Querying Lit Agents (Part II)
I keep thinking of the lyrics from that Whitesnake song (yes, that gives you an idea of when I was in high school): Here I go again on my own. Going down the only road I’ve ever known.
I will say, I entered this next phase a little jaded. I now understood landing an agent does not always equal selling to a publisher. But here I was, trying again.
This is what my second attempt at querying looked like:
Winter 2019 – I sent my NaNo novel to a freelance editor for fine tuning.
Spring 2020 – Rewrites!
September 2020 – Querying agents a second time with my 2015 NaNo book, Broken Bayou.
Did I mention I’m tenacious to a fault?
I was excited and nervous. I was about to send my new baby out into the cold, harsh world. I’d prepped for months. It was ready. Surely one agent out there would love my baby as much as I did! Okay, let’s do this. I pressed send on that first query, butterflies flapping in my stomach. I did it! Eleven minutes later a reply came back! I almost threw up. That has to be a record, a good sign. I opened it to what is still my favorite rejection. Three words: Not for me.
Huh. I’d sent her a query, a three page synopsis and 10 pages. Eleven minutes. Three words. Balloons don’t deflate faster than I did. Uh oh.
But this little engine kept going and going and going.
September 2021 – I’m one year into querying and something wasn’t working (obviously.) I was getting a lot of requested pages and fulls, but those pages were getting rejected.
At this point my book had been through one developmental edit and one R and R (revise and resubmit) for an agent at a great agency - who, by the way, then rejected my R and R with a form letter. That one got under skin, which is saying a lot since my skin resembles a thick, weathered hide by this point! Anyway, I’d invested too much to stop now so I reached out to another freelance editor I’d learned about from a blog I follow.
I sent her my manuscript and waited. She was a game changer.
November 2021 – Got my edits back and went to work.
March 2022 – Edits done. Restart querying. (Are you getting dizzy yet on this merry-go-round?) I told myself I’d only query 30 agents, then it was 50. To date, with both books, I’ve queried 134 agents. Move over Alice, this is my rabbit hole!
April 20, 2022 – I sent a query to an agent I found on Reedsy.
April 20, 2022 – She requested the full manuscript the same day!
April 21, 2022 – Full manuscript sent. At this point I had forced myself to stop checking my email every day so I didn’t know she’d requested it until the following day.
April 29, 2022 – Offer of representation!
We scheduled a phone call and when I spoke with her, I knew. Her enthusiasm over my book and her vision for it matched my own. I asked for two weeks so I could notify the other agents who had my full manuscript.
May 2022 – I accepted her offer.
May 29, 2022 – Got my agent edits back and, yes, went back to work.
October 2022 – The book was ready and, you guessed it, we went out on submission to publishers.
This business is not for the faint of heart nor the thin-skinned. Rejection is the name of the game. If you’re not getting rejected, you’re not trying hard enough. My writing friend Phylis said something on our walk the other morning that resonated with me. It referred to an interview with a K-pop singer/songwriter but it holds true for any art form. You have to feel rejection or it isn’t art. You have to put it out there and open yourself up to criticism. Period.
Don’t be afraid of it, embrace it.
You never know when lightning will strike.
Cheers until time!