59 Rejections: Now We Know Why

At 8:00:06 p.m. EDT yesterday, I submitted my pitch to Miss Snark, the Literary Agent, along with a gazillion other hopefuls. She posted her pithy comments about each one.

What I sent:

All the Cold War rules lie in the rubble heap with the crumbled Berlin Wall and the failed socialist dream. New opportunities, along with unknown risks and dangers pour through the open borders of East Germany in the summer of 1990.

Zara Gray, a high-tech consultant, and T.K. Drummond, a failed spy, are seeking an amiable sociopath who has fled the U.S. with his company’s ahead-of-the curve computer software and his sex-spy girlfriend. T.K. is expecting easy money and a plummy assignment. Blackmailed by her greedy bosses, Zara (POV) has been pushed into this assignment against her will. Zara is nervous about working with T.K. who has no reason to love her and every reason to betray her.

Crumbling old Baltic casinos and a classic sailboat are backdrops as an international cast of miscreants vies for the digital jewels in World of Mirrors, (96,000 words). The “Marquis de Sade on Steroids,” a Russian naval captain, ex-Stasis, a former wall dog, and a North Vietnamese guest worker take the stage as treacheries multiply. Zara and T.K. must rely on the software pirate and the Vietnamese laborer to sail them to safety as they play a deadly game of cat and mouse through the shipping lanes of the fog-shrouded Baltic.

What she said:

Paragraphs 1 and 3 are blather, paragraph 2 is the only thing of interest, but the plot is "so old it has whiskers."
Considering there are only x number of plots, I don't feed so bad about that, because my characters are unique and the setting is great. So I need to expand paragraph 2 to make the book sound extraordinarily interesting. Hmmm.
I am copying the pitches she marks as "Winners" to study them. Make I can get 3 good paragraphs. In the comments, some like the sound of the book and others did not. It was 50/50 which isn't bad.

I must say some of the hooks (lots of fantasy and sci fi which I don't read) sucked. Anyway, the agents are taking their time responding, so that's actually not bad. A quick response often means they reject it immediately. In the meantime, Promiscuous Mode is dead in the water.

We gave a copy of The Shadow Warriors to a boyhood friend of S.O. He lives in Germany and I'm not sure how proficient his English is, but he claimed to love it. Of course the setting is the home town, and everyone likes to read about their turf.

I tout my books (not to agents, of course) as Anti-Romance, because the romance always ends badly, and boy never gets girl. This works on a book-to-book basis, but a lot of readers are saddened by same. Hmmm. What do you think?

Grapeshot, who is still sucking it up and finding it no more pleasant than of yore.

G