Query Letters, Rejection, and the Midnight Rider

A Field Guide to Agents, Queries, and Other Creative Punishments

Lex E. Santi, LCSW, MFA

At one point in its life, Song of the Midnight Rider made the rounds to over 200 literary agents. Two hundred. That’s not a typo. I sent my book out into the world so many times it started to feel like junk mail. Sometimes there was silence, sometimes a polite “not for me,” and sometimes—just often enough to keep me going—there were encouraging notes that still ended in no. I became a finalist more than once, which is basically the literary version of making it to the final interview only to hear: you’re great, but we went with someone else.

In the end, I wasn’t represented. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Song of the Midnight Rider is now heading toward publication within the next three months, thanks to a team that helped shape it into the book it was always meant to be. And while I’m deeply excited to share it with you, I also want to pause here and talk about the strange, exhausting, humbling ritual of looking for a literary agent.

Step One: Writing the Query Letter

A query letter is where you take years of work and try to fold it into a single page. Think of it as putting your entire novel through airport security. The agent wants:

• The Hook – two or three dazzling sentences that prove you can summarize without losing the magic.

• The Synopsis – just enough to show you have a beginning, middle, and end.

• The Housekeeping – title, word count, genre.

• The Bio – who you are, and why you write.

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It’s brutal. Many writers spend longer polishing a query letter than they spent drafting their first chapters.

Sneak Preview: back cover of The Song of the Midnight Rider

When I was doing my MFA, here’s the thing: nobody taught us how to write one. Not the professors, not the workshops. It was a mystery. In fact, I was told at one point, "the MFA is about the exploring and art, not business." The irony of not being able to eat after doing a masters was daunting to me. One of my mentors finally showed us the query letter he had written to his agent—but he already had multiple book deals. It wasn’t the same thing at all. That’s not a query letter, that’s an email between old colleagues. For an emerging writer? Whole different ballgame.

Step Two: Researching Agents

Once you have your query, you have to figure out where it might land. That means researching agents—what they represent, who they’ve sold to, what genres they actually care about.

There are tools for this:

• Everyone Who’s Anyone (everyonewhosanyone.com) – messy but oddly effective.

• QueryTracker (querytracker.net) – searchable, sortable, complete with statistics.

• Publishers Marketplace (publishersmarketplace.com) – shows who’s selling books now.

• Poets & Writers Database (pw.org/literary_agents) – curated and clean.

• Acknowledgments pages – follow the thank-yous in the backs of books you love.

Some writers talk about making a “Top 10” dream list of agents. My advice: make that list, then make a Top 50, then keep going. Because even if you know where you’d love to land, you need volume.

Step Three: Editing and Rewriting

Here’s where things got real for me. After those 200 queries, after those near-misses, I sat down and rewrote the novel. Not just tinkering—I added 100 to 150 new pages.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if the original version should have been edited more thoroughly rather than rewritten so massively. But in those early years, I was the king of rough-drafty work. I sent things out half-baked and called them “done.” That’s how I operated in the beginning of my career.

Now, I draft differently. I spend more time in revision, even though I have less time in my life overall. It’s a strange irony: the older you get, the less free time you have, and the more careful you are with the time you do spend.

Step Four: Sending Queries (and Waiting)

You don’t send queries on Fridays. You don’t send them at midnight. You aim for Mondays and Tuesdays, those hopeful, caffeinated days when the inbox is still uncluttered.

You send out a handful at a time—three, maybe four—and then you track them. Not because tracking makes rejection hurt any less, but because you need to know where you’ve already been.

Step Five: When You Get a “Hit”

Occasionally, someone bites. That’s when the requests come in:

• The First 25–50 Pages – the most common ask.

• The Full Manuscript – a rarer but thrilling request.

• The Chapter-by-Chapter Synopsis – the most dreaded ask, the one that forces you to prove you know where your book is going in painful detail.

It’s a strange dance, this process of handing over parts of your work like samples at a grocery store, always hoping someone says, “Yes, I’ll take the whole thing.”

Step Six: Reflection (and Why We Still Do It)

Even after all of that, rejection is the norm. It’s ego-deflating to send your work out hundreds of times and hear “no” or nothing at all. It can make you question whether the book will ever sell, whether you will ever sell.

And yet—this is the writer’s life. The industry is punishing, yes. Agents are increasingly looking for commercial hits, safe bets, books they know will move. The odds are stacked against the new, the risky, the emerging. But here’s what I’ve learned: it only takes one person believing in you. And the most important person is you.

If you’ve got two people believing in you—yourself and someone else—that’s already miraculous.

So, Song of the Midnight Rider may not have found an agent, but it found its road. After rejection, after rewriting, after the long detour of self-doubt, it’s finally here. And maybe that’s the real truth of the writing life: you keep driving, headlights on, even when you don’t know where the road will end.