Geoff Rod

When I got my first rejection, I wasn’t surprised.

I had sent my queries via email (quicker), and had realized after the fact, and with a sinking feeling in my stomach, that in my rush to create my query letters, I’d overlooked some grammatical and spelling errors.  Not major ones; they were things that people could probably read over five times without noticing.  But a literary agent lives and breathes words.  They would pick up on those oversights as quickly as a veteran pilot could quickly scan a cockpit panel full of switches and knobs, and pick out the one thing that wasn’t set correctly. 

And what this would tell the agent - my errors - were that if I couldn’t get it together enough to have a single page be flawless, what would that indicate for the 450 pages of my manuscript?

There were undoubtedly other reasons that contributed to the rejection, but I had no way of knowing.  I had a frantic notion of writing back to agents whose submissions I’d erred on.  I would proactively let them know I had identified an issue with my query, apologize for the oversight, and maybe add an explanation of the time constraints that had led to the error.

But that wasn’t going to work either.  Most agencies are pretty consistent on one policy.

You get one chance.