"Agents aren't biting on my query. When should I give up?”

Various ways of answering the most painful (and common) question I get from the #amwriting community.

Before I get into our main topic today, a quick note:

The “How to Glow in the Dark” archives are now a lot easier to navigate.

At lunch the other day, Jane Friedman low-key roasted me for organizing the “Glow” archives in a janky homemade index post vs. Sections, the much more usable tool Substack has had in place for quite some time (OOPS). She correctly pointed out that this didn’t exactly showcase the value of the back catalog.

Several mind-numbing hours later, I’ve now organized all 5 years and 230+ posts into Sections (“Industry Gripes,” “Proposal 101,” “Professional Development,” “For the Soul,” etc.).

You can now read the archives more or less like a book. To celebrate this, I’ve taken the paywall off some of my best old posts, put toothpicks in them, and put out a free sample tray at the top of every section.

Happy reading.

Now on to the actual newsletter.

I’ve queried two dozen agents.

I’ve queried two hundred agents.

I’ve queried every reputable agent I can find in the US, Canada, and UK.

I’ve gotten two full manuscript requests, but no offers of rep.

I’ve gotten nothing but form rejections.

A couple agents seemed interested at first, then ghosted.

When should I give up?

“Glow” subscribers, friends, conference attendees, r/pubtips users: whenever I’m among a group of querying authors, “when should I give up” is the most common question I hear. A lovely writer named Amy Brown asked it in my open call Q&A last week, inspiring me to write this post.

Before I tackle the math of giving up, let’s ground ourselves in what most queriers already understand. Most of them know that rejection—regular, large-scale rejection—is a permanent and unavoidable part of just about every publishing career. Most have heard that if there’s anything like a modal average journey from “let me find a literary agent” to “yay, I’ve found one,” it involves months to years of uncertainty and many failed pitches.

Yes, and: most queriers also know that this is not the modal experience for the entire querying pool, just the people who eventually land agents. The vast majority of queriers never get that far. There are simply too many authors and too few agents—at least competent ones.

There’s also this, the most painful fact of all: most people who think they’re qualified for the Major Leagues simply aren’t. And no matter how certain we are of our own ability to bat the baseball or whatever—shut up, I’m not a sports person—the doubt forever curls behind our foreheads: maybe I’m only cut out for the Savannah Bananas after all.

If you’re getting pass after pass on your query, how do you know if you’re a Savannah Banana? Are you and your book following a well-trod road to “yes,” or are you a foregone “no?” Maybe you’re somewhere distressing in between? At what point are you ever going to know for sure?

My short answer is: you’re not. You’re not ever going to know for sure. Not unless you line up every last living literary agent who could possibly represent your book and force them at gunpoint to say yes or no. Hell, even then you can’t be sure—we’re a somewhat dynamic population working in a very dynamic market, so who knows what could happen in a year. There’s also the problem that decisions made at gunpoint tend to be rather underconsidered.

All you can hope for is finding the right answer for you, right now. You can choose to shape that answer from fear, hope, exhaustion, relief, gut instinct, Bayesian economics, chaos theory, or whatever else you want—everything, that is, except objective certainty. That one’s unavailable. Sorry.

I can walk you through some programmatic ways to make uncertain multivariable-calculus decisions like this, though, if that helps? There’s a gratifyingly large amount of thinking already out there on the subject, because—psst—pretty much every decision of lasting significance anyone makes in life between the ages of, oh, 18 and death—marriage, kids, investments—is staked exactly this kind of uncertainty, this fundamental lack of control.

OPTION ONE: BLAISE & BAYES (AKA, THE MICROECONOMICS APPROACH)

Good for: quant bros, MBAs, and people who long for the reassurance of numbers, even if we both know they’re kind of bullshit in this case