I don’t know about every author, all I know is how I felt. I sent a query letter and waited. And waited. You know the drill. You try to do other things, but the back of your mind won’t let it go. I know myself, so I put it on the calendar. Trying to let it carry the burden of waiting.
It didn’t help.
At all.
The first fear, or maybe worry, was that the query letter was not going to catch their attention. The next fear, yes, it is fear, was that they’d simply say “Thanks, but no thanks.” And nothing else. There is no way you can correct any issues with your novel.
I waited.
You know the drill. I’m new to it, so I’m learning. It is not the same as submitting to Literotica and waiting a week to see it publish. This is real. This is someone passing judgement on the worthiness of your creativity.
The characters are both not me, and me. They are different than I am because they were created with the story in mind. Yet their fears, their hopes, their dreams all come from my mind. They start there, flow through my fingers and land on the page. Someone is evaluating all of that and more, and deciding if your work is worthy of publication.
In forty years of business, I know that products have a niche. The niche has a cycle. Hit it right and you ride the wave. Hit it at the wrong time and you go bust. Books are products. We, the authors, are content creators. The genre I chose is Erotica. There are dozens if not hundreds of sub-genres within this market. Each publisher has to figure out if there is a market for the particular novel.
They have to start with a view of the market. Once they understand it, then they have to decide if they have the right distribution channels to get the book to the right person. This all happens long before they look at the first chapter. It has to. If it doesn’t then that publisher will go out of business in short order.
What’s the market for my story? The genre is Erotica. The sub-genre is Hotwife (or Hot Wife if you prefer). Under the Hotwife market there are several versions. The most common, from my research, is the cuckhold husband. Typically, but not always, this sub-sub-genre has a touch of humiliation for the husband. There is the swinger hotwife category. They both play, they both enjoy new partners, and they both love to reclaim each other after the fun. In the last few years there’s been a new category under the Hotwife, Stag-Vixen.
What is a Stag? Read enough and you find that it is a very confident and open-minded husband or boyfriend that feels secure in the relationship. He enjoys letting her play. Sometimes he participated, other times he watches, many times he participates in the planning but only finds out the results when she returns.
Vixen, please don’t confuse this wonderful woman with a fox (the animal). She understands her Stag’s motivation, feeds his needs, and knows that the third person (be it man or woman) is only there for the pleasure of the couple. She has a secure foundation with her Stag and adds to the memories and pleasures one well placed brick at a time.
Is a Stag-Vixen story a love story? No, not necessarily, though it can be. It is about the adventure they embark in as they step into this lifestyle.
How many people read Stag-Vixen Howife Erotica? Now, that’s the first question that a publisher has to answer when they get the submission. Note to self: Do a better job defining the market in the query letter. Lesson learned.
On July 3rd the letter arrived. The first sentence was a simple thank you for the submission to the publisher. My nerves reached the top of the scale. I knew in the next sentence I’d see whether I was published or not.
Not!
Devastation. Desolation. Loss. The first three emotions from the part of the sentence that read “…and, unfortunately we do not feel it’s right for us…”
I’m not the first to read those words, and I won’t be the last. In fact, I know it won’t be the last time I read those words. It is part and parcel of the work we do as authors. Rejection is only one more step we must take to achieve acceptance. Intellectually, I knew this at the moment. It does not matter. The devastation was still putting up a good mental fight and it was winning. It was helped along by the sense of loss and its friend desolation.
I took a short walk, picked up my phone again, and read the full letter again. All nine paragraphs and all the hints hidden in there. Wait. No, they were not hidden. It was just my mind shouting – you were rejected. I quieted my mind and read it again.
Key points:
I have a lot of work to do on the story I thought was finished. The one thing that resonated with me was the comment about the hook. I thought I had a good hook. I don’t think anyone writes a book and not think about how to get the reader committed to reading the full story.
Three friends had seen the story. All three made nice noises but none of them returned any of the answers to the Beta Reader’s Questions. That should have been a hint. One is a moderate reader, but two are voracious consumers of the written word. I called one and asked, “Did you ever finish reading the novel?” There was a long silence on the phone. Then the truth came out. No, they had started it, but never finished it.
Confirmed! The hook is not there, at least not good enough.
Need to do a lot of work now. The key question is: What to change and how?
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
What’s your experience with publishers and the query process?
Have you ever resubmitted a story after fixing it?
Who is your editor? I don’t mean name. I mean, professional, fellow author, or friends and family.
