When I was younger (and slimmer), I ran a half-marathon with my dad around his 50th birthday. I forget what my time was, but it didn’t matter because I finished and I was proud.

I turned to my dad, who had run a marathon a few years before this day, and mentioned that I was halfway towards being able to run a full marathon. After he finished laughing, he corrected me.

“You’re about 20 percent of the way there,” he informed me. Apparently the second 13-mile stretch of the race is much (much) harder than the first 13 miles.

I tell that story to tell you this story: When I finished drafting, editing, and polishing my manuscript, I thought I was at least halfway towards having a book published. I think the publishing world is still laughing at me.

Before I wrote a manuscript, I came from the world of communications focused on politics, policy, and advocacy. The idea of a literary agent, and how an agent worked with publishers, and the idea of large and small and independent publishers were all foreign to me. And why did other writers on Twitter keep talking about “querying”?

Turns out that you need a literary agent if you want to go the traditional publishing route. And to get an agent, you must engage in querying.

This is basically like applying for a job. Instead of a cover letter, you have a query letter. It’s about a page long and tells the agent a little about yourself and seeks to whet their appetite for your manuscript. Instead of a resume, you send in a sample of your manuscript. Different agents ask for different sample sizes – anywhere from five to 50 pages. Some also ask for a synopsis, which is a 1,000-word summary of your manuscript, including all spoilers and the ending. (Note: After spending years drafting a 120,000-word story, it is NOT EASY to boil that down to 1,000 words.)

But wait! There’s more. Not all agents represent all genres. Some focus on romance or historical fiction or memoirs. And some are not open to querying. And some have a Manuscript Wish List (or MSWL for short) that lays out what they are looking for from querying writers.

So before you can send queries, you must find agents that are not only interested in your genre, but who seem to be looking for what you have to offer and are open to queries.

Oh, and the rejection rate for queries is somewhere around 70 percent to 90 percent. Which means you must come up with a list of roughly 100 agents who you would like to query.

Once you have your list and your query letter and your synopsis, you can begin sending them out. The most common advice is to send out queries in batches of about ten, so you can wait for feedback before sending out more.

What you are hoping for as you wait (wait times can be up to three months for some agents) is a response asking for your full manuscript. This is the first goal of the querying process. This means an agent read your materials and the small part of your manuscript and now they want to read the entire thing.

From what I have seen on Twitter, agents request “fulls” on a tiny percentage of queries – somewhere between one and five percent.

If you get a full request, you send it in. And then wait roughly three to six months to see if the agent would like to take you on as a client. In some cases, they come back with an “R&R,” or a request that you revise and resubmit. This means that they think it has potential, but isn’t quite there yet.

If one makes it through this process, you get The Call. (And yes, writers on Twitter capitalize it.) This is the call from the agent to make an offer of representation. If you accept, then congrats! You have an agent.

Now all you have to do is make more edits and then the agent has to sell your manuscript to a publisher.

And that’s a whole other process.

I never did run a full marathon. I only got 20 percent of the way there. But I am hopeful that I will get this manuscript published. I’m in it for the long haul.

Thus far, I have a list of 93 agents. I have sent out 20-odd queries. I’ve received about a dozen rejections and one request for a full manuscript.

So I wait. This, friends, is the querying experience.