WriteMentor just announced their 2023 Novel and Picture Book Awards winners and I’m a runner-up! I am so excited — perhaps more than you might expect for not winning.
It can be so dispiriting trying to get your book out there. You’ve done your industry homework, developed your skills, learned from critique partners and classes and workshops. You’ve written (and edited and re-edited) a book you know is good. When you’ve finally got it all polished and pretty (complete with the dreaded synopsis and elevator pitch and comp titles and all that) you enter contests and send query letters to agents and then wait.
And wait.
And sometimes get polite rejections but never know why. There could be countless reasons — it’s not a good fit with that particular agent, they’ve got enough of your genre and age range already, the contest competition was just too good — but in the vacuum of what’s often a very solitary job, it’s impossible to keep the doubts at bay. No matter how confident you may be (at the best of times), you inevitably come back to wondering if all that silence and polite rejection is simply because the novel you’ve spent so many hours creating is just … not that good.
Or, slightly-better-than-worst-case scenario, the novel might be good but you’re so terrible at pitches and queries that no one will give it a shot. If only you could get someone to read the whole thing! Or tell you what’s not working. Or anything other than silence. It’s frustrating, and the more it gets you down, the harder it is to send the next round of queries or the next contest submission. You know deep down that that’s what it takes — just keep going, persistence pays off, everyone has setbacks — but whew. Some days that’s a lot easier said than done.
So this — this might be second place, it might not come with a cash prize or a contract, but it’s something. It means industry professionals — people who know a lot about the market and what readers like — not only actually read my book but saw something in it that they found worthwhile. If nothing else, that’s the reassurance my anxious mind needs to help me keep going for the next round of query letters … and the next book*.
*As soon as I decide which of the three books I’m working on will get my full attention…
michelle heimburger 