(September 2025)
What Next?
The good news: my “Not Yet” jar is full. Quite full. Crammed to the top, in fact. II had to swap out a handful of $1s for $5s just to make room.
The bad news: my list of available literary agents is shrinking by the day. As I am learning, the middle grade genre is a small and specific one, with a narrow audience of readers and hence a limited number of agents willing to represent MG writers.
Most days this journey feels a little manic. One day I’m sending queries, drafting newsletters, planning author visits—and yes, perhaps even doing some writing of my own. It feels purposeful, hopeful. Then the other days come. The days when a newsletter deadline sneaks up, two rejections land (before lunch!), and I realize I haven’t written a single creative word of my own in weeks.
A neighbor asked me the other day how my writing life was going. I smiled and said, “Good!”. But if I’m honest, I’m not sure what happens if, in the near future, the last agent query comes back as a “no.”
What next?
One option is self-publishing. I know people who’ve done it successfully. A local author I met loves it—he gets to choose his format, illustrator, timeline, everything. And the timing of self-publishing is fast: my friend Cindy DeBoer self-published her own memoir in a little over two months. The trick with self-publishing in what happens AFTER publication–you’re on your own. There’s no marketing team to help get the word out, schedule school visits or book talks or even for you to be a presence at a literary conference. Every copy sold comes from your own blood, sweat and tears.
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And even if that felt manageable on a given day, there’s future implications with how many books actually sell. The average self-published book sells between 250-500 books, with a few reaching the higher end of 1,000. Publishers, on the other hand, look for authors who can move 10,000 books in a year. And if your self-published book doesn’t sell well, it can actually make it harder to land a publisher for future projects.
See the pressure here?
Another option I have is to shelve Lily of the Valley for now and go in a different direction. Write another novel that might have an easier appeal to literary agents and the publishing world. If that novel does well, bring Lily back into the conversation.
In baseball terms, I feel like I’m closing out the eighth inning. I’m down, but not out.
Maybe there’s a different chapter of my writing story that I need to write.
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