#11 Okay, I Promised I’d Get Into It. The Reason I Think Querying Didn’t Work Out For Me 😭

So, a little backstory for context. I’ll try and keep it brief. In what some days felt like I was stuck in some fae-magic-induced never-ending story:

1. I started writing A Little Less Invisible back in 2016?? 2017?? 

2. I was VERY sick at the time and when I tell you I was working at a pace glacier-formation would envy…

3. I finished the first draft in…I honestly have no idea. I should’ve taken better notes 😭. My best guess is mid 2019.

4. I edited it to death over the next year, and once I had a polished draft, I sent my first queries to test the waters. I got a full, but no offers of rep. The feedback on the full said something wasn’t working but not what, so I knew I needed more feedback and editing.

5. October 2020, I applied to Pitch Wars and got a full request, but wasn’t picked.

6. Early 2022, I hired an editor to do a developmental edit because I knew I’d get the feedback that way. It was a lovely experience. Made A Little Less Invisible stronger and taught me sooooo many new writing skills. I basically rewrote the entire second half of the book over a year. 

7. I queried again. Got more full requests. But still no offers of rep. 

8. (There were more mentorship applications in here somewhere 😬.)

9. I applied to the Round Table Mentor program for 2024 and finally got picked!!!! Shoutout to my amazing mentor Sabina Nordqvist 🥳 for being the greatest human being on the planet and teaching me even MORE new writing skills. With this mentorship, I basically rewrote/smooshed around the entire first half of the book and then some, so it’s an entirely different beast of a book from what it started as in 2016/17.

10. Queried AGAIN partway through 2024. Got more fulls. More no’s. (Are you sensing the pattern here??)

11. I decided that if this round didn’t work out, I was gonna put my big-girl pants on and learn how to indie publish this thing. I put too much work into it and too many years to just give up and let it collect dust on a shelf. 

And that brings us up to present day. So, why do I think my querying journey didn’t work out? I think there were a few different factors.

Factor #1: Stinky Market Conditions

If you look at what trad publishing is picking up in the YA Contemporary Fantasy space right now it’s… not a whole lot unless you’re Holly Black. Especially if your main character is facing off the fae in a school setting. Why is that? I honestly don’t know. 

Maybe trad publishing picked up too many vampire and werewolf and fae books in the last decade–too many books with similar premises and burned themselves out. Maybe it’s because mine starts out in a school, and trad pub published too many books set in schools for years and lately have been shying away from these settings.

Maybe it’s just because romantasy is so big right now and soooo many of those have courtly or other-world plots. Either way, I think this is why I struggled so hard in the query trenches. Plus, it’s just rough out there for debut querying authors in general I think. So, if this is you too, you’re not alone! 

Factor #2: Having Good, Compelling Comps

As I’ve said before, agents have to eat (because they can’t eat pain like my fae can). They want to pick up books that they’re confident will sell and sell well. I get it, but I struggled to find recent comps because of everything I listed above, so they might’ve been thinking that too. 

And then you add to that the fact that my main character is chronically ill and it’s even harder to find comps that have sold really well. No one seemed to want to take a risk on my chronically ill girl being chased by pain-eating fae 🥺. 

The Takeaway 

But there’s good news here I think. 

Because traditional publishing isn’t inundating the YA Contemporary Fantasy space right now, there is SO MUCH room to grow. 

And there’s even more space to grow when you take into account just how few books are being published with chronic illness or disability rep when, according to the National Library of Medicine, 1 in 5 kids in the U.S. has a chronic illness or condition, and the CDC says 1 in 15 has multiple chronic conditions. And that’s just in the United States. Globally, those numbers are harder to find, but I know there are chronically ill teens in every country in the world.

Putting it all together, it means there’s room for books like mine with messy, unapologetically real, chronically ill main characters in the YA Fantasy space. There’s room for morally complex characters who can’t always “push through” the pain and still deserve to be at the center of epic adventures. There’s room to flip tropes, play with them from a unique angle, and show that chronically ill and disabled people can be heroes—and main characters, and love interests, and everything else in between.

So, I’m taking that silver lining and running with it. 

Which leads me into my next post: Traditional publishers aren’t marketing the books they are publishing as disability/chronic illness rep—why is that???

💬 Ever struggled with writing something that doesn’t “fit” the market? Did you end up indie publishing it? How did that work out? 

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