Preemptively rejected

Hey Sarashay, I'm sorry for those feels, I know that must be rough! 62K can be a fine word count, depending on the genre. I wouldn't say you haven't written a proper novel! 70K was just Angry Robot's minimum requirement in particular.

But why can't you see the total word count in Scrivener? In the top-nav, just click on Project > Show Project Targets, and you can see your total word count so far, and even set an overall word count goal. Hopefully this'll be helpful next time around!

They just released 3.0.1 last month. From what I can tell on their website, check View > Statistics > Project Targets for 1.x versions.

In terms of a pre-emptive rejections=- (for which a good term is "prejection"), that ain't nothin'. I once had a major New York agent approach me as I was walking across the university campus hosting a writer's conference I attended, to tell me she had seen a novel submission I had made to the meeting, and that she didn't know how she could sell it.

I had never submitted anything to her.

That's a pre-emptive rejection if ever there was one. Wasn't very encouraging, either.

caw

blacbird said:

In terms of a pre-emptive rejections=- (for which a good term is "prejection"), that ain't nothin'. I once had a major New York agent approach me as I was walking across the university campus hosting a writer's conference I attended, to tell me she had seen a novel submission I had made to the meeting, and that she didn't know how she could sell it.

I had never submitted anything to her.

That's a pre-emptive rejection if ever there was one. Wasn't very encouraging, either.

caw

Click to expand...

Hey, at least she recognized you! But, yeah, seeking you out to say "Don't bother!" has got to be depressing. Sorry that it happened to you.

Last September I preemptively rejected myself out of querying agents for at least three more years. I'd need to write something completely unrelated to a series, to even bother querying.

What happened: a loose, large fantasy series I've been working on for a godawful number of years, but only querying parts since 2009. Book 4 went nowhere and ended up on Wattpad. Book 5 (separate characters than 4) went to a small erotic romance pub in 2012, then I got rights back, revised, and sold it to a different small press last year. It and its sequels are no longer worth an agent's time.

Book 6, separate from the previous, had mainstream commercial potential. I sent the query to 60 agents in two rounds between 2015 and 2017. It had an agent for about six months, until she gave up on it. It got 4 partial and 3 full requests from other agents. They couldn't do anything with it. I embarked on another query round last June. Then my current small press owner (who knew about this project), made me an offer. I gave the remaining agents a month's notice then pulled the book and sold it to my publisher. I'm still getting rejection notices from agents who either never got or read my withdrawal letter.

My odds of making a Big Five sale by myself were vanishingly slim, and I couldn't get through to agents. I believed enough in the whole series to ready it for self-pub, so having my small press on board is a bit of insurance and testing the waters.

After 40 years of reading SFF and romance, and 10 years as a cheerleader for mainstream SFF publishing, I'm not sorry to step away from the query game for a few years, if not forever. I see the ways the industry is changing, and I don't think my work will be enticing to current agents.

Hit apple-shift-T in Scrivener, or right click on the folder containing the files you'd like to see the total word count for and hit "edit all scrivenings". I think.

But I feel ya, I would have used that as a "the universe means for me to fail!" talk myself out of writing moment too... never mind, your novella is probably perfect as is!