I don't think I'll ever be published

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My first book failed to get a single agent to represent it, so onto the second and it's not fairing any better. It has been an agonizing affair of psychological and emotional torture, cause I assumed it was because I simply wasn't good enough. Now behold THIS response which has knocked me for such a loop my dumb founded expression remains on my face as I paste this:

Thank you for sending me a portion of your manuscript. I enjoyed reading it.

While your pages are interesting and well-written, after careful consideration, I feel that your project is not right for my list at the current time.

I wish you the best in finding the right agent who can successfully champion your project.

Now keep in mind I sent the manuscript first. She knew EXACTLTY what genre of book this was, knew EXACTLY what the premise was, and it was in fact these two things alone which got her to ask me to send her the manuscript. Then she says she liked it, that it's good, but she still won't represent it.

Okay, so it doesn't even matter how good and appealing my premise or work are? What f*****g standard do they use, throwing darts at a board of manuscript titles? This whole time I thought the agent saying "this work doesn't suit us" was just a nice way of saying it sucks, but apparently they just don't want to do it. So even if I have a great premise, conveyed as excitingly and grippingly as possible in my query letter, and my book was the best thing ever written, it would still be rejected. Of course I'm not saying I've written anything that good, but hyperbole can be an effective conveyor.

At this rate, PublishAmerica is starting to look enticing.

Just send it out a bunch, to many people. All famous authors are rejected and rejected and rejected until they aren't.

May I suggest that getting angry at a form letter is not the best expense of your time. How about showing the book to some very, very, very honest friends who have an interest in whatever you're writing about and asking them for feedback, telling them to pull no punches?

It reads like a standard form rejection letter. Whoever read it might well have thought it had merit, but just didn't feel it would be something they could sell. There is nothing to get upset over in this letter.

How many agents or publishers have you submitted to? Many writers submit over and over with many books and it frequently takes years before they get any kind of acceptance.

From what I understand of book publishing, agents are more useful after your are an established writer. You might do better submitting directly to publishers. (You might have to work your way up doing short stories and publishing online.)

Good luck.

Since it took less than that for me to just give up altogether a long time ago, I commend you for hanging in there and getting much farther along so far.

There definitely seems to be some inconsistency in the correspondence you have mentioned, yet all of that could actually have come from merely-personalized form letters just like the recent "rejection letters" I received from the Social Security Administration ... and for me, those were just as personally-insulting.

My mother wrote two books and had them "self-published" after getting nowhere with any agent, and that ultimately accomplished at least as much as she had minimally hoped. I know nothing about how to make things work there, but I definitely hope you are eventually successful in getting your work out among people who can and will appreciate it.

I understand what you're talking about. I'm currently trying to get published as well. It takes a lot of patiences, a lot of time, and a lot of effort. You will face more rejection then you will face success. But you'll find your break sometime.

I was rejected 75 times before my first novel was published.
Agents specialize, and they only take books that they are sure will sell well in the niche they represent. They can love a book, but if they don't think they can sell it, they are not going to spend their time on it.

How many times have you been rejected? If the answer is less than 5,000, then you haven't sent it to enough publishers. In fact, if you get accepted the first time around, that's usually a bad sign.

Maybe you could think to distribute it on Internet.

The idea that people are running around getting rich by stealing people's books on the Internet is not reality. It's a very common fear among unpublished writers, and a non-existent fear among published ones. It just doesn't happen, and would be easy to prove by showing your manuscript to other writers and saving those emails.

If you think that is horrible imagine spending years writing a novel, being turned down time and time again because agents felt the genre wasn't marketable though you insisted it was, and then to find a story very similar to yours, which the author didn't spend nearly as much time on, got picked up, and was quite successful.

Anyway let us not dwell on the past, as it is no longer the present or the future.

Keep trying and explorer other publishing venues.