 So what do you do when you're trying to query a book that is not marketable or at least not marketable at the moment? Should you keep querying? Should you give up on getting an agent and a traditional publishing deal and self-publish instead? Should you put the book to the side and maybe try querying it again when the market changes? So if you're looking for the answers for any of these questions you will not get them in this video because I do not have the answers. I am in this position at the moment and I thought it would be a good time to just explain where I am and maybe get some feedback from you about different ways to approach the situation. So if you're new here my name is Jackie, I'm an aspiring writer and I am currently querying my YA Superheroes Meet the Russian Mafia book Powerless. I'm also sitting in front of a window which means natural light so the light is going to change throughout this video. So as I mentioned, Powerless is YA Superheroes Meet the Russian Mafia. It started out as a superhero story. I brainstormed putting the mafia in there because the main character needs to go looking for trouble and I thought why not and it ended up being the Russian mafia because I live in Estonia so the book is based on like a fake Estonia which I just thought was a little bit different to doing the typical New York set Marvel Cinematic Universe type of thing. So I started querying it at the end of April and I've sent out six queries now. I have three no responses but it's been within the time frame where they said if we'd like it we'll get back to you within this amount of time so they're clearly a no and I've had one rejection which was actually a really nice rejection. Like she said it was well written. She thought that the premise was interesting but it wasn't a match for her but she thought that maybe another agent would be intrigued enough to request pages. So that was really nice in fact that was sort of a it was really exciting to get my first official rejection. So I've got two more queries out at the moment and I thought before the next round I want to like overhaul the query letter because clearly it's not working and when it comes to what's not working the main area I've been focused on until now is the summary of the book like how do I describe this book in sort of two three paragraphs in a way that's going to get someone really intrigued to read more because that's been a big struggle for me. I don't think I've cracked it but I just wanted to start querying so at least I was doing something. The other bit that I think is a bit weak is my comps. So if you're not a writer or you're not familiar with the query process generally in your query letter you want to include an introduction to the book so sort of a two three paragraph like that cover copy that would make someone interested in reading it. You want to introduce yourself as an author and if you have any credentials that's great but if not maybe something interesting about you and why you're the best person to write this book then you're also expected to include comps or comparison titles. These are books that are similar to yours maybe in genre in themes in tone of voice and all of that helps the agent figure out who is the target market for this book is there a market for this book and even which editors might be interested in it if they decide to represent the book and start sending it out on submission. Now my challenge is that until I wrote this book I didn't read a lot of superhero fiction to be completely honest. The idea was very random and not like some of the other ideas I have which tend to be more fantasy based so usually like Victorian or contemporary fantasy but I love the idea and I wrote the book because I was getting back into writing I wanted to write something for me and now that it's written I love it I've had really good feedback and when I wrote my query letter I needed to figure out like who do I compare this to so the best comparisons I thought were V.E. Schwab's villains books so that's Vicious and Vengeful and then Marissa Meyers renegades trilogy so that's renegades arch enemies and supernova and when it comes to the two renegades is definitely closer I've almost just thrown villains in there because I need two comps. The problem is that according to the query shark archives now the query shark is a blog where an editor an agent I can't remember which but she basically does people send her their query letters for critiques and she posts them on the blog with her feedback and they sometimes submit multiple times until it's like approved by her so it's a really good place if you are a writer and considering querying it's a good place to figure out what's expected and what you can do better and on my side I while I found that I mean I do think it helped me write a better query letter than I would have otherwise I don't think it's helped me write the perfect query letter but it means I'm in the position to be able to diagnose what's wrong with mine even if I can't find the solution now the reason I bring out the query shark is because she says your comps should be from the last six months and neither of mine are both of them are multi book series and the most recent book in each of the series was published in 2019 for both of them so that's now two years ago which is not great so a few days ago I was thinking well hopefully finding better more recent comps will be a quick win when it comes to how to improve my query letter so I went on to amazon which has very bad advanced search functionality if anyone knows like a better way of filtering results in amazon beyond the actual advanced search they have within the website please let me know but I went on amazon I used their advanced search to search for superheroes young adult I did the genre was sci-fi fantasy and then I did publication date the last year the reason I was looking at the last year is that I figured because covid like damaged publishing a little bit maybe there's a bit more leeway beyond the last six months then when I got the results I sorted it by the highest number of reviews and the reason I wanted to do that is because I don't think there's any point in using a comp that hasn't been successful in your query letter because that just tells the agent that well clearly there's no market for this if the person listed one comparison title and it sold five copies the purpose of comps is to show that your book's marketable so I had my results I think there were like 900-ish results from the last year I sorted them by number of reviews and what I discovered is that pretty much all of them were self-published and that's not to say anything against self-published books in fact in the last like couple of months some of the superhero books I have been reading have been independently published and I've loved them but when it comes to pitching a traditional publisher I think yes there is a little bit of stigma around self-publishing but the other thing is that they aren't indie authors so they have different approaches to marketing they have different metrics for what's successful and what isn't so if they haven't seen a traditionally published book with recent success in this area that's not a good sign so I think I went through maybe the first six pages and I found two books that were actually superhero books for one because a lot of like more general fantasy comes up in the search and were also traditionally published so I've downloaded both of those to my Kindle just to read it for reference but the fact that I only found two in I don't know how many results come up on an Amazon page so let's say it's 30 results per page 30 times 6 is 180 so in the first like 180 books and then we were getting down to not many reviews either like I think under like 50 per book so if there are only two books that meet the criteria so they have some attention they have been traditionally published in my genre that's not a good sign for the markability of my book at the moment and it got me thinking should I continue the query process at all if even if I get good feedback on the book and the writing it's not going to be marketable for people in traditional publishing because that trend has passed if it happened at all because honestly with the exception of like books based on Marvel characters and DC characters I don't think there has been a lot of superhero fiction at least not in YA in the last five years and even the examples I gave earlier so the Renegades trilogy and the villains books I say books