"When should I start querying?"
How to give your work its best chance
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is an advice column for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response!
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Dear Kate,
I’ve been working on my first novel have sent it out to readers for feedback. I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but when should I start looking for a literary agent? I want to start planning my next steps.
- Anon
Dear Anon,
The number one mistake I see early writers make (my past self included!!) is querying too soon.
It’s not really fair to call it a mistake. Sometimes throwing something against the wall and seeing what sticks—or doesn’t :(—is the only way to figure out what we need to revisit, rethink, and revise. We can’t always get to that stage until enough rejections have come through to signal that our work isn’t as ready as we’d thought. But I wish I could wave a magic writing wand and save everyone some of that rejection in the first place by convincing each and every writer in your position to do one thing: wait.
Don’t wait forever! Don’t hold onto a finished manuscript out of fear, or a desire to avoid those rejections I’m talking about. Taking a leap and sending work out is part of the process, vulnerabilities and all.
But take the time you need to ensure you’re really, really, REALLY giving yourself the best possible chance of success. You wouldn’t serve your party guests raw cake batter, or a half-baked cake, or even a three-quarters baked cake. A cake that needs five more minutes in the oven is edible, even delicious, but still underdone. Agents (and publishers) are inundated with more manuscripts than they can possibly read. When they’re facing an entire buffet of delicious and impressive cakes to choose from (to extend this metaphor way too far), it’s easy to see why they can’t make their decisions based on the cake’s potential. If it’s not fully cooked, it’s not ready.
Many people think of the timeline as, okay, finish draft, get feedback, revise, polish up, start querying. Check, check, check. But I can tell you right now: there are more rounds of revision that your manuscript needs. Not because you’re a bad writer or I don’t trust your abilities—I haven’t read the book! You read this Substack, so obviously you have excellent taste! But I’ve read drafts by first-time authors and I’ve read drafts by multi-published authors and I’ve read my own drafts (so! many! drafts!) and they all, ALL, benefit from more thinking, more revising, more work. Because that’s how it goes! That’s not a flaw in the writing—that is the writing.
Writing is the accrual of significance through layers over time. In every successive draft, through every round of feedback, we see where to tighten, expand, deepen, improve. We see where to focus more of the story and where to let go. Where to shore up motivation and where to twist the knife deeper. We discover the book we’re writing by writing it, which means it’s often not until we get to the end of a draft that we start to see what the book is actually about—the central questions, the key plot points, the major themes, pulling together what happens in the narrative as well as what it all means. This is true regardless of your genre, and regardless of how commercial or literary your vision. I promise that books with a breezy writing style are labored over intensely to perfect their readability. There are no shortcuts here.
You’re doing the right first move by sending your manuscript out to readers. Your next move, while you’re waiting, is to rest, recuperate, and maybe start something new—a new novel, a short story, an essay, whatever keeps your gears turning and keeps you in the game without burning you out after the hurdle of finishing a draft. Take this time to read. Read a lot! Books in your genre, books outside of your genre, books you can learn from.1
Your next move, once you get that feedback, is to revise. (And keep reading.) For revision tips and how to approach this stage, see my post on revision.
Your next move after that is to do it all over again: get feedback, revise. Get more feedback. Revise again. Again. Again. Again. (Also: reading!)
I know. That sounds like an awful lot of revision. (And reading.) It is!!!!! At some point you may feel like the book is done well before that, and I encourage you at that point to set it aside for a few weeks, a few months, read a lot, write some other things if you like, and then come back and reread your own book with fresh eyes. Read it like you’re someone picking up a book in the store, busy, impatient, trying to decide if this is the book you want to spend your time and money on. Read it like you don’t know the author. As writers we have plenty of self-criticism, and I’m not trying to say to tear yourself apart, or to make yourself miserable comparing your draft to the polished, edited books on shelves. I’m also not saying that your manuscript should only be evaluated based on its salability or its place in the market. But an agent’s job is to sell your work, so at some point you have to start thinking about the reader and the experience they’ll have when they pick up your book.
It used to be that agents would help you reshape and edit your work before going out to editors, and that editors themselves would, you know, edit, and continue to shape and improve the book before publication. And they do—but the bar is much, much higher. Agents need your manuscript to be closer to ready, because editors are just as squeezed and are rejecting more books than ever before. Minor plot holes? Fuzzy character motivation? All your characters sound sliiightly the same when they’re speaking? There’s nothing too small to address before you hit “send” on those first queries. (The same goes for if you’re hitting “upload” to self-publish.)
Often, though, I read manuscripts where the writer is worrying about word choice or a minor point on page 276, when in reality the inciting incident is too small or the opening chapters too slow or the main character only reacts to what’s happening or the scenes themselves continually deflate their own tension rather than building a narrative through-line. These are not observations about any one book and to anyone reading this, I’m not talking about YOUR book. (Except my own book — I just revised my own inciting incident because I got the 100% correct feedback that it needed to be more significant and doing this *completely* changed the story. Thanks, Sara!!) My point is that these are extremely common types of problems that appear. The issues in a manuscript and the reasons for rejection may be much bigger, more central to the backbone of the narrative, and require more substantial revision to fix.
