One Year on Submission

I thought getting an agent was the hardest part. I was wrong.

The book I thought would be my debut novel spent 12 months and 22 days on submission.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t sell.

Photo by Miikka Luotio on Unsplash

I’ve never shared some of this before. What it’s really been like to have my first book baby in front of gatekeepers at major publishing houses. The months of radio silence. The kind passes that felt eerily reminiscent of those received while querying. That one phone call with a Big 5 Editor. How none of it was quite what I thought it would be.

A statistic that is thrown around a lot is that querying writers have about a 1% chance of signing with a literary agent, a necessity for getting one’s book in front of major publishers in almost all cases, as most Big 5 editors won’t look at unagented submissions.

Stats on how likely it is that your book will be successful on submission to editors are, in my experience, much harder to nail down. Some sources put the odds at a dismal 1% while others are more generous. According to Jericho Writers, a submission success rate of anywhere between 1% and 10% + is considered a reasonable expectation.

There simply isn’t a lot of easily accessible hard data on what to expect at this stage of the process. As with every phase of the publishing trajectory, there are infinite variables. If you go deep enough down this rabbit hole as I have from time to time, you’ll find there aren’t clear answers, and the ones you do find are bound to vary if not wildly contradict each other.

Because the 1% statistic is floated so often around the query process, I think I simply believed that signing with an agent HAD to be the hardest part. I truly thought I had a good chance of selling my book with this crucial gatekeeper role (an agent) in place. I was going from being a tiny fish in an enormous pond of querying authors, to a more sizeable fish with shiny agented scales in a nicely curated aquarium. It was only a matter of time (weeks? maybe months? 2023-24 me thought) until one of these editors would surely bite, making my book deal dreams a reality.

Right?

Continuing with the fishing analogies—my agent cast a wide net, sending my manuscript to close to three dozen editors over the course of a year. The feedback I did receive was overall more personalized than the feedback I had gotten while querying. Few, if any, of the editors’ responses read like a straight form rejection, those boilerplate letters that anyone who’s queried is all too familiar with.

Even though rejections always sting at least a little (and sometimes like a smack of jellyfish, if I may be even more insufferable with my under-the-sea speak), I still felt this thrill and sense of pride knowing that editors from imprints that publish some of my most beloved, highly revered books were taking the time to read MINE. That feeling of having made it this far never got old. It was an honor, even if it didn’t end as I had hoped.

While the first few months on sub were a steady, near-weekly stream of (largely personal and generously phrased) passes, after that things SLOWED…WAY…DOWN. In my experience, editors on submission either reply fairly promptly (within weeks or a few months— trust me when I say that’s ‘quick’ in publishing), or not at all.

The ‘not at all’ part I was not prepared for.

In all, close to a third of the editors we submitted my manuscript to downright ghosted us. Most of these people had it for a full year. I found this to be the most disappointing part of my sub experience—the lack of the professional courtesy of a mere reply. We unpublished writers spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on each novel we painstakingly write, edit, and revise—all for no pay and while facing very bleak odds that our book will ever be published. I understand that agents fielding thousands of queries a month might find it impossible to issue each writer a personalized response. But editors are receiving much fewer manuscripts at the submission stage. Some kind of a reply after a year doesn’t seem like too much to ask for.

In the end, I really struggled on sub. I could feel my book dying a slow death by silence. It’s hard. Anyone who has been there—in the query or submission trenches—knows this. It is SO SO HARD.

After a year on sub and much reflection, I made the difficult decision to part ways with my agent and close out all remaining open submissions for my novel. I don’t plan to write much more about this personal choice, but I will say that these decisions are complex, and ones I would never make lightly. I will forever be grateful to my first agent for believing in me and my work, and have no doubt she will go on to champion many other writers. As for my first novel—it is shelved for now, but I hold out hope it might find its home one day. Progress on this path is often non-linear.

So here I am, on the other side of a full year plus on sub. That chapter is over now, and it’s taken me a while to say this, but I’m at peace with that. I’m ready to move forward wherever my writing journey takes me next. I’m still betting on myself, because the alternative isn’t an option.

I really strive to share fairly, openly, and respectfully, about my path toward publication, in an effort to ‘pay it forward’ to fellow writers, and in honor of those who’ve so generously illuminated and helped make sense of my own path. I have learned, and continue to learn, so much about the wild, thrilling world of writing and publishing. I am a sharper, more fully formed writer, and a fiercer, more informed advocate for myself and other writers, for my dogged pursuit of this goal.

A few things I’ve learned so far…

• The word ‘done’ doesn’t exist until a book is on shelves in a bookstore

• Many, many writers don’t sell their first book. Or their second, or third

• It is—it turns out—possible to survive this

• Many writers have more than one agent and editor over the course of their career

• Editors ghost. It’s a thing.

• Find your people. Writing community is everything. This mountain is not meant to be climbed alone. And it will NEVER be summitted solo.

WHAT I’M READING:

(No, I’m not reading a book about DOGE.)

Truth be told, I feel like I’m getting away with something here. I’m not musically cool enough for this book. I’m barely keeping up with the CliffsNotes version of mainstream/Top 40 hits these days, and have little to no frame of reference for many of the songs, bands, and musical moments mentioned within this novel. But! But! I love music deeply, even when stubbornly positioned in my most basic of lanes. And I love and respect good songwriting SO much. And this book is a love letter to both, with excellent writing throughout. If I wasn’t listening to it on audio, I would be bleeding my highlighter dry.

I love it. You’ll love it. Recommending this book is the closest I’ll come to being musically relevant in the foreseeable future, so please let me have this win and read it.

GIVEAWAY: Are you a querying or soon-to-be querying writer? Comment “giveaway” by Friday 3/7/25 here or on Instagram to enter to win a free query letter critique or 60-minute publishing consulting call. I’m also offering 30% off all services from my website booked in the month of March.

Thanks for reading,