Submitting. - a (large) numbers game

The last week has been a new low in my submissions story.  I sent a novel off to an Amrican publisher that is open to unagented manuscripts.  They especially want books with LBGTQA characters, and as my novel features aromantic asexual lead characters and two engineers in a lesbian relationship, I figured it might be the sort of novel they were interested in.

How wrong could I be.  The rejection came back inside twenty four hours.

I had a moan about it at a writers' social event I went to this week.  On of the writers there, a mainstream published historical crime writer, told me it had taken him seventeen years to get published.  His first two books went to 70 agents each, without success.  It was the third book that got him his deal.

"To be honest, I'd given up," he said.  And that set me thinking about positive ways of 'giving up'.  By that I mean sending submissions off without fussing over them.  I mean giving up in the sense of just sending stuff out and not expecting any positive response.

This is counter-intuitive to the received wisdom on submitting.  We're told to study the market.  We carefully comb agents' websites, reading their biographies to try and figure out what their likes and dislikes are.  We select the agent who loves our favourite authors, the ones who say they like the kind of book we write. Full of hope, we submit to them.  But it's a false hope.  The weeks tick by, and no enthusiastic response comes.

We're told that the definition of stupidity is keeping on doing what doesn't work.  And I think I've had enough of being stupid.  So my new approach is to send the manuscript out to every agent who represents SF, whether or not I think that person is a good fit for my work.  It may well be that while I'm busy trying to control my fate the universe has other plans for me.

So I'm giving up the careful selection of agents.  And if that doesn't work it will be time to rethink again.  It will be time to approach the many good independent publishers who publish science fiction.

I'm going to play a large numbers game from now on.