instead of duology or trilogy because it will be a trilogy but only the first two are out both of those series are exceptions they were not the author's first books these were published by authors who were somewhat established especially when you consider the most recent one was in 2019 for Marissa Nyre it was the third one in the series for V. Schwab it was the second in the series so they're not really a fair comparison for someone who's trying to get her first book published so what can I do with this information well I've thought about a couple of potential angles one is that I try rewriting my query letter but I don't subject myself to a long query process since there's probably not a great chance of getting published so maybe I just redo my query letter make it as good as it can be keep my comps or remove my comps entirely but really fix the book summary section and then just send it to all of the agents on my list in one blast the reason you don't generally do that is because you want to do sort of five agents at a time just so you can get feedback and improve as you go to get better results next time but based on the experience I've had so far on what I've just realized about marketability maybe I'm not going to get feedback so is there any point in making this process take two years potentially if I'm sort of doing two months between rounds of queries and not getting feedback at all versus just sending to 50 agents now and if I don't get feedback finally it's done so that's option one is like do this single query blast now because there's not a good chance of getting published I might as well just get it all done now and get feedback option two is to continue the traditional query process but I don't know how much value there is in doing that for all of the aforementioned reasons option three is to stop querying entirely and acknowledge that I'm probably not going to have many traditional publishing opportunities at this stage my camera overheated in record time today so things look different now that's why I've put it in the freezer it's cooled down hopefully we should be okay for the rest of the video so option three can be split into like two sub options where three a is stop querying now and just put the book on hold and it can be on hold until either the market changes and superhero books are in or it could go on hold until I have a couple of traditionally published books under my belt so I put it on hold I go off and write some other things and then once I have a bit of a track record I go back to my agent or editor fingers crossed and I say look I have this other thing I've been working on would you be interested in publishing it or is there space for this in my publishing career so that's three a three b is then give up on traditional publishing this book at least permanently and self publish it and like I mentioned earlier I don't have anything personally against self publishing but I do have a couple of concerns the first one is if I self publish this book will it damage my chances of getting an agent and a traditional publishing deal for another book in the future so if you're a hybrid author and you started this way so you started with something self published and then you traditionally published I'd love to hear your experience in the comments and how you went like was your self publishing background a hindrance or a help to getting a traditional publishing deal did you feel like certain agents and editors judged you for it or were they really happy to see that you had this experience behind you so that's the first concern I would really like to traditionally publish something someday even if it's not powerless and I don't want to shoot myself in the foot by self publishing something especially if I self publish it and then there's like it doesn't go well there's no sales history which does not look good on your resume if you write a book and it doesn't deliver results and maybe it's not that big a deal but I feel like if an agent looks me up and sees that I've self published something and sees that it hardly sold any copies that's not going to instill them with confidence to go and represent me and put other books out on submission if I self publish and it does do well I'm assuming that would be really compelling for an agent or a publishing house because in theory I would already have an established audience if we publish more books in future some of that audience might like to buy them but again I don't know if there's like still the stigma around it where just having been self published even if something did well is going to turn them off so again if you've been in this position I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments the second concern I have about self publishing is just like how do I know that the book's good enough see one of the things I really appreciate about traditional publishing is that there are gatekeepers there are agents and editors who say okay this has met our minimum standard it is good enough to be published under penguin or tor or titan or whatever the imprint is that you get a deal with and self publishing doesn't have that like I could I mean I could take powerless now and I could go on to amazon create space and turn the word document into a e-book for kindle and no one would stop me from doing it there's no one to say look it's not ready it's not good enough yet and of course I would do my best to make it the best book it can be I do have outstanding feedback from like my beta readers and my book coach so obviously I would go and address those points I would also want to work with an editor for the full book and make it the best it could be but if it's not good enough to get a traditional publishing deal is it good enough to be published at all and obviously the focus of this conversation hasn't been about the quality of the book it's been about the marketability of the book which is a different concern and there are books that are excellent but that might not get agents or publishers because it's just the wrong market environment as opposed to they're just not good enough but without having had the experience of working with an agent working with an editor getting a book traditionally published I don't know that I can judge that myself so that worries me and I've done a video in the past about you know do I have bad self-esteem because I worry about how good my stuff is and this isn't a bad self-esteem thing because I do love the book and I do love the story but I also know there are standards that are really hard for me to assess one when I'm in the middle of my book like I'm too close to it to see it objectively but two when I'm also not a person in the industry who knows like what books go through and how much they get improved before they go out now admittedly like there are a lot of self-published books that aren't very good there are a lot of self-published books that are good similarly there are a lot of traditionally published books that aren't very good either and they somehow got published so maybe I'm worrying about this a little too much but I don't want to put something out into the world that isn't good enough and I don't know if I could ever get to that level of confidence on my own so they're the two concerns I have about self-publishing when it comes to what I'm going to do now I'm not actually sure so I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments if you've been in this position where you have a book that you love you think it's great but it doesn't look like there's much of a market for it what have you done did you try to query and see how you went did you put it on hold or did you self-publish then when it comes to self-publishing if you are a hybrid author like I asked earlier do you feel like having a self-publishing background helped or hindered your ability to get an agent and a traditional publishing contract and then how did you address the is it good enough concern when there wasn't anyone stopping you from publishing your book so please let me know in the comments below I would love to hear your thoughts and if I well either way if I do get an agent for powerless I will share how I incorporated your feedback into my query process if I don't and I decide to self-publish I will also share how your feedback influenced that decision other than that if you like this video please give it a big thumbs up subscribe hit the notification bell and do everything that will keep the gods of youtube happy and I will see you next time bye