How I Got My Agent
This is all still so bizarre to me, but writing this blog post (and creating this website) has cemented it a bit: I have an agent!
If you’ve been following my journey on Twitter, then you probably know I’ve been working towards this goal for a while. You write a book. You query that book. You get an agent. Simple, right? Except… not really.
So, here’s my very own blog post about my experience. I’ve split it into three overarching parts (the beginning, the middle, and the end, haha), where I detail exactly how I got my agent, including all the trial-and-error it took me with writing to get an offer of rep. (But if you would rather skip all of that and just get to my querying journey, that’s perfectly fine too! I’ve included some funky little stats at the bottom that you can look at in addition to that, because I always loved seeing those while getting ready for the trenches.)
Alright! Let’s get into it, shall we?
THE BEGINNING
I’ve always loved to write. My mom likes to joke I was writing before I even knew how to read, and I knew from a very early age (shoutout to all the five year olds out there with big hearts and bigger dreams) that when I grew up, I wanted to be an author. I attempted my first novel when I was nine, and I got about 12,000 words in before I eventually abandoned it. But that first attempt was monumental in shaping me, and it definitely gave me the confidence I needed when I decided to finally pick writing back up again.
It took a while, though. Throughout middle school, I strayed from that big dream I initially had. As I grew older, I somehow internalized that being an author was an unrealistic goal to have, and although I kept in touch with books (I read constantly, volunteered as a library assistant in my K-12 library, and consistently competed with my friends in Battle of the Books, which is one of the coolest school programs ever), I wasn’t actively trying to write them.
Enter high school. I was a wide-eyed freshman and didn’t wholly know what I was doing, but I somehow managed to find out our school had a Creative Writing Club. I attended that first meeting, sat in the front row, and latched on to the teacher’s every word. There were some other people there on the first day, but a lot of them didn’t return. I did, though. And slowly, I started writing again.
THE MIDDLE
Near the end of September, my Creative Writing Club teacher told me about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. He brought up the idea of attempting the challenge of writing a novel (defined by the program as 50,000 words) in a month, and I eagerly jumped at the opportunity. Alongside some of my friends who I (lovingly) pushed into doing NaNo with me, we each tried to write 50,000 words. And by the end of November in 2017, I had finished my first full-length manuscript—a 55,000-word YA coming-of-age novel-in-verse.
I’d love to say I did anything with that first manuscript, but I don’t even think I edited it. My best friend read it and loved it, I was satisfied with the fact I had entertained at least one person, and then I shelved the book and life moved on. To be completely honest, though, I didn’t know there was anything I could do with the novel I had just finished. (I also didn’t think it was publishing-worthy, but that’s a different story.) In 2017, I had never heard of a literary agent. I didn’t even know what an agent was. But (and I say this all the time) actually finishing that first book set me up to write better books later, much like starting a draft when I was nine set me up to try drafting again once I grew older. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was building up to something great. I was honing my skillset. I was learning how to finish things.
A year later in 2018, I did NaNoWriMo again. This time, I wrote 70,000 words of a YA contemporary fantasy in one month—and when November ended, I kept writing. This was huge to me because it was the moment I realized I could write a novel at any time, and not just during the month when everyone else was doing it. (Which I know is kind of a silly realization to have, but the notion genuinely hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.)
After that, I worked on that YA contemporary fantasy every spare moment I had. Researching, revising, editing, revising again. I would go to AP Statistics and write in the three minutes we had every day before class officially started. With each moment I spent in the world I was creating, I felt more powerful than I had before.
Then summer rolled around, and I played around with some more concepts. I wanted to write a sequel for my contemporary fantasy (in my head, I thought it would be a three-book-series, which is important for later), and I wanted to try writing the zero draft during the next NaNo. For some reason, though, I couldn’t write the sequel. 2019 was the only year I didn’t meet my 50,000-word minimum goal, and I felt super dejected about it until I realized why the sequel wasn’t coming along as well as it should—the first book wasn’t done.
Okay. Back to the drawing board, I thought. Surely we can polish the first book to be the best it can be first. (Surprisingly, this was a pretty genius idea on my part. If you’re a writer and you want to write a series, you shouldn’t work on any of the subsequent books until you’ve gotten an agent [and hopefully eventually a book deal] for the first book in that series.) I read what I had written. I changed parts, threw out parts, revised parts. I was still researching and editing and revising that first book until March of 2020.
Hang on. I actually think that deserves its own section, don’t you?
(THE PANDEMIC)
I was on spring break with my family in March of 2020 when the news broke: there was a pandemic. Cool, I remember thinking. Maybe this extra week off (cue present-day us crying in unison) will give me the time I need to finally finish my YA contemporary fantasy and get it out to betas.
