How I Got My (THIRD) Agent

Hi friends!
For my first official post I thought I’d talk about my experiences querying. I’m well aware that there are a million blog posts out there about the querying process, and I’m by no means an expert. However, I was in the querying game for a long time, and my path towards publication wasn’t straight forward. As such, I’m happy to share any tips and tricks I learned along the way.

As you may know, I recently signed with my new agent, the lovely and amazing Kathleen Rushall from Andrea Brown Lit, which is a total dream come true. Kathleen is everything a writer could want in terms of representation, but it was a long, LONG time coming. In case you couldn’t tell by the title of this post, Kathleen is my THIRD agent. Counting Kathleen, I received seven offers total after about one month of querying. BUT! Before you go thinking this process was a cake walk, it took me TEN YEARS of active querying multiple manuscripts to land my first agent, whom ended up leaving the business after four months. It then took me another year to find my second agent, Amy Tipton, whom I was with for one year before she also left the business to form her freelance editing service, Feral Girl Books. Luckily, Abrams/Amulet had bought my debut in the meantime, so I was incredibly fortunate in that respect.

Still, I couldn’t believe it. I had to query AGAIN? I had to reopen my Querytracker subscription for the third time, write a whole new query letter, make a new list, polish my new manuscript… My anxiety was through the roof just thinking about it!

And the rejections! The REJECTIONS! It was enough to make me cry. A lot.

Because here’s the thing that every writer knows, no matter how long you’ve been in the game, or what stage of the business you’re in: querying sucks. At times it feels dehumanizing, and any agent whom says “it’s not personal” is full of it, because it is personal: deeply personal.

But it’s a must in this industry, once again, I got to work. These are the steps that I followed:

Step one: Be ruthless

• Be ruthless with your own edits. Give the manuscript time to marinate and breathe before doing any major revisions, and then send it out to people you trust to read. Think about their feedback, and incorporate what makes sense.
• Write the damn synopsis. It’s painful, it’s difficult, but it’s way better to have it ready to go in case an agent asks for it, because in my experience about 1/3 do. Think about it this way: it’s just a summary. You know your book better than anyone, so just sum it up the best you can.
• Use your critique partners for your query letter. Follow the formats given on websites. Make sure to include the genre and word count. Incorporate a back-of-the-book pitch in the first paragraph, and any important information about yourself in the second. It shouldn’t be more than a page.

Step two: Research

• Manuscript Wishlist is an amazing resource that I wish was around when I started querying back in 2005. It’s a database organized by what types of projects agents are looking for, so you can make a list of all of the agents whom are looking for YOUR BOOK!
  • Make your list, then research the agents to make sure they are 1) open to queries and 2) a good fit
• To do this, I paid for a yearlong subscription to Querytracker, which I’ve used in different ways over the years. At the very least, it’s super helpful to be able to see about how long certain agents take to respond, or the honest experience other writers have had querying some of these people. I’ll be honest, I was very picky during my last round, and if I was considering querying an agent but then saw that they don’t respond to authors or are snarky in their responses, I crossed them right off the list: that’s just not the type of partner I wanted.
• Some authors pay for subscriptions to Publisher’s Marketplace, but I didn’t. When I got to “the call” stage of the process, I had friends look up the agents whom I had phone calls scheduled with, and they told me what the sales looked like. If you’re trying to save money, you can probably skip this step and find someone else whom subscribes.
• An easy, free method is to do simple Google searches on the agents you are considering. Most of them have social media accounts that you can politely stalk – key word: POLITE. Don’t be THAT person whom writes all over their Twitter feed or likes all of their Instagram photos – it’s weird, and obvious. In other words, you’re not trying to become their cyber BFF, you’re more trying to see what kinds of interests they have, what kinds of books they’re posting about, and whether or not you think your personalities would jive. Maybe follow some of their authors and read their books – this will definitely give you a sense of their portfolio better than any blog post can.

Step three: Nerd out

• If you’ve polished your letter and created your list, it’s time to take a deep breath and hit that send button!
• I’ve always created spreadsheets as I queried. This can be a simple list handwritten in your journal, or a fancy, color-coded Excel sheet – you do you! The point is just to stay organized so that you don’t forget which agencies you submitted to. Also, having a timeline of responses helps, and if you subscribe to Querytracker than you can match your times up against the ones in the tracker.

Step four: Be patient

• Don’t check in on your query, as tempting as it might be. UNLESS the agency is one whom responds to all queries, and it’s been months without an answer, then it’s OK to resend.
• Work on something else while waiting. Everyone says this because it’s true – it’s the only way to feel sane in the process. It also keeps your creativity flowing and alive.

Step five: R&R

• Here’s the thing about R&Rs (revise and resubmit): I used to get them a lot, and no one EVER offered to me after I did the revisions, BUT! The revised manuscript always ended up impressing someone else. (This happened during my submission to editors as well.) So if the revision sounds like a good idea, do it. If it makes for a better book, it’s worth your time. But don’t bank on the agent signing you afterwards: sometimes they do, sometimes they won’t, but the fact that they noticed SOMETHING in your work is so, incredibly important.

Step six: Try to take rejections in stride

• Subjectivity is still a thing, no matter what stage of the game you’re in – even after a book deal. You will get rejected for a plethora of reasons:
  • Just didn’t connect
  • Didn’t love the voice
  • Enjoyed the voice but didn’t love it enough
  • Needs a bigger hook
  • Too similar to something on their list
  • No answer… (Which is the WORST of all of the rejections.)
• If you get, say, fifteen rejections and NONE of them are personalized – personalized meaning that they gave you SOME piece of feedback that is unique to your story – then you need to go back to the drawing board and maybe tweak your query letter first. Get new beta readers, and try rework your pitch.
• If you get personalized rejections and they give you feedback, perhaps take a break from querying while you address some of their concerns. I did this every time, and my manuscript became tighter with each revision.

 
And here’s something very personal about my own experiences with rejection: the book that Abrams bought was a book that just about every agent rejected - nobody wanted it when I was sending it out. While the rejections piled up, I wrote another novel, and subsequently queried it, and THAT new manuscript was the one that got me my first two agents. Want to hear the ironic part, though? The book that received more interest from agents was not the book that sold to publishers: the book that sold in a two book deal was the one that didn’t get any agent love. Maybe it was timing, or the revisions that I did on it, or a combo of both. The bottom line is that you NEVER KNOW, and a manuscript is never really dead: it just might not be the manuscript that gets you representation. So take heart, be patient, and write the next beautiful thing.