Whee! I got my first rejection letter. It took them under 24 hours.
I want to thank everyone who made this possible: myself, for being a terrible writer, myself, for writing a bad letter of interest, and myself, for being an awful writer. Thank you, thank you all for crushing my dreams! sniff ( 
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No, seriously, I pretty much expected that, but if anyone has useful advice on finding an appropriate agent, I’d be much obliged.
Thank you for starting this thread. However, I regret to inform you that your post does not meet our needs at this time.
If it came back this fast you have a problem with your first page. Figure out what it is and fix it before you send the book out again.
And before you ask: yes, anybody who is experienced can tell by the first page.
If it came back that fast, did anyone even open the file?
Hard to be sure. It may have been sent to such a wildly incorrect market (a cyberpunk horror novel to a romance publisher) that they didn’t have to open it.
However, it’s perfectly possible that someone opened up the file, read the first paragraph, and decided it wasn’t for them. There are a lot of people competing for a small number of publishing slots at any publisher, and one misstep can disqualify you.
Oh, they didn’t read the document. This was simply a query; I knew it was a longshot going in, because while the agency does some similar things, they’re not quite the ideal match. But I liked them for other reasons, so I thought I’d ask while I looked around.
I’d suggest a two-pronged approach.
One - do everything you can to continually improve the quality of your writing. Writers’ groups, workshops, classes, courses, other things you have personally discovered - the aim is to make the work you are submitting the best it can be.
Two - do everything you can to improve the quality of your business skills. This second one is harder as the business is beginning to change rapidly, and ideas that would have been successful five years ago are no longer necessarily viable. Again, there are courses, classes, seminars, workshops and this is something constantly discussed in writers’ groups.
Keep trying - you don’t seem discouraged, but I thought I’d throw that in. The first rejection letter is kind of amusing, like a badge of honour. The tenth is not so much fun, the one hundredth tests even the strongest resolve.
Self-publishing is an option. If nothing else, you’ll quickly learn what skills you enjoy developing and what aspects of publishing you are happy to pay somebody else to take care of. Of course, if you get right into it, you could buy into a printing company and start your own publishing house. There are a few poets who have gone that route, with mixed results…
Having an agent decide that you’re not a good fit is not a book rejection letter. It doesn’t even say anything about the quality of your query letter.
The way to find an appropriate agent is research and diligence. Since there’s no clue given about anything else, what do you expect us to say?
No, that’s about all I needed. In fact, I’m not really certain what else I could even give you.
Under 24 hours? I once waited a year and a half for a “dear sir or madam” note, fuckers couldn’t even be bothered to delete which did not apply. 
Are you trying to sell fiction or non-fiction? I ask because all I’ve read about publishing suggests that the letter-only approach is reserved for non-fiction.
Care to post a sample from one of your writings?
I used to work with a guy who’d gotten 15 non-fiction books published, with about 100,000 in sales overall. When he learned I was trying to sell a novel he asked me how many agents I’d sent enquiries to.
I told him around 20 and he snorted. “I sent out letters to 80 agents for my first book and only got two hits. You’re wasting your time if you aren’t doing this on a bigger scale than that.”
I realize people do get lucky, either by knowing someone, or being salvaged from the slush pile, or by hitting the right agent at the right time. But really you have to work this hard if you want good odds of being successful.
And he followed his own advice, by the way. He was working in our office part time but quit to really have a go at it. A couple of months ago he had a book optioned by Disney, so it seems to be paying off.
It was as the agent requested. Many fiction agents want only a query at first.
This is the intro from a current project… which is actually a sequel of sorts to my first book. I know my writing sucks, and I don’t get better. I separated the paragraphs hre since indenting doesn’t always display right online.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you,” he said. “Sometimes you’re simply too late.” Messy brown hair and a thin mouth made him look much older. The man looked as though he’d stayed here in the small, decrepit house a few years too many. Though still young, the unkempt beard and wild eye matched the slowly-collapsing property.
