1/ I’ve been seeing a lot of #amquerying writers talk about their dream agents and getting really down on themselves when they get a rejection from them. Let me say this: your dream agent will be the one who loves your book more than you do! One who loves it so much that they

2/ want to sell it, and know they CAN sell it! One who you will rejoice with and be depressed with because let me tell you, if you think just getting the agent is the hard part, then listen up. My agent was so excited about my book which made me doubly excited. There were minimal

3/ rewrites and I think I was on sub 3 weeks after we signed. WOW, right?! Here comes my book deal!! Then... the weeks passed. They turned into months. And then—THEN—we had to pull it from submission after 10 months of it not selling because something had just come to market

4/ which was way too similar and it was getting a ton of attention. Yes, we were depressed. She even said, “maybe this happened for a reason.” On a crazy coincidence, I had submitted by book number 2 to her just days before that. After she read it she put it on sub, and that one

5/ sold in less than 2 months. Your dream agent will work with you even in the bad times, so don’t get hung up on the idea of who you think will be a “perfect fit.” Rejections are par for the course at every stage in this industry. I know, we writers hate the word “subjective”

6/ but it really is. Sometimes agents will love your work, but they already rep something similar or have a signed client writing something similar. Maybe there aren’t enough editors to sell it to. Maybe the market is saturated with that idea. And (eeeeek, here we go with brutal

7/ honesty) sometimes the writing simply isn’t ready. That’s okay. Everyone starts somewhere and I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, EVERY book you see on a bookstore shelf was likely rejected hundreds of times. It’s part of the process. Chin up, be persistent, and be

8/ willing to improve at every turn. Then you’ll have dream agents fighting over you

9/ Glad this resonated with so many. The takeaway here shouldn’t be “don’t worry, every book eventually gets an agent” because that’s not true. My 5th MS got an agent and I had to trunk the 4 before it. The takeaway here is that you don’t know who your dream agent is yet