QUERIES: The Reason I am a Self-Published Author

Welcome to today's A-Z post: "Q" is for "QUERIES"

As an aspiring author, you can find all sorts of websites to help you learn how to write the “perfect” query letter. Querying an agent? A publisher? We’ve got you covered! This is not a post about how to write the perfect query letter.

Around 2010 I participated in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for the first time. High on the success of getting through the “pitch” phase that year (an experience never to be repeated, apparently), I bought the 2010 Guide to Literary Agents and started furiously writing query letters and sending them off to agents in the hopes of becoming the next J.K. Rowling.

I didn’t keep track of how many letters I sent.

I got one request for the first 5 pages of my novel, followed by a kindly, “I’m sorry, that’s just not what I hoped it would be.”

I received a handful of form rejection letters.

I didn’t hear back from the majority of the agents I had so hopefully entrusted with my dreams.

But rejection is a part of the process, so I powered on. Writing more queries. Perfecting my 1-page synopsis, my 5-page synopsis, my 25-page synopsis (should anyone ever ask for it, I wanted it to be ready!)

And I didn’t hear back. From anyone.

If you’ve experienced this, you can understand how, after a while, it can get very discouraging to send your queries out into the aether... never to get a single response. At least a Rejection would be Something! I felt like I was mailing my letters out into the NOTHING of the Neverending Story. The most frustrating part of all this is that everyone seems to agree: just because you don’t catch an agent or publisher’s eye... doesn’t mean you’re a horrible writer. It just means you haven’t won the “publishing lottery” yet.

At long last, I made a decision.

I could spend the rest of my life writing query letters and synopses.

OR

I could spend the rest of my life writing stories.

In the end, it wasn’t that hard of a decision.

How about you? Read any good indie (independent/self-published) authors lately? Made a decision to be an indie author yourself? If so, what drove you to it?

Answers to yesterday's pirate trivia:

"Murdered by pirates is good!" - Princess Bride“Oh better far to live and die under the brave black flag I fly, than play a sanctimonious part with a pirate head and a pirate heart!” - Pirates of Penzance“I thought we was mates, I thought we was more than mates, I thought we was… friends.” - Shipwrecked"Now, bring me that horizon." - Pirates of the Caribbean

And that last pirate? Cap'n John Merrick from Shipwrecked.