Trying to find a literary agent while suffering from depression
It’s a bit of an unfortunate time in the United States for those suffering from mental illness. Our current HHS secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr., has repeatedly blamed mass shootings on antidepressants. He talks of autism as if it is a horror to be prevented, caused by unknown “toxins,” a view that contradicts that of the scientific consensus, and one that dehumanises autistic people.
I’ve written about my depression before. One big part of my experience with it has been learned helplessness, a downward spiral, a feedback loop created by repeated attempts and failure, made all the worse when you realise you really don’t know how to make things go as you’d like them to. I remember going through my days feeling as if I were pressed under some great weight, certain there was something wrong not just with me but with the fact of my existence. But I had no idea what I could do about it. Talk therapy hadn’t worked for me, and I was certain that prescription medicine was something for people who had a problem, not someone who was the problem. Waking up, failing to fix what was wrong, not knowing what to do, going asleep, and repeating it all over again was both maddening and deadening.
Trying to find a literary agent is a fucking minefield for people with depression.
What is involved in trying to find a literary agent?
When you are a fiction writer, and you want your book to be traditionally published (as opposed to self-published) you almost certainly need a literary agent, and the process for acquiring an agent is called querying. You describe your book in a query letter, which is sent to the agent in an attempt to sell them on the writing and on the writer. Different agents have different requirements for these letters (for instance, some want to see excerpts and a synopsis in your first email to them, while others insist you do not send anything other than the query letter itself).
If the agent likes what they see in what you first send them, they’ll ask for more. As you progress through the stages, you will be asked for the full manuscript, invited to a call after the agent has read it, and then given an offer of representation—assuming you are successful. The agent will then work with you to get your book ready for submission, which is where they will try sell your book to editors at a publisher.
It’s typical for published authors to have received many rejections before finding an agent. It’s hard to find an agent, and it’s hard to get published.
The mines are buried elsewhere.
An information vacuum
Literary agents receive a lot of queries; it is not unusual for an agent to receive dozens every day. Finding new clients is also only a fraction of an agent’s work. As a result, an agent can only spend a very short amount of time reviewing each query they receive. If they decide not to move forward with you, they might reply with a form letter if they reply at all.
It is unreasonable to expect an agent to provide individualised feedback on queries they reject. These replies would take up a significant amount of their day. Instead, the totality of the feedback you receive will either be some form of “yes” or, most likely, “no.”
But there’s a problem, a disconnect, for authors. Your ability to sell your book to an agent is a different skill than an agent’s ability to sell your book to an editor, or a publisher’s ability to sell it to bookstores, or a bookstore’s ability to sell it to their customers. It’s a very different skill to actually writing fiction. Furthermore, it’s a skill you don’t need to continue to develop, unless you need to find a new agent. Worse, there are so many variables involved that it is almost impossible to know why a given agent rejected your book.
Improving in any skill requires information about your failures. It is possible to learn where the only feedback you get is success or failure, without further information, but I feel this only works where there is one or a few right answers. The question answered by a rejection of your query is not “is the query letter correct?” but “was this query letter, at this time, enough to interest this particular agent?”
Things that can go wrong
There are so many reasons your query letter could fail. For example:
The agent might have said they are closed to queries, but you sent them a query anyway.
You might have ignored the guidelines that agent gave for how to format your query letter.
You might have pitched the agent a genre or other category they do not actually represent (for example, pitching adult horror to an agent who deals exclusively with children’s fiction).
You misspelled the agent’s name, or used the wrong name, or pasted in “Dear AGENT NAME” without changing it to their actual name.
You pitched them a book that you haven’t actually written yet.
You didn’t describe your book.
But there may be far less obvious problems. Some of these are not problems with your query letter per se but instead some incompatibility with that particular agent you could not tell in advance, or a host of other problems that you have no way of knowing you have. These include the following:
The book might not resonate with them.
They might not see a market for the book.
They might have been interested in the book, but they currently represent an author with a similar book or books.
All of the above, but the problem is how you sold the book, not with the book itself.
Your query letter did not sufficiently differentiate itself from other queries they’ve seen or even just saw that day.
The specifications or requests they provided in one place were different from those mentioned in another place, and you followed the wrong set (I have reason to believe this happened to me at least once).
The agent expects something to be in your query letter that they have not explicitly asked for and is not mentioned in any of the standard advice for query letters, e.g. you should always put the ending to the book in the synopsis, but the agent might expect to see the ending in the query letter itself, which is not the case for every agent and they may not tell you.
If you include the synopsis and sample chapters in the query letter, the problem might lie in those and not your query letter itself.
There’s also paradoxical advice. One agent tells writers they should include all the major plot points (though perhaps not the ending) in the query letter, so an agent can see that you’ve thought this through. But there are plenty of successful query letters that do not go into this level of detail, and instead set the scene and the stakes and go little further. One notable example is Scott Hawkins’ query letter for The Library at Mount Char.
The paradox is resolved when you understand that the agent is talking about what they expect, what other agents they’ve talked to might expect, but it is not universal.
Welcome back to the doom loop, and the particulars of depression in this context
The more information you have about success or failure of your actions, the quicker you can learn how to improve your odds of success. For example, I might have had a hard time understanding why my wife liked the flowers I bought her sometimes and not others, if she never told me the smell of one type of flower made her gag.
With minimal feedback on your queries from agents, you lack information critical to improvement. Assuming you have the basics down, how can you tell what part of the query letter is failing you? Is it the introduction, or how you phrased your bio? Did you fail with the pitch, or with comparative titles? Is it that there is no market for a book like yours? Or is it a different problem for each agent?
