve even had them request to be on the list for beta reading Book II. It was their positive feedback that told me it was time to start querying the manuscript. But beta readers sign up to the task prepared to read an entire book in order to provide feedback. That’s not the case with literary agents, who can receive hundreds of queries a day. Putting myself in their eyeballs, I can’t imagine reading that many sample pages full of different genres, characters, and environments day in and day out. Am I wrong to wonder how repetitive it must get, or how many manuscripts have been passed over because of it? Did the agent who provided me with feedback actually read my sample pages, or did they get my query mixed it up with another one they had just skimmed over?

I’ll never know that answer, so I am left with the feedback from my beta readers to fall back on. Their positive reviews are what is keeping me continuing down the muddy trenches, hoping to find a way out. Querying is a subjective business, indeed, and certainly a hard lesson to learn.