Well, that’s exactly what I did. And then none of them read it.
Okay, that’s an exaggeration. A LOT of my betas (read: friends from high school) finished my book, and I got a lot of serotonin from their comments in the massive shared Google doc I had emailed them all one-by-one. But even though I was super happy that people seemed to be enjoying my writing, very few of them were actually equipped to give me actionable feedback on how to make my manuscript better. I knew I needed a writing community if I wanted to improve, so I set out to find one.
(THE SEARCH)
Although I finally felt like I had a book that might be worthy of being published, I wanted to make sure it was the best it could be first (which meant finding critique partners and beta readers, even though I didn’t know either of these terms back then.) At this time, I was thinking about self-publishing, since it was the only kind of publishing I vaguely understood.
“But Victoria,” you yell at me from the other side of your screen, “you have an agent now! Agents are for people who want to publish traditionally! What made you change your mind?”
Around the time I had first started doing NaNoWriMo, a family friend paid for me to attend a small writing conference held at my community library. There were a lot of local authors there, and one of them gave a seminar that was specifically about the publishing industry. During that seminar, the speaker said something that completely realigned how I was approaching publishing: you can always self-publish, but why not try traditional publishing first? You can’t do it the other way around.
When I read back over that in my notebook, it’s like a lightbulb went off in my brain. I needed to pursue traditional publishing first, especially if I wanted my books in libraries and bookstores (which I did). I started Googling things about writing, and I found out there was a huge writing community on Twitter. I made my own account in September of 2020, and then I slowly started getting acquainted with the world of tradpub. Somehow during this period, I also managed to stumble across Pitch Wars, and I eagerly took my YA contemporary fantasy manuscript and applied with it.
I didn’t get in. Not only that, but I didn’t get a single request. It could have been crushing, but instead I decided to dust myself off and keep pursing my dream. I emerged from the Pitch Wars application process with the beginnings of a writer community (including a few CPs and betas) as well as a strong foundational knowledge of how publishing worked, so I buckled down and sent off some queries with my new submission package. While I was doing that, I also kept working on the project I had tentatively started for 2020’s NaNoWriMo—a standalone YA thriller about a girl gang of amateur high school detectives that embodied everything I wanted to be.
With that manuscript, though, something clicked as soon as I started it. The girls in it were powerful and smart, and their ringleader reflected who I was and who I wished I had the strength to be. It helped that I was completely in love with the genre I was writing (One of Us is Lying by Karen McManus was the first book I devoured after a long reading dry spell in high school and prompted me to pick up everything from A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder to The Cheerleaders after that), and I adored being able to create a completely new world that I could fall into alongside my characters. This book just felt different, and I knew that I wanted it to be The One.
By the end of November, I had written 51,000 words of my thriller. I took a break in December to try something new and draft an #ownvoices middle-grade chapter book (which I finished at 18K as practice for a later project and has since been banished to a folder on my computer), and from January to February I wrote a 7.5K science-fiction short story about sapphic girls in space. (I actually entered Author Mentor Match with my MG chapter book in January of 2021, which I didn’t get into either. I did get into the RevPit #10Queries event though, which I found out after checking my spam when my Harvard interviewer called me to say I hadn’t followed up on his email. Oops.)
But in March, I opened up my thriller document again. I read everything I had written, and I decided it needed a major overhaul (as in, a complete rewrite). That was fine, though. I knew it had potential. This was still The Book I Wanted to Be Published With, especially since I was slowly starting to realize the YA contemporary fantasy I had spent the better part of two years on was something I should have never written in the first place. (I had actually gotten one full request for that MS from my first batch of queries, but I withdrew it and pulled the rest that same month. I was writing from a place that didn’t come from lived experience, and once I realized I didn’t want to speak over those who deserve to tell their own stories, I permanently shelved that book.) After that, there was only one thing that mattered: finishing my thriller. So once again, I buckled down and got to work.
I finished the first real draft of How to Find a Missing Girl on July 7th, 2021, after over four months of editing and rambling to the CPs and betas I had accumulated through Twitter and various pitch events/mentorship programs. She came out to 83,000 words and I loved her, but she still needed a lot of work. So I decided to rewrite the manuscript again.
On August 4th, 2021, I finished the second draft, and I was more than ready to just throw it into the querying trenches and see what happened. I had been ITCHING to query ever since November of the previous year, and I felt like my book was finally ready to land in some agent inboxes. It helped that one of my good friends and CPs was about to start querying her YA contemporary at the same time as me, and after I did a quick read-through and editing pass of HTFAMG, we decided to just go for it and query our agent lists at the same time. (She ended up getting her first offer four days after we queried our first batch, which was absolutely amazing. You can check out her blog post about that here.)
