When to Stop Querying Agents: 5 Signs You Need a Break
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Feeling totally burnt out by the querying process? Wondering when to stop querying agents and work on a different project? I've identified five signs it's time for you to take a break based on my experience working with aspiring and agented authors over the past decade.
Remember that querying is a marathon, not a sprint, and for many authors, the process takes months or even years. So do not feel bad if you decide to take a few weeks or even a few months off. I promise you there will still be agents who are eager to accept your queries when you're ready to come back to it, and in fact, taking a break is sometimes the very best thing you can do for yourself and for your book.
1. Every Rejection Sends You Spiraling
The first sign that it's time to take a break from querying is that every rejection sends you spiraling. When you get a rejection from an agent, do you brush it off and move on, or does it send you down a negative mental spiral?
I'm sure that you went into this process understanding that it requires a lot of endurance, knowing that you will receive many rejections and expecting those rejections to sting. They always do, but if you're finding it more and more difficult to cope and you're feeling more and more overwhelmed when you receive rejections, to the point that it affects your mood and your self-esteem outside of your writing space, then it could be a sign a break might be useful.
If the rejections are really affecting you negatively, I recommend taking a step back and focusing on something you really enjoy and that boosts your confidence and self-esteem. That could be working on a totally different writing project that excites you, or it could simply be spending time with family and friends or pursuing a new hobby for the time being.
When you are ready to come back to querying, I strongly recommend setting up a separate email account for your query process if you haven't already. This way, when you get rejections, you won't have them come into your main email account that you're likely checking multiple times a day. Instead, you can make sure you are mentally in the right headspace to go into your query inbox and see agents' responses. This helps ensure that you don't get totally derailed by a rejection from a literary agent hitting you at a random time of day when you're already stressed out about other things.
2. You’re Feeling Cynical
The next sign that it's time to take a break from querying is if you're feeling cynical. Maybe you've noticed lately that you're starting to develop a resentment toward literary agents, toward the publishing industry, or maybe toward those authors you see posting on Twitter about how they just got representation.
The traditional publishing process is highly competitive, slow-moving, and old-fashioned in a lot of ways, and frankly, it's incredibly frustrating both for authors and for publishing professionals. After trying to query for a while to no avail, you can start to feel like everything is working against you and then start to resent the entire industry. But ultimately, harboring these feelings of cynicism and resentment is not likely going to get you any closer to your publishing goals.
If this sounds like you, it can be super helpful to take a step back from querying and think long and hard about what your publishing goals actually are. Try to approach them from a more objective and clear-headed space. What do you actually want out of this process, and is traditional publishing the right path to get that? What are your priorities in terms of publishing this book?
It could be that after thinking about it, you decide that traditional publishing is not the right path for you and alternative options such as self-publishing or submitting to small indie presses directly could be a better fit. Or you could find that you really genuinely do want to pursue traditional publishing, and you can resume querying when you feel excited about that possibility again.
3. You’ve Identified Major Issues in Your Book
The next sign that it's time to take a break from querying is if you have identified major issues in your book. Many authors make the huge mistake of putting a book in front of literary agents prematurely—a manuscript that isn't yet the strongest version of itself. Because querying is incredibly competitive, it's essential that you are producing the best draft you can.
At the same time, writing a book is not a perfectly linear process, and it can be difficult to know when it's really done and ready to show literary agents. During the querying process, you might receive feedback from critique partners or beta readers or even a professional editor that makes you rethink certain aspects of your story. You may have an aha moment where you realize you need to make a pretty substantial change to the story, maybe even a massive one. I've seen this happen many times with authors who I help with querying, and in these cases, I recommend holding off on querying any further and taking the time to make those changes to the manuscript. Once you have a stronger manuscript, it's going to make your future queries that much stronger.
It is ultimately up to you to decide whether you want to withdraw the queries that are currently still sitting with agents or if you want to let them play out with the current version of the manuscript. But in any case, if you feel excited by the potential for these revisions to radically transform the story and make it a lot better than it currently is, I definitely recommend going forward with them, even if that means pausing querying.
4. You’re Doubting Yourself
The next sign that it's time to take a break from querying is if you are doubting yourself. Writers are typically their own harshest critics, and many struggle with feelings of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. If the querying process is making you doubt your abilities as a writer and making you question if you should even be writing this story to begin with, then that's a sign you should maybe take a break.
I totally understand how hard querying can be on your self-esteem. Your writing is personal to you, no matter if the story came from your true life or not, and you put so much of yourself and your time and your energy into this book. Showing it to a literary agent, or anyone for that matter, is a vulnerable act. And then when it doesn't receive positive responses from literary agents, you can start to question your abilities as a writer and if you're really good enough to be published.
It helps to remember that agents pass on manuscripts for all kinds of reasons, many of which you will not know at the time of their response. In many cases, a rejection doesn't have anything to do with the quality of your work. So, if you've started to develop this narrative in your head that you must be terrible at writing, you are never going to be good enough to get published, or that you don't have what it takes to get an agent, then these are signs for you to take a break from querying.
What I would recommend doing here is looking back on the positive responses you've gotten on your writing. Find those nuggets of positive feedback that you've gotten, write them down on a sticky note, and put them on your desk to remind you that you do have worth and talent as an author. Also remind yourself of just how far you've come and grown to even be in the position you currently are, where you are querying literary agents. You've written an entire novel, which is an incredible achievement most people in the world cannot say they have done. Once you've gotten some of that confidence back, then you're going to be in a much better place to continue engaging in the querying journey.
5. You No Longer Feel Excited About Your Book
The last sign that you should take a break from querying is if you no longer feel excited about your book. You wrote this book because you were passionate about the story, and you were eager to get it out in the world and share it with readers. So, if you no longer feel that level of passion and excitement, it could be a good idea to take a break.
Maybe the idea of researching agents or sending out further queries just starts to feel super daunting and more like a chore. Maybe you have a different story idea in your head that you're more excited about than this one that is currently out with agents. Or maybe you've started reading back over your manuscript and are starting to get the ick for your own story. It happens.
If the idea of seeing this book published on the shelf no longer ignites that fire in you, it could be that you're ready to move on from this book for the time being. Remember that even if you shelve a project, you can always return to it later. And in fact, while some authors get agents for the first book that they write, many other authors actually write multiple books or even query different books before they sign with a literary agent. If during the querying process you discover that this just isn't the book you want to work on anymore, you can put it aside and work on something that actually excites you.