Liked It; Didn’t Love It: Querying your novel as a real estate agent

My buyer took a final look around the million-dollar condo. “I like it, but I don’t love it,” he shrugged. “At least, not enough to pay a million dollars for it.” I like it, but I don’t love it. Where had I heard those words before? Oh, yes. Attached to every book I’d ever written. 

For seven years, I was lucky enough to have a literary agent. In writing workshops and classes, when I mentioned that I was represented, the instructors treated me differently. “Getting an agent is harder than getting published,” they’d say. “You’re almost there.” 

Spoiler alert: I was not almost there. And this spring, after four books that had gone “on sub,” three of them multiple times, my agent gave up on me. Now I was back in the query trenches, which, according to other aspiring writers on Twitter, were tougher than they’d ever been. I’m thickening my skin and bracing myself for a lot of bad news. And I’m hoping that my years of work as a real estate agent has given me some perspective into the process. 

Like my buyer who “liked it, but didn’t love it,” literary agents and publishers aren’t just looking for a good book without any obvious flaws. They’re looking for a home that they’ll love for years. I want my book to be that home. But I know they have so many options, and there are so many more writers out there than publishers. 

Here are a few more ways that real estate and publishing overlap: 

 Buyers take forever. When I first got into real estate, my broker warned me that the average buyer takes between 12-18 months to find their home. At the time, this seemed ridiculous to me—I hadn’t taken nearly as long to find the houses I ended up buying—but as time went on, I found it to be true. Buyers start off excited and energetic, but as the search goes on, they lose enthusiasm and the desire to look. And then things change in their lives, or in the market, and time passes and sometimes your buyer decides to leave town completely or use a different agent, and a year has gone by and you have nothing to show for it. I still have books out that my agent sent last year. The editors greeted her pitch email with, “Sounds fabulous! I’ll read it right away!” Then… crickets. Some editors never get back to you. Some agents don’t, either. 

  Editors sometimes have really picky reasons to reject a book. Many times I’ve gotten “pass” emails praising character, setting, plot, theme. But they didn’t like the ending, or they found a minor character unbelievable. I could fix this! The same way a paint color in the kitchen could be changed, or a bathroom could be updated. But publishers want something they love, and so do buyers, and you can’t talk someone into falling in love with a book or a house. Either they’ll fall in love and are willing to work with you to fix the problems, or they only like it, and they move on to the next book or the next house or the next woman in their dating app. 

 The pitch is sometimes better than the product. As real estate agents, we pretty up a house with staging and terrific photos. As writers, we hire editors to pretty up our prose and help us write query letters and synopses. But putting a gloss on something that doesn’t work only postpones the inevitable. Buyers will see that your lovely photos hide a too-small kitchen or that your polished first 20 pages hide an episodic plot. 

  The process is similar for both. You list the house; you send out your queries. You get a buyer who wants to see the house; you get an agent who wants the first 20 pages! You show the property and send off your pages, filled with hope and excitement. For the writer, disappointment often follows. For the agent… well, that’s where things get a little different. 

 The big difference between the real estate agent and the writer is that eventually the house will sell. You might have to lower the price by a little or a lot, you may have to replace a roof or an AC unit, but someone will buy that house. Especially these days, when, despite decades-high interest rates, we’re still about a million homes short of what the population needs. There are no such guarantees in publishing. In fact, it’s more likely that one outstanding book will attract several agents and sell at auction, while ninety percent of submissions fail to find a single buyer. There are many more books out there than there are agents to rep them or traditional publishers to distribute them. The only guarantee writers have is our belief in ourselves and the commitment to keep writing no matter what. Maybe this book won’t sell, but the next one will! 

Keep writing, writing fam. And I’ll keep looking for new agents to query, and new condos for that picky (but wealthy!) buyer of mine. 

And if you need a realtor in Pinellas County, Florida, hit me up.