THE END
If you’ve gotten this far, I commend you. This is probably the part you’re truly here for, which involves how I, you know, got my actual agent (lol).
So, to recap, it was August of 2021, and I was officially querying the book of my heart. I can’t explain it, but things just felt different from the first time I had queried. Somehow, I just knew this book would be the one to land me an agent. (Don’t do this, but I actually only had two betas read the manuscript before I sent it out. A friend of mine refers to this as “pulling a Chloe Gong.” It’s probably a bad idea. Have other people read your work before you try to get rep.)
I queried 10 people in my first batch. And five hours after I sent out my first few queries, I already had a partial request in my inbox.
I screamed and ran to my parents, where I frantically waved my phone around and tried to explain between shrieks of joy that an agent was already interested in seeing my work. She wanted the first three chapters, and she said she was “really into” my opening pages, which I took as a good sign. When I finally calmed down, I sat down and sent her my materials.
The next day, I refreshed my inbox (something I started doing constantly the second I first sent out my queries) and saw I had gotten a full request from an agent I loved. He requested my full on a weekend, which seemed like a great sign since agents usually don’t work during those, and since I opened the email in a Starbucks it took everything in me not to panic until I got home and was able to send him my manuscript. Two days after that, I got another full request. I couldn’t believe it—it felt like I had struck querying gold. I started letting myself query a new agent every time I received a positive response, which meant that my initial 10 queries turned into 13 within a few days.
A few weeks passed, and rejections on my cold queries started trickling in. I still had a 60% request rate, though, so I was remaining cautiously optimistic. At times, though, being in the trenches felt like I was suspended in writing limbo. I would get a partial request from an agent that I loved, but then an agent with my full would pass with a form rejection and I would start crying in my school’s dining hall. (I also moved to college during this time, which made the whole process of querying somehow even more excruciating. Whenever someone asked me what I wanted to do with an English degree, I had to physically restrain myself from explaining how the publishing industry worked [and only occasionally succeeded.])
In September, though, I participated in #PitMad. (I actually totally forgot it was happening that day, as evidenced by my chaotic tweets here and here, and ended up writing all of my pitches on the spot in between my classes.)
And, by some miracle, all of them… did pretty well.
In total, I got fourteen agent and two editor likes across my three pitches on September 2nd. I was over the moon, especially since my past experiences with pitch contests had always been disappointing. I immediately vetted all the agents who wanted to see my materials, added which editors wanted to see my manuscript once I secured representation to my query letter, and sent out another batch of queries.
Within five days, I had five fulls and two partials out with agents. During that time, I also received an email from a book pitch contest I applied to earlier in the year letting me know that my YA thriller was selected for their longlist. Things felt like they were finally starting to happen for me, but I was still anxious. What if every agent who had my full hated my book? What if all those requests turned into rejections like they did with the Starbucks agent, and then I’d be back at square one? I was a nervous wreck, and I couldn’t stop checking my email. And then, as I was refreshing it while pretending to pay attention in my religion class a few weeks into college, I got an email back from one of the agents who had my full from #PitMad. And she wanted to set up a call.
Reader, I was absolutely vibrating in my seat. I could not pay attention for the last fifteen minutes of class to save my life, and as soon as I got outside I called my mom (who DIDN’T PICK UP???) and then my boyfriend to let them know the news. The agent had emailed me on a Thursday (September 9th, a week after I had participated in #PitMad and 35 days after I sent out my first batch of queries), and she wanted to call me on either the immediately following Friday, Saturday, or Monday. Initially, I wanted to take her call on Monday, but Ann told me to get it over with as quickly as possible (thank you Ann lmao), and so I emailed the offering agent back to thank her for her interest and schedule a Friday call.
I told myself not to freak out too much. Don’t count your offers of representation before they hatch. It might be an R&R, so stop daydreaming about what your author headshots will look like and pay attention in your English class. But still, there was that little voice in my head that told me this call was going to be an offer. And it wouldn’t shut up, no matter how hard I tried to tell it to chill.
On Thursday afternoon, I bit the bullet and sent out the rest of my queries to all the remaining agents on my list. And then on Friday, I had my call, and the agent was fantastic and lovely and officially offered me representation, and I thanked her and hung up and definitely cried a little afterward. Here it was: all my dreams felt like they were finally starting to come true. But I was also (still) massively anxious; things didn’t feel wholly real, so I kept quiet about the whole thing and sent out all my nudges while waiting for the requests (and rejections) to inevitably roll in.
The following Tuesday, I had another email in my inbox from a second agent who wanted to set up a call. I called my parents again (they picked up this time) and couldn’t stop my voice from shaking—I had received MULTIPLE offers of representation, which meant I would have to CHOOSE the agent I wanted to go with. I was super excited, but I also wanted to throw up. I hopped on the call with the second agent on Thursday, and it was also amazing. I felt so torn. How in the world was I going to pick who I was going to go with?
