Journalist or not, you don't seem to understand how agents and publishers work. Fortunately, there's Janet Reid's blog. She's an agent, and she has lots of advice on dealing with agents and publishers in her blog, including "do NOT do this" advice. Go read the archives there, it will help you not shoot yourself in the foot. She also runs Query Shark, where she diagnosis whats wrong and right with query letters people submit for evaluation.
Try submitting to other places. If they don't like it either then consider listening to the feedback you got and make the changes. Otherwise publish it yourself. Totally free on amazon if you don't buy any extra services. But you still have to promote yourself and promote your book if you expect anybody to buy it or read it.
Keep going. Console yourself with the knowledge someone has read your book. Page by page think how it might be possible to make the narrative more interesting and more accessible (less technical). Try to reduce some of the the Q and A formats with more subtle dialogue.
I'm still unclear what he meant by technical. Probably the boat stuff because the action happens aboard a former fishing vessel being used for marine mammal research and as I am a commercial fisherman and mariner I explain all the boat handling, navigation and research techniques in intimate detail. You mean he is not interested in the intimate details of how to drop an anchor? I never imagined either that my dialogue style was Q&A.
You're lucky he even bothered to comment on your M/S. Most don't. Tom Clancy was in the habit of getting the reader bogged down in technical details and, good as his books were, that was like trudging through treacle at times, leading me to skip forward. I'm a sailor too, but you need to look at the sailing jargon from a layman's point of view and expect that most readers know little to nothing about port/starboard/fwd/aft etc. They just want a good story. If I were you I'd prune back the technical descriptions, have another go and if that doesn't work, publish on Amazon/KDP at no cost to yourself.
