Not every story finds a home. For a writer, it’s a worst-case scenario. You spent months (possibly years) bleeding text onto the page and editing the story to make it the best it can be. Then after even more years of querying agents—nothing.
I’ve been there.
Two years ago, I finished one of my most challenging manuscripts: a young adult urban fantasy set in the early 1980s. I immersed myself in spy novels. I studied spycraft, the Cold War, East and West Berlin, all sorts of random crap about 1983, and lots of mythical creatures. The actual writing took about a year, and then the querying began.
I got two full requests from agents. Both eventually sent me rejection letters.
The same day.
One hour apart.
That was one of my worst days as a writer.
How did I cope with that? Less than three hours later, I drove to the library and continued writing my next story.
I love my YA spy novel, but it hasn’t found a home. As demoralizing as these moments can be, shelving an unpublished story doesn’t make a manuscript or the writer a failure. The challenge is how to take a homeless story and make the best of that situation.
First off, every story you write can help you improve your craft. A good writer should always push themselves to do better with each story they write. You’re paying it forward to your next story.
You should also take some time to reflect on your options. Can you query any small presses? Be aware that while there are lots of small presses, many of them rely on print-on-demand technology. That means you probably aren’t getting in a Barnes & Noble. To get your book into many independent bookstores, you’re probably having to buy the books and deliver them to the store yourself. That’s just a step above self-publishing, and that takes even more business savvy on your part.
The grimmest takeaway is to decide if you’ve got the stomach to try again to hunt for an agent or a publisher with another story. Writing is filled with far more rejection than acceptance. This doesn’t end with the querying process. If you think querying agents is demoralizing, just wait until you try to convince a paying reader to buy your book.
Before you call it quits, you should consider why that manuscript failed and do your best to avoid those mistakes with your future projects.
Perhaps you aren’t the right person to tell that story. It’s possible you just don’t have the life experience to make that story work.
Maybe your timing is bad. Certain trends come and go. While I eventually found a publisher for my Gidion Keep, Vampire Hunter novels, I never found an agent. I had the misfortune of timing my agent hunt during the height of Twilightfatigue. I can’t tell you how many agents I researched that looked promising only to see a big “NO VAMPIRES!” in their manuscript wish list. If the timing is bad and you have patience, then maybe there will be a better chance to query agents with that story in the future.
Sometimes, you can cannibalize elements of your trunked story. You can lift a character, a setting, or a plot twist and use them elsewhere. One of my earliest publishing credits was a novelette titled The Deadlands that appeared in the anthology Four in the Hole and is now the title story in my short story collection of the same name. That story was born from the first act of a young adult, urban fantasy novel I’d written and been forced to trunk.
Success isn’t easy to define, even when you get published. The thing aspiring authors often forget is that failing to succeed doesn’t always equal failure. Sometimes, you can find some small victories even when your story isn’t published.
About the Author
Bill Blume‘s love for the written word started in high school with an addiction to comic books that was later hijacked by novels such as Frankenstein and Dragonflight. His short stories have been published in many fantasy anthologies and ezines. He’s the author of the Gidion Keep, Vampire Hunter series. Like the father figure in his novels, he’s worked as a 911 dispatcher for more than 15 years.