Then, a few hours after my call with the second agent wrapped up on Thursday, I got a third call email from a third offering agent. We had a great call the next day, and I immediately clicked with her and her vision for my story. But on Saturday, I got yet ANOTHER email from a fourth agent who wanted to call me to discuss my book. The decision was starting to get harder and harder.
We scheduled our call for the following Monday, but I was starting to get nervous. I already had four offers of representation, and there were still eight other agents who had my full and eleven who had my query with a deadline of September 23rd to get back to me by. (I was in an incredibly privileged position to have this dilemma, but I also want to emphasize that this entire process was incredibly emotionally taxing for me. I was barely sleeping and constantly breaking down in between my classes because of how stressed I was; something can be both amazing and terrifying at the same time.)
On Monday, I had my call with the fourth offering agent. At this point, I still had several fulls out with people who said they would get back to me by my deadline, but I was also feeling REALLY antsy. All of the agents I had spoken with so far (including the fourth offering agent!) were fantastic, but I couldn’t help but feel a sense of impending doom every time I looked at my email inbox. I was about to make a huge decision that would affect my entire career and the rest of my life—it was hard not to worry about making the wrong one.
My fifth offer came in on Wednesday, one day before my agent deadline. I had another Zoom call, and again the offering agent was fantastic. The remaining fulls I had out trickled in with incredibly kind rejections over the next few hours, and then the number of queries and fulls I still had out finally dwindled to zero as I marked the rest of them as CNRs. The rush was over. All my offers were in, and I would have to decide.
Or so I thought. On the day of my agent deadline, however, I got an email from an agent who had my full that I had already logged as a CNR (Closed No Response) into QueryTracker. It was 8:42 PM and she wasn’t finished with my book—but she wanted to talk after she’d read it. Could I possibly extend my agent deadline for her?
Full disclosure, reader, I LOST MY MIND. I hadn’t expected this agent to respond to me, and especially not when things were so down to the wire. Once again, this was truly my Chloe Gong moment—the agent who was now interested was Big, and she represented an author in my genre that I looked up to A LOT. But I just couldn’t bring myself to extend the deadline any longer. I didn’t feel like it would be fair to any of the other five offering agents who were waiting to hear back from me, and there was no guarantee that the big agent would offer anyway. (And even if she had, I wasn’t certain I would go with her.) So after crying and freaking out over the phone to Ann, who acted as my actual rock through my entire querying journey, I composed myself and wrote an email back to the final agent: I was very sorry, but I would not be able to extend my deadline.
And just like that, my querying journey was (actually) over. I had five offers of representation from some very incredible people, and now I had the privilege (and terror) of deciding who I was going to sign with.
The thing is, all of querying is terrifying. I was in the trenches with my second book for only 35 days before I got my first offer, but I had been in them beforehand with my first book for months. I knew how excruciating the entire process was, but the anxiety I felt about my agent decision was staggering. I was constantly sending emails, staring at stats on Publisher’s Marketplace, scouring agency websites, and just generally feeling a sense of Extreme Panic about the entire process.
Through it all, though, there was one agent who made me feel at ease no matter what was going on at my end. She was the third agent I had spoken to, the one I felt like I had instantly connected with, and the one who had consistently stayed in touch with me after our call. Through all of her kind, thoughtful, and considerate emails, I could just tell that I would love to work with her. I didn’t want to jump the gun though—after all, picking out an agent is huge!—so I reviewed clients and contracts all the way up to the end of my agent deadline. I wanted to give each person who offered on me a fair shot.
Finally, decision day rolled around. I tentatively drafted up emails to each of the incredible agents who wanted to work with me, and then I wrote my acceptance email to my agent.
As soon as I sent all of my emails, it was like this huge weight was lifted off of my chest. I knew that I had made the right decision, and I felt so excited at the prospect of working with the agent I had picked: Jessica Errera at Jane Rotrosen Literary.
From the very beginning, Jess’s vision for How to Find a Missing Girl really resonated with me, and I couldn’t be happier to be working alongside her to bring Iris and her team of sapphic amateur detectives to the world. :)
(THE CLOSING)
So, that’s it! That’s my querying journey! It’s not a typical one, but it’s wholly mine, and I’m incredibly proud of myself for it.
I can’t wait for what comes next. I hope you’ll stick around to see it.
STATS:
Book #1 (YA Contemporary Fantasy)
Queries Sent: 6
Partial Requests: 0
Full Requests: 1 (Withdrawn)
Offers of Rep: 0
Book #2 (YA Thriller)
Queries Sent: 47
Partial Requests: 1
Full Requests: 19
Offers of Rep: 5
