Ok, world… I have this incredibly brilliant (choking on my own vanity here) and uplifting children's book series I am writing. These characters are quiet literally my children and I, going through a typical suburban life and letting our imaginations transform the world around us into unlimited possibilities. I know, you are wondering why is that sentence bold; don’t get ahead of me.
So, what is this incredible series called you want to know because you already are hooked on my sassy personality (choking again). Sisters of Sugar Land. I think it is cute, mainly because I’m an English teacher who thinks alliteration rocks the world, but still, I like it. LDS members out there will like the double meaning of “sisters.”
Last Thursday, I sent out my first round of queries to find an agent for my series. (Most of these agent website sites have a pre-apology note posted on their submission page: Sorry it will take 3 months to respond to your query, thanks for your submission.)
Today, I got four responses back (guess they aren’t as busy as they claim). Three said “Not for me” and I kid you not when I tell you that was the entire response. A fourth asked for the entire manuscript. I did a happy dance for about four minutes. When I sat down to send the manuscript, something inside told me to go to the agent’s website again. (I say again, because I really have looked over all the websites I sent my queries to.) Immediately, I get the “no way are you sending it to them” feeling. “But, they want to actually read my work, not some stupid cover letter!” I argue with myself. So, I set out to find out WHY I shouldn’t send it. I re-read the bios of the agents. I write down all of the books they have gotten published and then I look all of those books up online. I know, I know, it is like self-torture as I find each and every one of those books were published and marketed horribly. Many were actually rip offs of other popular series (published with the same name even).
To make up for my rejection, (which I don’t take personally, because they didn’t even read my book…because if they had they would have signed me immediately) I set off to find another agent.
So, I find an agent to query that I like and wouldn’t you know it… this agent has a line by line rubric of what she wants in her query… which is NOT anything that I can just copy and paste from my standard query. So, I wasted an entire day making a special query just for ONE literary agent who had extremely specific sentence by sentence requirements for her submission query... and she is likely to not even request to read my manuscript after all that trouble. And that bold sentence at the top… was line 7 of her special query requirements: Why can you, only you, and no one in the whole world write this story? Duh, it is my actual life… I wanted to write that… but the sentence in bold sounded better.