Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
For a part of this year, I have been rejected by people who have never read my work. This, I am told, is part of the process.
The literary agent query process is a remarkable thing. You spend two years writing a novel about a Polish conspiracy theorist, a synesthetic ex-FBI agent, a pair of government-enhanced otters, and an efficiency consultant named Brandy who may or may not be engineering the collapse of Western democracy from a regional conference room in suburban Ohio. Then you send 300-word summaries of it to strangers who decide in eleven seconds whether or not it deserves to exist. Olivie Blake, who wrote The Atlas Six and knows this particular gauntlet from the inside, describes the process as long, arduous, and likely to drain you and infuriate you in equal measure. She is not wrong. It is exactly like dating, except that in dating, you occasionally get a positive response.
I got responses.
Oh, I got responses.
I should say, before I share them, that I bear no ill will toward the agents who passed on Truth Tastes Like Pennies. They are busy professionals navigating an industry that is itself navigating a category five existential hurricane. I understand. I respect the hustle. I also have receipts.
The following rejection letters are real in spirit and completely fabricated in fact, which is more or less the DNA of everything I write.
Rejection Letter No. 1: The Polite One (Which Is the Worst One)
Dear Brian,
Thank you so much for sending along your query for TRUTH TASTES LIKE PENNIES. I read your pages with great interest and found much to admire in your voice, your premise, and the otters specifically. Unfortunately, I am not the right agent for this project at this time.
I wish you the very best with your writing.
Warm regards,
Ernesto K. Ashcraft,
Literary Agent
Ashcraft, Holloway & Mime, LLC
What this letter says: “No thank you.”
What this letter means: “I read the first paragraph, said the word ‘otters’ out loud to an empty room, and went back to my sandwich.”
What I heard: the soft, distant thud of a door closing in a building I was never actually inside.
What Pemberton does not know is that I have since googled him, and he represented a book described as “a sweeping multigenerational saga of love, loss, and artisanal cheesemaking.” Pemberton made his choices. We have both made our choices. We will live with our choices.
Rejection Letter No. 2: The One That Explains Too Much
Dear Brian,
Thank you for your submission. After careful consideration, I am passing on TRUTH TASTES LIKE PENNIES. While I found the concept intriguing, the market for satirical conspiracy fiction featuring enhanced otters is, at present, quite specific. I also struggled with the character of Timothy Splashinski. You’ve written a building janitor who unravels a federal conspiracy because he mops the right hallway at the right time, and I just — I kept waiting for a reason he was special. A hidden past. A particular skill. Some latent gift that makes him The One.
He doesn’t have one, does he?
It’s just the hallway.
I need it to not just be the hallway.
Best,
Margaux Delacroix-Pinfield
The Delacroix Literary Group
Margaux, with the greatest respect: it is the hallway. That is the whole point. The hallway is load-bearing. The janitor sees everything precisely because he is the janitor, and the people doing crimes in that building have never once in their careers looked directly at a janitor. Timothy Splashinski does not have a latent gift. He has a mop, a consistent schedule, and the radical underestimation of every powerful person he has ever encountered.
I showed this letter to Karie.
“The agent doesn’t get Timothy,” I said.
She didn’t look up. “A lot of people don’t get Timothy.”
“Do you get Timothy?”
She turned a page. “I’ve worked in institutions my whole life, Brian. Timothy is everywhere.”
Rejection Letter No. 3: The One That Got Personal
Dear Brian,
I appreciate you thinking of me for this project. I have to be honest with you — and I say this with genuine admiration for your craft — this book unsettled me in ways I am still processing. I do not know how to sell a novel in which a man can literally taste when someone is lying to him, and yet he still stays in the meeting. I sat with that for a long time. Trout Bowman can taste deception like copper on the back of his tongue, and he still nods, and takes notes, and says “that’s a fair point” to a man who is demonstrably lying directly into his face.
That is not a thriller. That is a documentary.
I cannot be your agent. I have a dentist appointment I need to reschedule and I think you know why.
