I just finished sending out two dozen queries to literary agents, pitching my latest sci-fi novel, “Alien Panic.”  My expectations for a positive agent response are close to zero, and I look toward self-publishing the book in January. Why did I pitch it then? Because the process creates useful pain.

Self-publishing has many rewards, such as being close to the readers and maintaining artistic control.  What self-publishing does not offer is a large audience. The internet is bigger than the ocean, and the chance of my novel being “discovered” is next to nil. An agent would place the title with a commercial publisher who could find the larger audience I seek.

The book is great, of course (like all my novels!).  My previous work has garnered a proud collection of awards and positive reviews (see www.psifibooks.com). Alien Panic will probably do the same. So the product is a positive.

Working against that is a large negative: the damn pandemic. The New York publishing world is almost at a standstill. Since publishers aren’t publishing much, agents aren’t agenting much. People are still buying books, but they’re not going to bookstores, so book marketing comes down to online presence. And I suspect that recreational reading is fading as the pandemic grinds on and people’s minds turn to porridge.

But I offered up my latest child to the slayers of dreams because it’s worth a shot in the dark, and because, as I expected from past experience, the process of pitching clarifies the mind. I had to state, in a few succinct sentences, what my 88,000 words and three years of work are “about.”  That is no easy feat.

What I took away, as always, were contradictory lessons. One, I have a great story with great characters. But also, it does not quite, exactly, precisely say what I wanted to say. I know that’s true of any novel, and of any work of art, but still, it’s frustrating.

My aliens from a distant star are stranded on earth, their colony dying. The human characters befriend and help them, despite the enormous differences in body and mind between the species. The aliens are saved when they have a revelation in their point of view: they each need to think like an individual, the way Earthlings do, instead of communally, as was their tradition. The converse message is that humans could benefit from getting past their commitment to selfish individualism and think more in terms of community. I don’t know if that message comes through as well as I wanted.

But hey: it’s it’s sci-fi. It’s got aliens and death-rays, for heaven’s sake. It’s not a psychology textbook and I had to resist the urge to have a character stand up on his hind legs and give a speech about modes of consciousness. I had to tell a page-turning story, and hope that the “message” was implicit between the pages. I’ll do better in my next novel.

Because of the painful self-learning that comes from it, I recommend that every writer make queries to agents, even in no-hope situations. Even if you plan to self-publish, as I do, you should still pitch your work to agents. You will learn a lot, and you will have the satisfaction of knowing that the agents who reject you are working for you, making you a better writer.

It’s about the journey, not the destination.