Q&A Good Ole Thursday

Back in the Saddle Again

Hi friends!

Shall we do some Q&A? Yes. I think we shall.

K asks: I'm currently querying a contemporary romance novel that takes place in 2022. I've gotten a decent amount of full requests but no offers of representation, and recently received feedback from a mentor (an author) saying the reason might be because of the book's timing. Her reasoning was that even if I got an agent right now, by the time that agent sold the book, it could have a 2027 or 2028 pub date, and 2022 will no longer feel contemporary, but isn't historical either. There's a reason the book is set in 2022, as events that happened in the world that year are part of the plot and the MC's character development, but I could set the book in a different year (like 2025 or 2026) and rework the timing of events if I had to. When I suggested this to my mentor, her recommendation was to find a way to remove the date altogether, making the book feel more timeless (although still clearly contemporary to this time) if someone picked it up in ten or twenty years, for example.  

Do you think agents are turned off by the 2022 setting? And would 2025 or 2026 be better, or should I be trying to remove the date (and any specifically-timed plot points) altogether? 

I would have to disagree with your mentor here. Sometimes it matters what year it is in your novel, and sometimes it doesn’t. It sounds like it matters that it’s 2022 in yours, and that’s good enough reason for it to stay. It would probably be more conspicuous and confusing if, for example, you set a novel “sometime in the 2020s” when “everyone got sick at the same time and it was really scary” without saying it was COVID. See what I mean? That would be weird. Being set a few years ago is not, however, doesn’t mean your book isn’t “contemporary.” I mean, Bridget Jones’s Diary is