So, you’ve written a novel. Congratulations! You’ve climbed Everest. You’ve wrestled a kraken. You’ve survived a multi-year psychological endurance test conducted entirely by yourself, against yourself, with no clear rules and frequent bouts of sobbing into coffee mugs.

That’s supposed to be the hard part, right?

Wrong.

Because now it’s time to query.

Which means condensing your beautiful, messy, high-stakes brainchild into one peppy little email that says: Dear Agent, Please validate my existence and make all my dreams come true based on this 300-word pitch and a vague sense of market trends.

You finesse your comps until they sound both wildly original and commercially proven. You rewrite your hook sixteen times until it walks that magical line between “gritty” and “upmarket.” You agonize over whether the word “gritty” is too gritty. And then you hit send.

And that’s when the magic happens.

Just kidding.

That’s when the rejections roll in like a funeral parade for your self-esteem. Some agents ghost you entirely. Others hit you with a form letter so bland it could be copy-pasted into a break-up text and still feel generic. (“Thanks for the opportunity to consider your work. It’s not quite right for my list at this time.” Translation: I skimmed the subject line and already hate you.)

But the real soul-sucker? You get zero feedback. None. Not a single sentence telling you what missed the mark or why. You could be one comma away from perfection or twelve galaxies off course—and you’ll never know. You’re just screaming into the void, hoping the void is staffed by a plucky assistant who likes your vibe.

Spoiler: it’s not.

The Great Wall of Silence

Here’s the thing: rejection? I can take it. I’m a writer. I’ve built a personality out of emotional resilience, caffeine, and pretending not to care what people think. Rejection isn’t the issue.

The issue is that querying offers zero opportunity for improvement.

It’s like auditioning for a role in a play where no one tells you what the part is, or what the script says, or whether the director is looking for Shakespeare or SpongeBob. And when you don’t get the role, all you hear is, “We’re going in a different direction.” What direction? Where? Is it somewhere I can walk to, or do I need a passport and a better hook?

There are no scorecards. No helpful margin notes. No “Hey, your concept is cool but the execution reads like a TED Talk hosted by a raccoon.” Just silence. Or a form rejection so robotic it makes ChatGPT look like Oprah.

The only thing agents consistently agree on is this: they will not, under any circumstances, tell you why they said no. It’s not personal. It’s not you. It’s definitely not them. It’s just… publishing. You know, the industry that thrives on obscure trends, gut feelings, and vibes. Lots and lots of vibes.

So you sit there refreshing your inbox, wondering if your email got lost or if your book just has the literary appeal of a moldy sock. Either way, you’ll never know. Because the system is designed to give you exactly two pieces of information:

1. Whether the agent said yes.
2. Whether they ever said anything at all.

That’s it. No notes. No guidance. Just a stone-faced wall with the occasional form letter stapled to it like a Post-it from the abyss.

I Rewrote Everything—So I Could Be Rejected Faster

After my first twenty rejections, I did what any optimistic, emotionally stable person would do: I spiraled. Then I got help.

I hired an editor. A real professional who specialized in turning sad little query letters into sparkling beacons of marketability. I handed her everything: the query, the logline, the comps, the plot summary, the first chapter. I stripped the whole thing down to the bones and let her help me rebuild it like a fixer-upper in a gentrifying neighborhood.

And you know what? We did a great job. She gave me clear, actionable advice. I rewrote the whole thing. The new version was tight, punchy, structurally sound. I felt like I was finally holding a ticket to the big leagues.

So, I sent it out.

And an agent rejected me six minutes later.

Six minutes. That’s not even enough time to boil an egg, let alone read five sample pages and thoughtfully consider a career-defining partnership.

Honestly? I was impressed.

Before the rewrite, rejections took weeks. Sometimes months. But now? I was getting rejected in real time. The editor didn’t necessarily make my pitch more appealing, but she did make the entire process much more efficient. I was out of the running before I had time to romanticize my odds. Talk about streamlining!

It felt less like being ghosted and more like being swiped left on Tinder before the app even finished loading your photo.

And yes, I laughed. Because what else can you do when the thing you’ve poured your heart into gets professionally dismissed with the speed of a spam filter?

Is Anyone Even Reading This?

At some point in the query process, a dangerous little thought creeps in. A whisper. A doubt.

“Are they even reading these?”

And the answer is… probably! Kind of! Maybe! Unless they’re not!

Look, I’m sure there are agents out there diligently combing through every query with a highlighter and a heart full of hope. But when your meticulously crafted pitch gets rejected in under ten minutes, on a Tuesday morning, fifteen seconds after the agency tweeted about how behind they are on submissions, it’s hard not to wonder if they even opened the file, or if your email just tripped an internal alarm labeled “Debut Author with Guts and No Platform. DESTROY.”

