Fail Story

He scribbled down the points needed to sketch up a neat query letter, for his hard work of one hundred and fifty pages for a year. He had been googling for days, to gather out the ways of hooking up with a publisher, a literary agent, online writing discussion forums, etc for the launch of his debut novel. Being a lone traveler, an inexperienced debutant in a completely dark industry of literature publishing, he knew it would a wrecking journey. It had taken him a year to complete his non-living offspring, and it might take another year or two to get his work published by a good publisher.
He had copied down every young, successful, one-book wonder author’s blog in different MS Word files to get a brief about his new venture. He had both rejoiced and envied on seeing how young students, college-goers getting accolades for their books. He loved it when some critics verbally thrashed some literary works for their poor English, but at the same time he knew there could be his name too after his work is published. But he didn't care about negative comments and feedbacks, for Churchill once had said "oh you have enemies, and then you must have stood for something in your life." Some motivational blogs had even written "you must have come across some worst books, and if their books can get published, why can't yours?" and this have kept his morale high.
He had almost ranted the writers' blogs in a week, as it was the only job for a second year engineering student. "Perseverance", "rejection", "unfaithful", "fake" were the most common utterances of those blogs. Each of them had mentioned "be used to rejection", "beware of fake publishers", "your test of perseverance and will power" once in their thousand-words-posts. He could feel the pressure thrusted upon by an invisible negative energy trying to bend his spine to kiss the feet of defeat, but he needed to stay strong. He remembered "people tends to give up because they see how much still they have to go, instead of seeing how much they have already walked" to pulley up his feared spirits ready to be broken down.
 
It took him a week of intense, spine wrecking, motionless research to gather down all the small-banner, big-banner, self publishing houses, and literary agents. It seemed as if he was walking across a never-ending desert, instead of what used to be an analogous of Rio de Janiero with Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Quora and obviously those "protein excreating websites", but he didn't think of visiting there once. It was as if the external power had metastasized all over his brain, for it was the first time for which. He took a detour from his research path to visit some blogs for extra tips, where he read "have a good knowledge of the publisher you're sending your e-mail."
After battling out his inner demons of fear, shyness, rejection, he made up his mind to send the e-mails with their requested type of manuscript. First on his list was X literary agent, which branded them as "bringing new authors to horizon", and which suited his genre aptly. He typed out their website and made a brief homework on them. He cherry picked some of their titles, those which sounded catchy, and pasted them in his query letter, telling them he had liked them, which was of course a lie. A grave one. He didn't even know whether these books are really good, or are they still in print. It was as if he was throwing an arrow in dark, praying to hit the bull's eye. It was 7 in the evening, when he clicked on the "send" button. It was as if someone had removed the boulder off his chest, as if chest congestion got cleared, but he controlled his emotions and attempted the same to the other publishers and literary agents. By the time he completed the spine-trembling job of sitting on the chair and sending the e-mails it was 10 @ night. Three hours whizzed off like chinn music in cricket.
He could feel his back paining, the spine bones moving with that "crack-crack" sound when he twisted his back. But it was only the first step and a painful one though. Someone had aptly said first step is always the hardest. Now, after that task, he had to wait for their confirmation, their announcement, and no one knew how much would that take - one week, one month or more, or whether they would even answer.
He woke up early the next morning, and was back on his computer opening his e-mail. Amongst the thirty e-mails he had sent the previous night, only four had sent a reply. He checked them out one by one, and unfortunately three of them were automatic-generated message just to inform him that they have received his e-mail. At least they have sent a reply, while the other twenty-six didn't even care to reply, he thought.
He proceeded to check the fourth e-mail, the one from that X literary agent.
As he read their e-mail, he was amused, bewildered, and ashamed. He felt helpless, dejected. He didn't know what to do, what to feel. Even being confused seemed to be bewildering, even being ashamed was shameful, even being sad was remorseful. He wanted to laugh at his own folly, but even laughing seemed to be funnier. It was a short, subtle e-mail - thank you for choosing the X literary agent, but the books you have mentioned are under production and not yet released. We wonder how you read those. Unfortunately we couldn't go ahead with your manuscript.

Reviews

[Marie]

Well, he did a good job. He researched well, sent out plenty of mail,. But he should have been honest. He might have gotten somewhere. Perhaps he still can.

[Dayran]

Dear Mayur ... thank you for choosing me to review your write. As usual ... it has the unmistakable signature of a view of the many ways a person may look at one thing ... handled deftly by your wit and sense of humour. Unfortunately ... we don't publish any writes ourselves but will be happy to refer you to other publishers. Thank you.

[Mayur Sadhu]

Thanks... I would be very thankful if you do so...