I have written seven books in four years. I have queried somewhere between 150 and 200 literary agents across the world. I do not have one.
The books exist. Unfold came out in June. A short story collection, The Fish Can Talk, arrives on 14 October. There is a memoir called Sharma that is finished and unplaced. There is Dharamshala Wedding, a novel drawn from my own arranged marriage during the covid year. There are three fantasy books in the Venom of Vengeance series. Everything that is out, I put out myself through Amazon.
I am writing this because of the version of this story people usually hear. Write a book. Build passive income. Let it earn while you sleep. That advice is everywhere, and almost none of it describes what actually happens.
Here is what actually happens, in the order I learned it.
Phase one: finishing is not finishing
I thought the hard part was writing the book. I finished my first manuscript and felt ready to send it out.
It was not ready. Not close.
What I had not understood is how many passes sit between a completed draft and something an agent will read past page one. Structural work on what the book is doing. Line work on how the sentences move. Copy work on consistency and error. Then a proofread, because by then you have read your own pages so many times that your eye slides over mistakes.
Each pass is a different job and it is difficult to do them all yourself. If you pay for them, that is real money before a single person has agreed to buy anything. If you do not pay, you are relying on your own judgement about a text you can no longer see clearly.
Nobody mentions this in the write-a-book advice. Finishing the draft feels like crossing the line. It is closer to reaching the start.
Phase two: the gate is not a quality filter
The second lesson took longer and cost more.
I assumed that once the manuscripts were genuinely good, the process would sort itself out. Send them to enough agents and one would recognise the work.
That is not how the market operates. Agents take on a small number of clients a year and they are making a commercial prediction, not an aesthetic judgement. The prediction depends heavily on whether a publisher’s marketing team can see how to sell you. An existing name, an established audience, a personal introduction, a hook that fits a shelf that already exists. Those things move a submission forward. A good manuscript with none of them mostly does not.
This is not a conspiracy and I do not think agents are acting in bad faith. It is an industry with far more supply than capacity, using signals that are cheap to check.
But it does mean something worth saying plainly. If you are being rejected, you cannot assume the writing is the problem. It might be. It might also be that your book has no obvious shelf, or that nobody knows who you are yet. Those are different problems with different fixes, and treating a market problem as a quality problem will make you rewrite a book that did not need rewriting.
The economics nobody puts in the pitch
I stepped away from a project management career to write. That decision has a price that the passive income advice never mentions.
Books earn slowly, if they earn. Self-publishing gives you control and a much higher royalty share, and it gives you no distribution, no bookshop placement, and no marketing budget. You are the publisher now, which means you are also the sales department.
And a career gap does not sit quietly on a CV. Time away from a field is time the field moves on without you. That is not a complaint, because I chose it, but anyone considering the same choice should price it honestly rather than discover it later.
This is a large part of why I am building a software and AI studio alongside the writing. The writing pays in a currency that arrives late and unreliably. Something has to pay in the meantime, and pretending otherwise is how people end up in trouble.
What I would tell someone starting
Three things.
1. Budget for the editing, in money or in months. The draft is not the product. Plan for several passes and get outside eyes at least once.
2. Build readers before you need them. An audience is the one asset that belongs to you rather than to a publisher’s calendar. It is also the thing that changes how a submission is read.
3. Keep an income. Write in the time you have. The romantic version where you quit and the book saves you is a story people tell after it worked, and you are not seeing the ones where it did not.
None of this has made me stop. I am still querying. Sharma is still finished and still unplaced, and I still think it is the best thing I have written.
But I would rather people knew what the road actually looks like before they set out on it. Most of the advice you will read was written by people selling the advice.
One practical footnote. After formatting seven books myself, I built the tool I wanted for that part of the job. It is called Akshara. You import a .docx, pick a theme, and export a print-ready PDF and a store-ready ePub, with the KDP fields ready to paste. The app is free and there is a one-time upgrade at $49, against $147 for Atticus and $250 for Vellum. Windows for now, Mac in progress. It does not solve the agent problem. It solves the week I used to lose every time a manuscript was finally ready.
