That book remains unsold, mainly for lack of trying on my part -- around the time that I was ready to start sending out query letters, I landed some contract wo

That book remains unsold, mainly for lack of trying on my part -- around the time that I was ready to start sending out query letters, I landed some contract work working on visual novels. Getting my first contract involved spending a week or so assembling a writing portfolio to satisfy the company I was applying to, and once I had that portfolio, I started sending it off to any visual novel company that posted a classified seeking contract writers, with a pretty high success rate. (My portfolio started as a collection of ~5 writing samples; with each opening that I applied to, I would pick out the 3-4 writing samples which seemed most relevant to the position I was applying for and just send those. Each job I completed gave me another writing sample to add to the portfolio, and the longer I kept working in the visual novel space, the more specific I could get with tailoring my writing samples to the positions I was applying for, so the result was sort of this "snowball" effect where success beget more success.) Once I had my foot in the door, my inertia continued to carry me forward from gig to gig, and visual novel work eventually became my main source of income (I quit my "day job" back in 2016). Having a steady supply of contract work kind of sapped my motivation to continue doing any writing on spec; the appeal of toiling away privately on a novel with the hopes that it will one day get published becomes a lot less attractive when you have offers from people who are willing to pay you to write right now. Once the contract work started, I also sort of rationalized procrastinating on sending out query letters for my unsold novel with the reasoning that my query letters would be a lot more impressive when I could start them with a paragraph listing the visual novels I'd worked on as a contractor, along with information about the number of copies they'd sold. That being said, although I never sold that novel, the time I spent working on it certainly wasn't wasted -- most of my early gigs in the visual novel space came as a direct result of the strength of my portfolio, which included parts of the original manuscript. So, while I didn't sell the manuscript, it did help with the first few critical steps of my writing career. In an interesting quirk of fate, the editor that I'm working with for one of my current visual novel projects is also a senior editor at Tor, so despite never sending out those query letters, I somehow managed to stumble my way into a working relationship with someone at the publisher. Perhaps the moral of this story is that all roads lead to Tor. :)