The pale woman speaking to him nodded gravely before replying, “I appreciate it, Mr. Keinman. Really, I do. I just need to find out where he’s buried.”
They were discussing Conner Sabot, who unfortunately, died a long time ago. Kainman said he believed Conner drank himself to death, but either way he just vanished one day. He had lived here only briefly, Mr. Keinman had said, sleeping on the floor for a few months. The bearded man would say no more than that.
Keinman stayed hunched over, only half visible from the street, nestled behind overgrown bushes, nailing a new board to the wall. His visitor, elegantly dressed and quite unconcerned with how out of place she looked in a neighborhood like this, a section of the city largely forgotten, all forgotten houses left to rot. As she got out of the car and walked over, Keinman cursed as his board split, the jagged edge of half of it dropping to the dirt.
On second look, the clothes she wore were less elegant and more “mourning,” clothes made for subdued and reflective times. She pleaded, “Sir, I’m sure your busy, but you must have something for me. It’s very important.”
“No, I don’t, and I don’t have to help you,” Keinman muttered, too low to be heard. With a sharp turn in his voice, Keinman cried out, “Get your ass off my property!”
The woman stood absolutely still, shocked for the moment. Then she turned and slowly walked away, looking a little unsteady as she did. An angry “And don’t come back!” followed her off the driveway.
Hearing her tires squeal a bit in the empty road, John Keinman stood up and stared down the street. As she vanished from view, he dropped the board he’d deliberately broken, to fashion a crude stake. He ran his fingers over the thin scar running just over his left eye to the middle of his nose, scratched at the beard which hid his chin, and wondered how the vampire had found him, and perhaps more importantly, why.
Conner Sabot did die a long time ago. These days he called himself John Keinman – John No Man. And John No Man didn’t need any old “friends” to come looking for him. He had better things to do.
He also knew he was half lucky she hadn’t been able to see the scar, a dead giveaway at the best of times. One wrong move and he would have had to make some very quick guesses as to why she had come – to kill him, or maybe to beg for help. If the latter, he would refuse, and then vanish again. Monsters always needed a helping hand, but they bit it more often than not. If the former… well, that’s what the business end of the stake was for.
In any event, John didn’t have time to play. Even the most broken home didn’t pay for itself, even if he’d taken the entire street for a song, finding the former garden spot of suburbia had fallen into complete decay. Now he worked the graveyard shift as a mall security guard, doing quiet and dull rounds of empty logs. The only thing of interest which happened in the last few years had been kids tagging the dumpsters and a parked delivery van slipping its brakes and cracking a few bricks in the north wall.
Now he wondered if he would ever be back again. It might not be much of a life, but it was his, and it suited John Keinman to a tee. Ordinary people had ordinary problems, and ordinary problems could be solved with ordinary resources. You could find freedom in anonymity, he mused.
So that evening John trimmed his beard to a neater shape, finding it had grown too ragged – if only he could get grow whiskers below the corners of his mouth – and washed up after the day’s work. A brief nap to relax was all he needed to keep active all night. Security wasn’t terribly hard work, after all.
Amateur carpentry had its advantages. It kept him lean enough, and unlike his parents he’d grown over a hair six feet. Staring into the mirror, steam slowly fading, John knew he hadn’t grown up handsome, either. The scar wasn’t pleasant, a jagged line that cut across his left eye and part of his nose. It rather ruined his face, he thought ruefully. Thin and red, it was an ever-present reminder of an old enemy’s malice, cutting the heart more deeply than his body.
More importantly than old history, John knew he had to rely on his body more than his looks to attract a good woman. Most seemed more than a little intimidated by the scar, though it had certain advantages in the security field. Combined with the beard and his height, the scar meant even the meanest drunk wanted nothing to do with Mr. Keinman.
John grabbed a contact lens for his right eye, leaning back to set it in. His left eye had changed color after he got the scar, turning a dull gray. That had bothered Conner, but John was more pragmatic and simply used a simple contact lens to make the left one match. And while would never be completely masked, a little makeup made it far less noticeable.