Here’s the real kicker. Once you fix those problems? It’s almost inevitable that when you strengthen one part of the manuscript, another part will feel weaker in comparison and now need your attention. Now that you aren’t distracted by that issue when you’re reading, you’ll start to notice other things. If your beta readers all commented on X issue, and you fixed X issue, your next round of readers won’t call attention to X…but they might notice Y and Z instead. That’s why it’s important to not stop your revisions after X is done. Keep going. Keep working. Get another opinion, another set of eyes.
I once had a manuscript with two different antagonists, and everyone said one of them read as flat because the other was much more dynamic and well-rounded. I did a huge amount of work to deepen the flat character, and guess what. The “well-rounded” character now became the one who looked meh in comparison. I’d thought I was done, but instead I had to do another round of revision to deepen the second character, too. And once the antagonists finally felt complete? I got feedback that some secondary characters weren’t pulling their own weight. Those secondary characters had been walking around fine and dandy in my earlier drafts, but now that everything was polished, tighter, deeper, more significant, they suddenly needed more work to keep up.
Give yourself this time. You owe it to yourself to make your work the best it can be. Even if this isn’t the manuscript that ultimately gets you an agent, putting in this work now will make your writing SO much stronger for the next book you write. The only way out is through.
But, back to your original question: how do you know when to start querying? Because you could keep revising forever! And that’s not helpful, either.
There’s a certain point in all of my manuscripts where I start to feel like I could send the manuscript to five different people and I’d get five different opinions, but they’d be just that: opinions. They might be based on the idiosyncratic tastes of the individual reader, and the changes they’re suggesting would be unlikely to tip the needle in a substantial way. For all that I’ve talked about how fully done your cake (book) needs to be, it’s unlikely that changing that one line of dialogue is going to change an agent or editor’s mind either way. I can start to feel like I’m tinkering rather than editing, and while small changes can have a big impact, even that starts to yield diminishing returns. When I find that I’m rereading my manuscript, changing a word here or a word there, and then reading it again and changing those things back (lol/sob), it’s time to get the book off my desk because I’m not doing anything meaningful to it anymore. That doesn’t mean I’ll never make another change! Just that I’ve taken it as far as I can at this stage, and it’s time for the next step.
When I get feedback from readers that’s substantive, actionable, and makes a real difference to the story, I know something in the manuscript needs my attention. Regardless of whether I take their feedback or how I work it into the manuscript, I know the book isn’t done yet. When I get feedback from readers that feels like, well, they wish I’d written a different book, or they have personal preferences here and there—I wouldn’t necessarily ignore their advice, but I’d feel the book is closer to query-able.2
I should note that this feedback doesn’t have to come from a professional editor or be something you pay for. But it should be from trusted sources with real experience, who are reading your book cover to cover and can see the big picture as well as the details. They can be a mix of readers and writers, and they shouldn’t all be people who already love you and are predisposed to read your work with an open heart. Not that people need to be cruel when giving feedback! Far from it! But they need to be able to be clear-eyed and honest with you, and if you’re serious about your work and serious about wanting to be published, then you need to be able to take that honest feedback gracefully and eagerly, because your #1 goal here is to make your book better.3
You can certainly start researching agents and putting together your agent list now, and working on your query letter and synopsis, because those take time and revision as well. It never hurts to be prepared and have a sense of how you’ll approach the querying stage. You just don’t want to get ahead of yourself and neglect the manuscript because you’re focused on polishing the query, or take a polished query as a sign that you’re ready to go. It’s still the book that needs to stand on its own. And sometimes as the plot of the book changes in revisions, the query itself needs to change. Sometimes, though, finding the holes in the query points to holes in the manuscript, which is an argument for writing a blurb before the manuscript is finished—while recognizing that both documents, the query and the book itself, will continue to undergo revisions.
Write, revise. Read, revise. Get feedback, revise. Take your book as far as you possibly can, until there’s no stone left unturned and no angle you haven’t considered. The number of revisions this can take is sometimes shocking, and definitely daunting. But you go through it the same way you wrote your first draft: one word and one page at a time. There’s such joy in seeing a book come together, and in making the changes where you can feel it getting better day by day. Maybe not every day, and not in such a linear fashion. But the rewards are there, and I’m confident you will find them.
Keep writing,
Kate
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Maybe someday I’ll do a post on how to study books like an author?
That’s assuming I’ve already sent it to other readers beforehand. If I get feedback from a first round reader and it doesn’t feel helpful, that doesn’t mean the book is perfect as is and ready to go! It’s a process of trial and error to find the beta readers who are right for your work, and how and when to send your work to them. That could be a whole other post!
People who love you can still give good feedback. Just that it’s also helpful to have some beta readers who want the best for you but still have a little more distance and objectivity. :)