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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  11hr ago (text post)   109 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for January 27, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Since November, I've been sending out query letters for my novel (which originated as a project for NaNoWriMo 2024), and have yet to receive any requests from agents to see the full manuscript. Therefore, it sucks and I quit.

/s No way am I going to give up that easily. However, I do think my query letter is letting me down, and needs to be heavily reworked. Additionally, the feedback I've been getting over on /r/PubTips is that it's practically unheard for a literary agent to take a chance on a debut novel significantly in excess of 100k words, and in my query letter I mention up front that my novel is 112k (rounding down).

This is not as precious and self-indulgent as it sounds: the first draft was 133k, and removing over 15% of that was no mean feat. But I'm coming round to the idea that if I want to get this thing published, I'll have to meet the agents halfway. To that end, I've commenced work on a fourth draft with the explicit goal of cutting ~12k words (more, if possible), or 11.4%. Having edited the first four chapters, I've reduced their word count by 10.6% without, I think, losing anything significant, so I think I'm on the right track. Hope I won't have to kill too many darlings.

I have made no progress on mastering "Phobophile" on the guitar. The last few days I've just been practising two-octave scales (major, harmonic minor, natural minor, Mixolydian).

I wonder how this process actually works? It does not feel scalable. It would take a person likely a couple of days at least to go through 100k+ page text, especially if they want to pay proper attention. From what I read online, agents receive thousands submissions per year. Clearly, there must be some filters. I can guess "previously famous author" and "the guy I know or that somebody I know vouched for" are the obvious ones, but what comes next?

Most literary agencies accepting unsolicited submissions request a query letter, a synopsis (of three to five hundred words) and an excerpt. The excerpt is typically the first three chapters, first 5,000 words, first 10,000 words or similar. I have little doubt that many agents reject a work without even looking at the excerpt, because the query letter and synopsis don't strike them as compelling.

Hence, there are several filters a prospective author must pass through:

  1. The query letter. If the query letter doesn't make the book sound compelling, or doesn't make a persuasive business case that the book will be a commercial success, or makes it sound like it would be difficult to sell to a publisher (e.g. too long, too short, uncertain genre and audience), it's an automatic reject.
  2. The synopsis. If the agent is intrigued by the query letter, but the synopsis is confusing and disorganised without a clear sense of narrative progression or story structure, it's a reject.
  3. The excerpt. If the query letter tickles the agent's fancy and the synopsis sounds logical and engaging, but the first three chapters are poorly written, it's a reject.
  4. The full manuscript. If the query letter, synopsis and first three chapters are solid, the agent will request the full manuscript. But having read the full thing, they might decide it's not up to standard and pass on it.

So it's not the case that an agent has to read hundreds of full manuscripts every year, adding up to several million words. If an agent receives 500 submissions, he might only bother reading the excerpts of 50 of them (5,000 words x 100 = 250,000 words), with the rest getting rejected on the basis of a weak query or synopsis. Of the 50 excerpts he reads, he might only request 10 full manuscripts (10 x 75,000 = 750,000 words). So at most he's only reading a million words of prose a year (and he might well decide to pass halfway through the excerpt or the full manuscript). A million words of prose in one year is very doable: assuming 261 business days in a year, a million words a year is 3,831 words a day, or roughly 15 pages. Last year I read at least 9,164 pages: assuming ~250 words a page, that's 2.3 million words, and that was for pleasure, not my day job.

I've heard that January is a bad time to query, precisely because agents know a lot of people have just finished polishing up their NaNoWriMo novels and are sending them out. Don't know how true that is.

One of these days I will finish one of my other manuscripts. The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.

I can't imagine I'll be done with my fourth draft for at least another fortnight.

The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.

How long was it, if you don't mind my asking?

About 83,000 words.

I'm not much of a fantasy head, but are you looking for a beta reader? Or have you given up this particular project?

It's SF, actually.

Honestly, I've given up trying to find an agent or publisher with this particular book. I might try the indie publishing route someday, but I'd want more books in the pipeline to do that.

Anecdote:

  • GURPS Vehicles First Edition and Second Edition, for GURPS Third Edition, are sharply divisive books, with their complexity alienating some but appreciated by others.

  • When GURPS Fourth Edition is published, fans clamor for GURPS Vehicles Third Edition.

  • After twenty years of radio silence, the editor of GURPS finally explains that (1) GURPS Vehicles Third Edition is basically complete, but (2) the publisher has decided that the final editing of such a complicated book with such a shaky audience would not be worth the expense, so (3) the publisher has canceled the contract and returned the rights to the author, so that if he wants to he can excise the GURPS-specific material and publish it himself as a systemless vehicle-design supplement.

  • GURPS Vehicles fans ask the author about crowdfunding. He responds that he probably could get the book edited and published for 6 k$.

  • Astonished at the lowness of the price tag, various fans quickly offer a few kilodollars to the author. He responds that he is busy with another project at the moment, but in a few months he will put together a concrete plan for accepting money and finishing Definitely Not GURPS Vehicles Third Edition.

The point of this anecdote is, it would be pretty funny if this website contained enough fans of your commenting and moderation style that you could milk them for a few hundred dollars (not as months of Patreon/SubscribeStar donations, but as a lump sum) on the promise of a book from you.

Hah - it's flattering to think I have fans here, but even if so, I don't think my posts give much of a sense of how I write fiction.

Ironically enough, my only actual professional writing credits are with Steve Jackson Games. It's amazing to me they have survived all of Steve's really bad decisions. I guess Munchkin keeps them afloat.

...All responses coming to mind sound too much like glazing. I guess I'll say that I think that's extremely cool, and leave it at that.

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