Winning this year’s Writer’s League of Texas manuscript contest has been exciting, to be sure, but I’ve also had to temper my excitement by remembering 2023. That year, I entered the contest in the romance category with my almost-completed novel Don’t Give Me Grief, which was listed as a finalist in the contest.
I thought to myself, this is amazing! Here I am going into the market to query in a wildly popular genre with a manuscript that earned an award before it was even finished. This was going to be SO easy! I even had an agent (who I met via the WLT Agent Symposium) express interest in seeing the whole thing when I was done, and told me to send it to her when I was. She was the first agent I queried back in November of 2023.
Fast forward nearly two years, and that manuscript has now garnered its 100th rejection in the market. It’s had its share of interest, with a full manuscript request from two agents and three different small presses, but it was ultimately a pass on all of them. The refrain, when it doesn’t come in a boilerplate form rejection, is that it’s very hard to stand out in the market right now. Yes, contemporary romance and romantic comedy are popular, but only among the authors who are already standing out in that crowded space.
So what do you do when your manuscript fails to land and amasses its 100th rejection?
You write another one. You keep querying. Go for 200 – why not? Every no is just one step closer to a yes. All the other platitudes. It’s hard to not take the rejection personally and keep going, I won’t pretend it isn’t. Every time I opened a followup email after sending a full manuscript I was SURE was going to be an acceptance, I was disappointed to the point of tears. But I kept going. I’m going to keep going.
And I’m going to write the last 20k-30k words in the novel that won in the thriller category of this year’s manuscript contest, so I can repeat the same delusion about this one’s query journey being a piece of cake.
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