Why Personalized Rejections Can Feel as Good as a Request

Two years—that’s how long I’ve been querying this novel. I won’t even say its title, because you know the one I’m talking about. It’s the same one I’ve gotten at least 150-plus rejections on. Some of them were form letters but a select few were crafted with love and care.

Personalized rejections are not your typical rejection form; rejection forms can range anywhere between, “This isn’t right for my list” to “I’m just not connecting with the story.” But in short, it translates to the same thing: “Thanks, but no thanks.”

These short and snappy shutdowns sting, like all rejections do, but if you get one of these forms, don’t burn your notepad or chuck your laptop across the room and give into the imposter syndrome cramping you from the inside out. Literary agents are notoriously busy, and they don’t have time to personalize every rejection they send. Besides, sometimes your manuscript just really isn’t a fit. Every once in a while, an agent might add a line or two about why, but most don’t have the time or energy to offer you a multi-graph breakdown of what didn’t work.

However, somewhere far less frequent than every once in a while, they do.

This week, I received a very detailed rejection from an agent on why she was backing away from Beneath The Night. Mind you, this was a normal query, not a full or even a partial. For this agent’s guidelines, she asked for the synopsis, the first three chapters, and, of course, my query. The first graph of her rejection was her complimenting all three, which I greatly appreciated.

Again, two years in the trenches. Like Tinkerbell, I’m starved for love.

And lucky for me, I got plenty more.

This agent continued to rain down praise on my concept, my characters, my plot, and my writing, and even though I knew it was a rejection from the moment I opened it, I couldn’t help but beam.

I won’t get into why she turned it down. (That’s a whole other story for a whole other blog post.) But I will say that her detailed rejection felt almost as good as a full request. And I’m not capping. Like I said, agents are busy, and if they take time out of their hectic schedules to break down my novel in a thoughtful response, then that means I made them feel something. I don’t know what, but they felt it deeply enough that they needed to write it down in a lovely multi-graph email and send it to me.

And you know what that tells me?

That I have a place in this industry. It’s easy to forget that when querying, but it’s also easy to be reminded when the gatekeepers see it, too. More importantly, it makes me want to keep working to claim that place, even if it takes another two years.