The Query Trenches: What Nobody Tells You About Trying to Find a Literary Agent

There is a particular kind of despair that comes from refreshing your email for the forty-seventh time in a day, knowing that the silence you're met with is also, technically, an answer.

That's querying.

And if you've never done it, let me paint you a picture.

You've written a book. Maybe it took you a year. Maybe it took you five. You've revised it, you've cried over it, you've read it so many times that the sentences have stopped making sense. And now, before a single reader can ever hold it in their hands, you have to sell it — not to readers, but to a literary agent. A gatekeeper. Someone who will, if you're lucky, champion your work to publishers. If you're very lucky.

So you write a query letter. One page. Maybe two. You take the story you've poured your whole self into and you compress it into a tight little pitch, season it with your credentials, end with a polite "thank you for your time," and send it off into the void.

Then you wait.

Sometimes you get a form rejection. A template. A few lines that make it clear your letter was read (if it was read) by someone who had approximately forty-five seconds to decide whether your entire creative vision was worth their time. No feedback. No "here's what didn't land." Just: not for me, best of luck.

And sometimes, often, you get nothing at all.

Here's what I want to say clearly, because I mean it: I get it.

I actually do. Literary agents are fielding hundreds, sometimes thousands, of queries a month. They are running small businesses. They are advocating for their existing clients, negotiating contracts, reading manuscripts, attending industry events, and somewhere in between all of that, they are also reading the slush pile. Or trying to.

The math doesn't work in anyone's favor. There are more writers than there are agents, more queries than there are hours in the day, and so the process has to become, by necessity, a little bit ruthless. A little bit industrial. A little bit, and I say this with full understanding, emotionless.

I understand all of that.

And I'm still going to tell you it was soul-sucking.

Because here's the thing that nobody really prepares you for: querying doesn't feel like submitting your work. It feels like auditioning for the privilege of submitting your work. You're not just writing a great book, you're also supposed to be great at distilling it into a hook, great at researching which agents rep your genre, great at tailoring every single letter to that specific person's taste and wishlist and mood on whatever Tuesday they happen to open your email.

You're performing. Constantly. And the audience may or may not even be watching.

And then, and this is the part that really gets me, you go to a bookstore, or you scroll through what's getting big marketing pushes from major publishers, and sometimes you read something and think: this got a book deal? This? A book with a muddled premise, flat characters, prose that reads like it was written on autopilot, and it's sitting on an endcap at Barnes & Noble with a foil cover and a blurb from someone famous.

I'm not saying those books don't deserve to exist. I'm saying the industry's definition of "what's publishable" can feel completely disconnected from quality, from craft, from originality… and when you're in the trenches of querying something you genuinely believe in, that disconnect is maddening.

I don't have a tidy resolution here. I'm still in it.

I'm writing the book I needed when I was a teenager: a Chinese American girl in small-town Minnesota, navigating grief and prejudice and the kind of friendship that changes you permanently. It's the most personal thing I've ever written. And yes, I'm going to query it. And yes, I'm going to refresh my email too many times. And yes, I'm going to get rejections, some with reasons and some without.

But I'm also going to keep writing it, because the story matters whether or not a gatekeeper decides it's commercially viable this season.

If you're in the query trenches too - I see you. The waiting is brutal. The silence is brutal. The part where you have to turn your art into a sales pitch is brutal.

Write the next book anyway.

Phyllis Mma is the author of The Foothills and is currently seeking traditional publication for her second novel. She writes about Chinese American girlhood, Midwest identity, and the characters she always deserved to read. Find her on TikTok, or sign up for her newsletter at www.phyllismma.com.