{"id":181,"date":"2025-10-31T17:12:16","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T17:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.samanthahund.com\/?p=181"},"modified":"2025-10-31T17:25:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T17:25:00","slug":"tricks-and-treats-advice-for-querying-authors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samanthahund.com\/?p=181","title":{"rendered":"Tricks and Treats: Advice for Querying Authors"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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It is of course the most wonderful night of the year; the fireplace is on, the wind rattles the windows, and crispy leaves scatter the streets outside. I hope this evening finds you with impertinent children at your door, and a heavy nostalgia for ghost stories in your heart.<\/p>

I should probably preface this post with the fact that yes, to me, Halloween is the high holy day of my existence. Most years I spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on a costume no reasonable human would attempt (see evidence below<\/em>) but this year I find myself celebrating in a quieter way\u2014as strange as that is.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Maleficent\"\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
Maleficent - yes I sewed a gown.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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a Devil - because airbrush paint is fun.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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In the spirit of a good scare, today I want to reflect on a topic that often terrifies me; the dreaded limbo of querying, pitching, and all around growing pains of the writer lifestyle.<\/p>

Typically, I approach any discussion of querying with the same lip curl of someone who believes discussing politics and religion is a major faux pas. The problem of course, being that the discussion invariably opens up the opportunity for creatives to more or less neurosis-dump in public.<\/p>

I will not be doing that. There is plenty of discourse online already about the terrors of the Query Trenches, and the horror stories about \u2018Bad Agents\u2019, and if that\u2019s what you choose to feed your brain, please go right ahead\u2014preferably somewhere else.<\/p>

Yesterday was the #PitDark pitch event on the service formerly known as Twitter. I opened up my app to discover (just before noon) that it had started at 8 am. Well. No one has ever accused me of being well prepared.<\/p>

So, in a flurry (between client meetings I might add) I wrote nine pitch posts for The Last Dawn<\/em> of varying efficacy. Thus scheduled, I decided to go about my day, checking in occasionally to retweet a few pitches that I\u2019d like to read, and of course tweaking my pitch posts a few minutes before they\u2019d go out.<\/p>

Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. I showed up to #PitDark like a chronically late student that missed the first three classes of the day and was hoping no one would notice. What did surprise me though, as I scrolled through the tag, was the variety of pitch styles. Lots of tropes. Lots of emojis. Lots of\u2026 confusion?<\/p>

I tried to figure out if I\u2019d misunderstood the pitch style, realized perhaps I did, but also ended up in a weird straddle. Should I reduce my novel to goth emojis and trope tags? Is that what agents really want?<\/p>

Dear Reader, I could not.<\/p>

Another thing that stood out to me, was the unexpectedly nice feeling of author support and community throughout the day. As someone who really wasn\u2019t participating in the event with any goals of agent interaction (more on that in a moment) I was genuinely pleased to feel in a larger sense some kind of community around writing. Querying mostly feels very dog-eat-dog, the system essentially pits writers against each other anonymously\u2014if you\u2019re familiar at all with the QueryTracker ecosystem you\u2019ll know what I mean.<\/p>

Through the pitch event, I started assigning real people to manuscripts, and it was oddly refreshing to think of it that way. No longer was I up against faceless \u2018Romance, Fantasy 80,000-89,999\u2019 but real working writers with their own hopes and dreams. That was so comforting somehow.<\/p>

That experience alone made participating worth it, though I\u2019m fairly certain I won\u2019t be getting any Agent attention as a result. Another thing about querying that I\u2019ve learned, is you need to treat every experience as a win. I know that sounds trite and terrible, but if you don\u2019t find some way to do that I fear you\u2019ll never make it to the end.<\/p>

For example, yesterday I got not one, but two query rejections from agents while I was at the same time very much trying to pitch my novel like a professional. Now, I\u2019m not saying I\u2019m immune to rejection by any means, but it no longer feels like an excuse to pity myself. It just isn\u2019t personal and that\u2019s the long and short of it. You simply need to keep moving on.<\/p>

I know I\u2019m proselytizing in rarified air as I type this, since I\u2019m lucky enough to have my full manuscript under consideration with multiple agents that would be a dream to work with. But even if I had no positive momentum to stand on, I know this for sure;<\/p>