How to create exciting book pitches

Hello friends! Recently a few of my friends have been querying agents, and it seems to be a pretty miserable experience. Just seems very hard to even get a manuscript request.

I myself spent the whole of 2020 querying agents. It sucked! My experience was obviously different, because I was already published, and thus I got plenty of manuscript requests. But I couldn't turn my manuscript requests into an offer.

During the doldrums of that year of querying I wrote my Cynical Guide to the publishing industry. This was my last attempt at self-publishing! I thought it was going to take the world by storm, but of course it disappeared into the maw of Kindle Direct Publishing. Still, in that point I excoriate the publishing industry for its poor taste, but at the same time, I hammer on the point that nobody is publishing anybody else as a favor. You don't get published because it's in your own interest or even because you've written a good book--you get published because it's in an editor's own interests to publish you.