For those who don’t know, I started my publishing journey with submissions to agents. By the time I finished, I had submitted to over 450 agents and had gotten back hundreds of rejection letters. In the end, it was a huge waste of my time, and there were numerous reasons that I stopped.
1. I finished my lists. That’s right. I put together several lists of agents. List 1 was agents I felt would be a good fit for my work, and their work ethics seemed to match my own. List 2 was agents that I felt could do a good job working with me to get my manuscript to the best possible traditional publisher, but I wasn’t sure about their work ethics or if they were super goal oriented. List 3 were agents that were professional and had been in business for a while, and there were no red flags anywhere online. Now, to put together those lists took a lot of time. I viewed a lot of agent websites and a lot of supplemental agent websites. I was very thorough with my research. 2. If I had put together a List 4, it would have been agents I wasn’t confident about. They either didn’t have websites, had spotty success records, had actual complaints against them or submitted to publishers that don’t require agents! AKA: I could have submitted myself to the same places where they were submitting books. That’s not helpful! 3. I didn’t feel like the agents weren’t reading my submissions materials or taking me seriously. I’m a very serious person. I take my writing seriously, and I am very goal oriented. I felt like some of the places I submitted to had a very LaDeDa attitude. That doesn't fly with me. 4. I felt like more than one agent clicked “select all” DELETE with their email inboxes in order to immediately clear them. 5. I felt like I was the only one taking this seriously. Publishing is a very serious business, and when you are an agent, you need new books to keep your income going. Right? Like I need to sell books to maintain my income, they need to acquire new talent in order to maintain and/or increase theirs. Again, I just felt like the work ethic wasn’t there. 6. I felt like some of them were reading a 20 year old script on what types of books to take and what to auto-reject. 7. At the end of a year and a half of submissions, the timeline was no longer working for me. I hadn’t found a working, serious agent after 18 months, and there was no telling when I was going to find that agent. Even if I had found one the very next day, I could expect another 4 months of editing, 6 to 12 months of finding a publisher, 2 or 3 months more of editing and 12 more months till the book was released. It was too much time. Maybe if I had started the submission process when I was 10, that timeline would be ok. After carefully evaluating the process, my own goals, my timelines and everything else I had planned and wanted to accomplish as a writer, the traditional route was not going to work for me. In fact, I’m not sure it would have ever worked for me long-term even if I had found that agent right away.
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AuthorJosephine Leonard is a biblical horror author. Archives
May 2020
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