Please do not respond to this email.
Regards,
Clarissa Vane-Burrough
The Vane Literary Group (Est. 1991)
Clarissa is fine. Clarissa is probably fine.
Rejection Letter No. 4: The Form Letter That Tried
Thank you for your query. After careful review, we have determined that your project does not align with our current list. We receive thousands of submissions annually and can only offer representation to a small percentage of authors. We wish you all the best in your search.
P.S. — We do not represent fiction involving otters with federal clearance. This is a firm policy effective as of March 2023. Please do not ask what happened in February 2023.
There is a story behind that postscript.
I will think about it for the rest of my life.
Rejection Letter No. 5: Harold
Dear Brian,
I appreciate you thinking of me for this project. I have to be honest with you — and I say this with genuine admiration for your craft — this book unsettled me in ways I am still processing. I do not know how to sell a novel in which a building janitor named Timothy Splashinski figures out the entire conspiracy because he mops the right hallway. I do not know who the reader is. I do not know if I am the reader. I spent forty minutes this week wondering if I have been Timothy Splashinski my entire career and did not know it.
Please do not send me anything else.
Regards,
Harold Fentworth III
I think about Harold a lot. I hope Harold is eating. I hope Harold has people.
What Happens When the Agents Say No
Here is the thing about rejection in the traditional publishing world: the answer is almost never “this is bad.” The answer is almost always “this is not a thing we know how to sell right now,” which is a completely different problem and also, if I am being honest, a more interesting one.
Truth Tastes Like Pennies is a book about how large, dumb systems fail spectacularly when a few small, weird humans start paying attention. It is about what happens when a man who can taste lies, a janitor who sees everything because nobody sees him, and an efficiency consultant who can deduce exactly which load-bearing assumption to kick out from under a plan — plus two federally-enhanced river otters named Olive and Otis — start asking questions that nobody with a title is supposed to be asking.
It is not an easy pitch. The agents have established this clearly.
I have written and published books before. The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse exists in the world and no one can take it from me, but this one is different. This one has otters with clearance issues and a janitor who is right about everything, and I won’t apologize for that.
Trouble the pig expressed no opinion when I read her the opening chapter. She maintained sustained eye contact for nearly a full minute, which I am choosing to interpret as support.
So Here’s What We’re Doing Instead, and I’m Warning You Now
I am releasing Truth Tastes Like Pennies to my Substack paid subscribers, a few chapters per month, in the order they were written, with no otters removed for marketability.
This is the part where I tell you what you get. Here is what you get:
The novel itself, obviously. A few chapters a month, delivered directly to your inbox, which is more reliable than any agent has been to me personally.
Notes from me between installments, because I cannot help myself.
Live chapter discussions. I am going to host online chats about the chapters as they drop, where you and I can talk about what’s happening in the book in real time, like a book club where the author is present and cannot be avoided. This may be wonderful. It may be deeply uncomfortable. It will almost certainly be both.
And I am not ruling out a podcast.
I want to be transparent with you about the podcast. A podcast in which I read chapters of my own novel aloud, to subscribers who have already read them, and then discuss what we all just read, is objectively one of the most aggressive things I could do to an audience. I know this. I am considering it anyway. The agents have radicalized me. I have nothing left to lose. Clarissa Vane-Burrough is rescheduling her dental appointment because of me and I am out here thinking about microphone placement.
A paid subscription is what makes this possible and what makes you complicit in whatever this becomes.
You can subscribe right here. The first chapters drop soon. Current paid subscriber count: a number that rhymes with “hero” and also is “zero.” Let’s fix that before the podcast happens. You have the power to prevent the podcast. Use it.
Trout Bowman can taste a lie from across a conference room.
He would want you to subscribe.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his well-being). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting for an agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Dear Brian: A Rejection Anthology - May 12, 2026
- KUMQUAT: A Sleep Study - May 8, 2026
- They Named Everything Firefly - May 7, 2026
