How I Got My Agent
A lot of people don’t know this, but I started my querying journey when I was sixteen. Technically speaking. I don’t like to talk about it because I had no idea what I was doing, I did practically no research, my query letter was garbage, and my book wasn’t even finished yet.
Yes, you read that right. I committed the cardinal sin of querying with an unfinished manuscript. I figured it would take forever to get a response and they’d probably all be rejections, so why not?
So, of course, I got one of those mythical next-day full requests, just to mess with me and I was nowhere near ready. I scraped together a terrible ending (to this day, endings are my writing Kryptonite) and sent it to the requesting agent. I ended up sending about 30 queries in that early round and getting 4 full requests. The thing is, my ending was still trash. And if I’m being honest, so was the rest of the book. I wasn’t ready. Not even close.
Over the next five years I rewrote that book more times than I can count but it still didn’t feel right. I’m not sure when it was I figured out what the problem was, but at some point I realized that I was writing a YA multi-POV mystery and not one of my POV characters was Black. When I started writing the book, I didn’t read about any book characters that looked like me outside of books about slavery. This might sound silly to some, but I literally didn’t realize that they made books about Black people.
That turned out to be the missing piece. With Black POV characters, I rewrote the book a final time. It was a magical change. Everything made more sense and felt more like me. I jumped back into the querying trenches in June 2020 and this time I felt ready. I’d done my homework, knew how to write a query, and I’d actually finished the book.
It seemed to be working. Requests started rolling in. My request rate jumped to 60% and, for a while at least, it stayed there. I figured this was it and I’d have an agent by Christmas.
I was wrong.
Because after the requests came the rejections. Full rejections. Heartbreaking rejections that made me question everything. Most were forms. And in the rare event they weren’t forms, they didn’t give any actionable advice. It wasn’t me, it was them. The industry is subjective. The usual. At first, they all hurt, but after about seven full rejections, I grew numb. After ten, I lost pretty much all hope. Each new full rejection that rolled in solidified to me that I could entice agents to read my book, but that was it. I would never quite stick the landing.
Eventually, I stopped sending queries.
I was still not sending queries and waiting on responses from a dozen or so full requests I still had out (expecting passes on all of them) when a zoom call with my query support squad made me think I wanted to write about sirens.
For those of you who met me before November 2020, you probably know I was pretty set writing mysteries. I’d never had any inclination to write fantasy before but the idea was stuck in my mind and wouldn’t go away. So in November, I did NaNoWriMo and cranked out a first draft of the first fantasy novel I’d ever write called SING ME TO SLEEP.
I was obsessed. When I got COVID mid-November, I kept writing (which I definitely don’t recommend. A smart person would have slept). Writing SING ME TO SLEEP was cathartic for a lot of reasons. A big perk was it took my mind off the full rejections that would trickle in every once in a while to remind me I was a terrible writer who would never write a story that was consistent enough to get an agent.
In February 2021, I got back into querying when I participated in #SFFpit with the pitch that would change my life. And not because it was the pitch that connected me with my agent (spoiler alert: it wasn’t) but because it was the pitch that convinced me I wasn’t a horrible writer. The amount of retweets, likes, and love I got from this pitch made me think that maybe, despite all of the full rejections, I could write a story people wanted to read.
My pitch got over 500 RTs, 15 agent likes, and so much love from the writing community on Twitter. I started querying the agents that liked my pitch the next day. And two days after #SFFpit, I got an email with the subject line
Offer of Representation
My. Heart. Stopped.
It was for my first book. The YA mystery that had racked up 20 full manuscript rejections, 8 partial rejections, and that I had convinced myself was garbage. I couldn’t believe it. Honestly, I still can’t.
And now I had a dilemma: I had an offer on a book I’d given up on and I had only just started querying a book I’d fallen in love with. It was still early and I didn’t think I’d given my YA fantasy a chance to do well in the trenches yet. SING ME TO SLEEP had become the book of my heart, and with such a positive reception from the writing community, I started to wonder if this was the book I wanted to land me an agent.
The first offering agent was incredibly patient. They told me to take as much time as I needed to make a choice. They had seen my pitch in #SFFpit, realized they still had my earlier full manuscript, and got back to me. I was given as much time as I needed to do what was best for me and my career.
So, I queried in bulk. I sent out dozens of queries over the course of a week. I figured I’d have to wait a while. I started getting full requests at the same rate I’d gotten requests for the YA mystery but I assumed I’d have to wait longer before I knew if I had an offer.
Once again, I was wrong. 23 days after SFFpit when I officially started querying SING ME TO SLEEP, I got an email notification on my phone during Zoom class. When I saw the notification, I turned off my camera and checked my inbox.
I did a double take.
Then another.
It was an offer of rep for SING ME TO SLEEP.
I was FLOORED. So floored, I left class early to go scream in the woods. And no, that’s not a joke. I literally walked out of my on-campus apartment, across the soccer fields, and into the woods where I ran around screaming in excitement. Luckily, it was midday on a Monday in Maine Winter so there weren’t any witnesses.
With an offer on the table for SING ME TO SLEEP, I nudged the agents with my query and full manuscript. The next day, I got nearly 20 more full requests, including from Naomi Davis (spoiler alert: this is my current agent). A week later, I got a very enthusiastic message from Naomi over Query Manager asking for THE CALL (if you’re interested in more details about the call, I did an interview with BookEnds about it).
By the end of my querying journey, I had four offers on my YA Fantasy and an offer on my YA mystery. SING ME TO SLEEP was the book of my heart and I knew I wanted to make this story my debut. And after my conversation with Naomi, I knew they were the agent I wanted to work with to get there.
If you’re curious about my final querying statistics, I posted them on Twitter.
I’m a bit scatterbrained, so if I missed something, or you have more questions on my querying journey, I’m happy to answer them! Big thank you to the Twitter writing community for boosting my confidence when I was feeling low! I definitely wouldn’t be here without all of their support.