Learn from my mistakes, friends! I spent nearly nine years querying five different projects, sending hundreds of individual requests over the years. I queried esteemed agents who’d been at their agencies for decades and I queried brand-new agents who’d just opened their inboxes. I received rejections within minutes and I received rejections after over a year in the slush pile.

Over the course of those nine years, I made plenty of mistakes. At the end of the day, I still wound up with 13 full and partial requests across 78 queries, and one offer of representation. Which is to say, mistakes happen. As my favorite pop star of my adolescence (Hannah Montana) once said, nobody’s perfect. The right agent for you isn’t going to write you off entirely if you have a typo in your query; and you won’t ruin your shots entirely if you make a querying faux pas of any size.

Specifically, these are the querying mistakes I made — so you can learn from my mistakes and (hopefully) have a smoother querying experience!

Queried a book I shouldn’t have written

I have always been ambitious, both in the successes I dream about and in the stories I try to tackle. Alas, at the start of my writing career, this translated directly to taking on stories that weren’t mine to tell.

The first book I queried was one such story. It was ambitious, a story about cancer and mental illness and fraught family relationships, and I simply wasn’t mature enough, nor did I have enough real-world experience with the topics I was exploring, to do it justice.

Ultimately, after a few partial requests that ended up being passes, I shelved the book after about 50 queries. It wasn’t the right book, and over the next few years, I came to really appreciate and respect the agents who had done me the service of not signing me with that book. I think it was a solid, well-written story; it just wasn’t one I ought to have written.

Queried a book that wasn’t ready

This happened with my second and fourth queried books. By the time I was querying for the fourth time — with my fifth completed novel — I was short on patience, self-confidence, and the desire to extensively revise a book. It was late 2021, and I had spent the first part of that year querying a novel I spent four years on, which received two partial requests and resounding passes otherwise.

I was furious at the world, at myself, and especially at the publishing industry. So I wrote two drafts and threw my book into the trenches. I think I sent 20 queries and then panicked, because I knew the book wasn’t right; I knew my query and pitch weren’t solid; I knew I had made a mistake.

When it came to the next book I wrote and queried, I was very careful to write multiple, well-thought-out drafts. And what do you know… that book is the one that snagged my my agent’s offer.

Quit querying too soon

Like I mentioned above, my third querying experience was rough. I had spent more than four years writing and revising the book, and I had so much of myself wrapped up in it — so much of my experience with mental illness, of my experience as a person in a fat body, of my love for Italy and New York City.

I really thought the book shone.

The passes I got devastated me, to the point that I nearly lost all my belief in myself. If it weren’t for that pesky ambition that had driven me for two decades by then, I might have given up entirely. Instead, I just pulled the book too early.

I don’t know if continuing to query would have led to a different result, but I do know that by the time I finished my next book, I was determined to query until I had, truly, exhausted all my options.

Let my querying experience define my identity

Oh, this is a hard one. It’s bigger than querying, too, because I have let my writing and publishing experience define my identity — and my own sense of self-worth — for far too long at this point. I’ve had countless breakdowns over whether I matter at all if I can’t even get a book published.

This is an eternal struggle for me and, likely, lots of other writers — maybe even you? I don’t have all the answers for how to avoid falling into this trap, but I do know that it’s well worth fighting it. Some antidotes including hobbies outside of publishing, finding friends who have no connection to the industry, getting out of the house occasionally to touch grass and bask in the sunlight, and just in general reminding ourselves that we are more than the books we write.

We are more than the passes we receive, too.

Writing is an intensely personal, vulnerable practice, and the business of trying to publish is hard and, often, unforgiving. Mistakes will surely be made along the way, but they’re rarely if ever a death knell for our careers. Keep going. It’s the only way to find success.