And here’s the brutal truth: most agents don’t reject your book. They never even get that far.

They reject the idea of your book. The query. The vibes. Maybe your comps sounded too midlist. Maybe your voice felt “off” that day. Maybe Mercury was in retrograde and they just didn’t feel like reading about murder before lunch.

It’s like applying for a job and getting ghosted because your résumé had the wrong font.

You spend years writing, months editing, weeks polishing your pitch—only to be turned away at the door because your logline didn’t sparkle hard enough. Forget “don’t judge a book by its cover.” In querying, they don’t even get to the cover. They glance at the envelope and throw it into the sea.

So, no, it’s not always clear whether anyone’s reading your query.

But it is clear that most of them aren’t reading your manuscript.

Because if they were? You’d have a whole different genre of rejection to enjoy.

The Feedback Paradox

You know what’s funny?

(Okay, not ha-ha funny. More like screaming-into-a-pillow funny.)

Every bit of publishing advice boils down to this: revise, improve, evolve. Keep getting better. Tighten your pitch. Sharpen your hook. Clarify your stakes. Polish, polish, polish.

But here’s the catch:

Improve based on what, exactly?

Because querying doesn’t come with notes. You don’t get a nice little breakdown of what worked and what didn’t. You don’t get redline comments or “Hey, this pacing lagged a bit in paragraph three.” You get a vague “not the right fit” and a one-way ticket to self-doubt.

It’s the literary version of being told to fix your face without a mirror.

You could be this close to agent-worthy brilliance, or so far off the mark you’ve actually reinvented a new genre, and you’ll never know. Maybe your comps were too obscure. Maybe your tone clashed with the market. Maybe you mentioned a prologue and the agent spontaneously combusted. All possibilities. None confirmed.

So you sit there, staring at your inbox, asking yourself the world’s most pointless question: What went wrong?

And the answer is always the same: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You’re not being evaluated, you’re being vibed. And those vibes? Unspoken. Unmeasured. And absolutely immune to revision.

So, when people say, “Keep going! Just revise and resubmit!” you nod politely while your soul dies a little inside. Because you would. You want to. You just have absolutely no idea what needs changing.

It’s like being told to improve your aim while wearing a blindfold in a pitch-black room, firing darts at a moving target… that may or may not exist.

The Unsolicited Pep Talk

Eventually, when the rejection count hits double digits (or triple, if you’re an overachiever), the motivational brigade shows up. You know the type. Bright-eyed. Brimming with hope. Usually armed with a Canva infographic that says something like:
“All it takes is one yes!”

Ah yes. The battle cry of people who’ve either never queried or are safely on the other side of the gate, sipping iced coffee in their agented glow, pretending they too once suffered in the trenches. Spoiler: they didn’t. Or if they did, they don’t remember the smell.

And sure—technically, they’re not wrong. It does only take one yes. But that logic also applies to lottery tickets, spontaneous combustion, and being chosen by a celestial goat to inherit the secrets of the cosmos. Just because something’s technically possible doesn’t make it emotionally sustainable.

What they don’t mention is that “one yes” might come after 147 no’s, two existential crises, and a complete personality reboot. They don’t tell you the process is basically a soul-sifting colander with no handle. That you’ll watch worse books get picked up while yours gets ghosted in under ten minutes. That you’ll start questioning your title, your talent, your life choices, and your use of em dashes—all before breakfast.

But no worries! Just keep going! Smile through the pain! Manifest your dreams!

People mean well. Truly. And when fellow writers say, “All it takes is one yes,” they’re right.
In theory.

But persistence without feedback? That’s not growth.
That’s Stockholm Syndrome.

But Hey, You’re Not Alone

So, here’s what I’ll say: if you’re deep in the query trenches right now, screaming into the void with a stack of rejections and no idea what to fix… same. Me too.
It sucks. It’s broken. It’s infuriating.
But it’s not your fault.

Keep writing anyway. Keep querying if you can stomach it. Keep building something nobody can take away from you. Because even if no agent sees your brilliance today, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

It just means they’re busy. Or tired. Or allergic to adjectives. Or maybe they’re flat-out wrong.

And if all else fails, remember: you already did the hardest thing. You wrote the damn book.

Publishing may be allergic to clarity, feedback, and basic human communication, but your work is real. It exists. It matters.

And one day, when your book finally finds a home, you’ll look back on all of this and laugh.

Right after you scream into a pillow for twenty straight minutes.