Conner had never been very keen on dressing himself properly, but John was different. Neatly pressed khaki slacks perfectly suited the uniform jacket, and he matched it with a a simple olive dress shirt and white tie. The outfit matched the olive uniform jacket for Eagle Security in a way that suited him: unremarkable but organized and clean, just like the house.
I would have stopped reading here. Yes, that’s the very first paragraph. But that last sentence has so many mistakes that it could launch an entire class on bad writing.
It has a classic misplaced modifier for a starter. “Though still young” technically modifies the word “beard.” You meant that the person wearing the beard was still young but that’s not how it reads. You then give him a wild eye. Just one? The other has been tamed? What is a wild eye anyway? You make it into a comparison with the “slowly-collapsing property” but although you could make a tortured argument that a slow-collapsing property is reverting to a wild state, that is far-fetched and simply untenable for using it as a descriptor for an eye. Singular.
All that and you didn’t ask yourself why you needed to start the sentence with “Though still young” when one sentence earlier you had implied that by telling us that his features “made him look much older.” That sentence also tells us that the house was decrepit, which you then repeat with the slowly-collapsing in the next sentence. The last sentence therefore does not build on that sentence; it merely repeats it without imparting new information. This is why people describe good writing as taut. Though the paragraph is outwardly short, it is wordy, yet vague. Both terrible things to have in a first paragraph.
I’m not dumping on you to tell you how bad your writing is. I’m trying to tell you what a professional appraiser will see. You have no more than a few seconds to grab the eye of someone who gets a huge pile of these queries every day. If your first paragraph is this amateurish and this filled with basic mistakes no professional will take the time to get to the rest of the page. Not that the next paragraphs are any better. The comma is misplaced in “They were discussing Conner Sabot, who unfortunately, died a long time ago.” And then in the next sentence, you misspell the name of your lead character. Let me repeat that. You misspell the name of your lead character. That’s death far more literal than what’s on your page.
It doesn’t matter that is presumably only a sample of your writing rather than your query letter. Amateur writing shows up instantly in any format. A query has to be professional and it has to be perfect. An individual mistake can doom a query letter.
I have to ask. I mean, I am compelled to ask this question. If you know your writing sucks, and it doesn’t get better, why are you trying to get an agent? What is the result you’re expecting from this effort?
I hate myself. Also, very early draft.
Sorry, let me be clear: I cannot stop.
I get the urge to write things and have nothing to do with them. I bothers me that I write stuff nobody reads, and with no expectation anyone wants to read it. Yet I can’t avoid writing. I just write, and everything I’ve ever written seems like utter trash to me. Everything from damn school essays to some odd nonfiction to novels - every word is a painful shriek of crap.
Pisses me off.
You may or may not suck, but to Exapno’s point, you need to get in the habit of evaluating every word and sentence, and what their purpose is.
What jumped out at me was a little different:
Whose point of view are we getting here? What I mean is, who is evaluating that Keinman looks much older, and that Conner Sabot’s death was unfortunate? One of the difficulties of 3rd-person narrative is keeping a consistent POV, which in this sample goes from the woman (briefly), and then I think to an omniscient narrator who is free to comment. Later the POV is Keinman himself.
There’s a reason a lot of writers use 1st person, which immediately defines the universe and allows for a lot of exposition. Something you might consider…
I get that. Writing well is really, really hard, and takes a lot of work. But as long as you’re writing anyway, you might as well make a go of doing it better.
There are a lot writers here at SDMB who can jump in with advice. My own suggestion would be to spend most of your time in the near future reading a lot of prose from someone whose writing you admire, to the point that it bakes into what you’re trying to do…and also try to analyze what they’re doing. (You know who writes accessible fiction and makes it look simple? Lee Child, writer of airport fiction. You could do worse than to dissect how he creates scenes, and transitions between scenes).
Good luck.