The process can feel like writing a letter on a piece of paper, making a paper aeroplane out of it, and throwing it into a building through an open window, hoping that there’s someone inside who’ll read it.
To fail itself can be disheartening, sure, but the possibility of failure is not where people with depression might stumble. The real risk is of falling into the familiar doom loop of learned helplessness. Without knowing why you’ve failed, it’s impossible to know what to adjust, and your subconscious starts spinning its tyres in the mud, your anxiety building again. For me at least, the similarity of the experience to depressive episodes brings me right back to those feelings.
People with depression often suffer from low self-esteem. This presents another problem when you are pitching a novel. I can say (with confidence) that my novel is well written, is tense, is something I would like to read. These feel like table stakes. But a standard part of a query letter is comparative titles. I find it impossible to say “This book will appeal to fans of Book X or Book Y,” for praise like that makes me deeply uncomfortable, and to praise my own work? The words would turn to ash in my mouth, even if their accuracy was proven to me.
Conclusion
So, what can be done? Other than being aware of all this, I’m not sure there is anything that can be done. You would need to drastically change the publishing industry to include opportunities for feedback in the process, which would make the process very different, and with the increased labour involved it would require vastly more readers to be economically viable.
It is important that you do things to preserve your peace of mind. Annoyingly, working out helps here. I admit that this does not solve the problem, but it does mitigate it, at least temporarily.
My own mental health hasn’t been great recently. On one agent’s bio they claimed that, if you had a particular thing in your submission, they would always take a look at that thing (I’m not going into details on what that thing is, to protect that agent’s identity—I hope you’ll forgive the vagueness). I spent at least eight hours working on one for my book, and received a form rejection a few days later. I was okay with the rejection (you have to expect rejections, after all), but what threw me was that the page I created containing this thing was never visited.
I didn’t feel angry. I just felt hopeless. I bring this up to warn budding authors this is an experience you might have. If my expectations had been lower, I wouldn’t have had this reaction. It sent me deep into perseveration, further into the lower tiers of the doom loop.
It’s the familiarity of those feelings that will get you, because even if you are doing better, for so much of your life you’ve felt that way and the well-trodden paths in your mind are exactly where your thoughts go.
None of this is to suggest the agents are doing anything wrong and, even if they had the time to respond with individualised feedback, they would have other problems to contend with. After all, there are bigger risks they face.
Buckle up, folks. This blog post is about to get some appendixes!
Appendix 1: A darker risk agents face
There are many people in the world who are angry at all the wrong things, unhinged, unwell and not aware of it, or even just incapable of understanding context. Given the emotional attachment writers have to their work, a rejection may result in an unwelcome reaction.
There are parallels between this and how women navigate the world of men who want to date them (made even more relevant as most agents are women, so they have these experiences). Over the years it has been startling and horrifying to hear the experiences of female friends with many other men, revealing a world I would never have direct experience of but, holy shit, what the fuck.
A person asking an agent why their query letter didn’t work could be simply someone looking to improve. Or it could be someone who won’t take no for an answer, and who takes each reply as an opportunity for escalation; it could be someone who, with the “justification” of not hearing what they want to hear, goes to the agent’s workplace to harass them. Or it could just be a writer who’s desperate and needs emotional support that is not an agent’s job to provide. Individualised feedback from an agent gives the writer an opening to respond, but the response the agent receives might be inappropriate if not dangerous.
Think of all the women who have come forward with allegations of abuse regarding men in the entertainment industry, and how often they have been blamed for “ruining” movies, TV shows, or books after doing so. As if somehow the fault was theirs, and not the abuser himself.
You might not be such a person, but such people do exist, and the agent you’re querying doesn’t have sufficient information about you to be able to tell.
Appendix 2: A note on query critique services
That said, some agents do offer query critique services, but this is rare and the experience is inconsistent. Bad design choices on the Manuscript Academy site showed agents listed there as available for meetings, but with no meetings available. I’ve since booked an agent consultation through the site, but you can imagine how frustrating it was to see a way I could learn how to improve my query letter from someone with domain knowledge, then step through several months of several agents’ schedules for several different services and find that there was no path forward.* (Yes, this post really does have everything, including a footnote)
Other sites offer query critique services without telling you who will be providing the critique, or even the role of those doing the job. Are you getting the critique from an agent or a writer? On these sites, it was impossible to tell.
Several writers provide paid advice on query letters. But writers are not experts in what makes for a good query letter. Even those who are successful may not know what drew the agent in and, even if their agent tells them, it might be particular to that agent for that genre, and is probably not generalisable.
When I’ve reviewed query letters for other writers, I can comment on the writing. Perhaps their pitch seems confusing. Perhaps they’ve brought up a character but not told you anything about them (i.e. “But her friend Sharon can’t help her”—who is this Sharon? What is the relevance of her not being able to help? Is the problem that Sharon in particular can’t help, or is it that no-one the protagonist knows can help?) I can also tell the writer if I see something that goes against some common advice I’ve read or heard about writing queries. But I can’t warrant that advice, only relay it and state its provenance.
I don’t doubt that most writers providing advice on query letters do so in good faith. But there are plenty of people offering advice who do not.
Grifters abound in this space. I’ve seen people who have had one book published (and maybe none?) sell expensive courses on how to get published. One person offers to tell you what agents look for in a query letter but, although they work at an agency, they are not in fact an agent.
* At issue was the idea that an agent could be “available for live meetings” when it was impossible to actually book such a meeting. However, when you go to book a meeting with an agent, it doesn’t actually tell you this; you have to infer it from choosing a service and stepping through the agents’ schedules. The site could have prevented this confusion by, at the very least, telling you up front if a particular service was impossible to book.