ReQuerying

Thomas Lion knows it's too hot in June to come out of his shady spot.

I started querying for my WIP back in October of last year.  To my amazement, I had several agents asking for partials and fulls on the manuscript.  Within a week I was allowing myself to believe that I might actually become a published author.

To make a very long story much shorter, I began working with an agent who liked the manuscript a lot, but felt it was lacking in several important areas.  This agent was willing to work with me, without any guarantees of representation, if I was willing to do so as well.  We discussed changes and opportunities within the story.  The agent never made requests, but only suggestions for the kinds of things that would deepen the characters and their relationships and, therefore, improve the story.

We went back and forth on this over the course of several months.  My manuscript more than doubled in length and became stronger than I had thought possible.  In April, weeks turning in my last revision, I was expecting to finally receive that much sought-after offer.  Instead, email brought a "thanks, but no thanks" letter.  This agent recommended I submit the manuscript as it was, to other agents.  The story wasn't right for this agent, but this agent felt confident that the story would find the right person soon.

I immediately contacted another agent who had expressed interest in the revised manuscript if anything happened with the agent I had been working with.  I sent the second agent the new manuscript the same day.  (And haven't heard anything back since then.  Bummer.)

In the past several months I've tried doing revision work on the second book in the series.  (The irony of doing such extensive revision work on Book1 is that I have to now bring Book2 and Book3 up to the new standards set by Book1)  However, I've found that even writing new passages for scenes that are well blocked out in my head is difficult.  Any writing is being difficult.

Instead of beating my head against the same scene that isn't getting written in Book2 I decided to do something slightly different this weekend: begin the querying process all over again.

My wonderful CP made some great suggestions on the three agents who I had queried previously that I thought might be interested in seeing the revised manuscript.  Then I dived back into QueryTracker to see who else was on my old list.  (Helpful Tip: Never get rid of your QueryTracker account nor list of agents!)  I took a look around AgentQuery as well and came up with a few more names.

Last night, emails were written, specific reasons for querying each agent were listed, submission guidelines were followed.  Everything was saved in my Gmail Drafts folder so I could review them today.

So, let the re-querying begin!


-- Tom

Where are you in your querying process?  Have you ever re-queryed agents over the same project?