Hi, Dan!
have taken issue with my position on agents, but I assure you that getting all these rejections says NOTHING about the quality of your queries.
I think it's absolutely important to point out that there are outliers in every situation, folks who went against the conventional wisdom and did well.
I think it's also important to state what the conventional wisdom is, and why it's offered.
In general, if a query (no pages) doesn't get you a 15-25% request rate, you should revisit the query.
In general, if pages don't get you any requests at all, you should revisit the pages.
In general, if you want an agent and you can't get one from a particular manuscript, you shouldn't treat self-publishing as a fallback.
In general - yes, agents miss good books, but if you get no requests at all, you should revisit the manuscript.
On self-publishing in particular: it can be a great strategy, although it's worth mentioning a few things:
1) Some genres do much, much better in self-pub than others. This isn't about quality; it's about where readers look for new books.
2) Self-publishing well takes time and research (and often some cash up front).
3) If your ultimate goal is to get an agent, be aware that agents
will look up your self-published work, and your sales will matter. (I don't know that poor sales would keep an agent from offering on a book they loved, but it's a data point that trade publishers will pay attention to as well.)
Every agent I've ever talked to opens every query wanting to like what they read. They're not parsing your greeting or your fonts (although yeah, avoid crayon and Comic Sans), searching for ways to reject you. All they're looking for is a book they can love and sell (and yes, it needs to be both). They're subjective readers, just like the rest of us, and it's perfectly possible for a good book to be passed over by a lot of agents. But they're not passing it over to spite you, or because they're agents of The Man.