What Querying Lit Agents Looks Like (Part I)
Querying literary agents is the base camp on the mountain where you learn writing the book is the easy part.
A query is 250 word hook of your novel. It sets up the characters and what’s at stake for them. It’s an agents first look at your story and your writing style. Most agents ask for pages too. Some ask for the first five. Some the first fifty. Just depends. You also need to know what other current books are like yours (comps) and what your reader demographic is.
I'm going to pause here to say in November 2015 I challenged myself to do NaNo WriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It takes place online in November and the goal is to write a 50,000 word first draft in a month. (Novels are typically around 80K-100K depending on genre.) I wrote 51,000 words that month on a book I called Broken Bayou.
So now I have technically written four books. The first one and the poster one have been put away forever and labeled learning curve. The NaNo novel wasn’t quite ready but I thought it would be at some point. So I went back to the one I was calling Trapped about the bride in a truck, trying to beat a train. I hired a freelance editor I met at a writing retreat to help with developmental edits on it. It was time to polish it and get it ready for the ball.
Part of the prep is researching agents and what they are looking for, hours scrolling Twitter and #MSWL (manuscript wishlist) and making lists of those dream agents and those dream agencies you just know are going to love your book. PSA to all you writers: strike the word “dream” from your vocabulary. If you get hung up on the word dream, you can pass by the best fit for your book!
Once that was done I headed for the crazy that is Base Camp 2.
This is what my first querying journey looked like:
February 2017 – I started querying agents. I queried over 80 agents. I got a handful of full requests - which means they asked to read the whole book - but no offers of representation. The rejections trickled in, most form letters. (My favorite one is yet to come.)
April 2017 – I discovered a Twitter pitch where you write the hook of your novel in a tweet and if an agent likes it that means they want to read more. This was mine: To avoid being committed, troubled bride-to-be flees to Louisiana swamp where
dangerous ex-con & horrific memories await. It got a like from an agent but another agent at his agency had my query and pages so I needed to wait for her to pass before I could send him my pages.
September 2017 – The agent (finally) passes so I send my query and pages to the other agent from my Twitter pitch.
October 2017 – He asked for the full and I sent it to him that day.
February 2018 – Four months later, I sent him a nudge to see if he’d read my book yet. This gives you an indication of the speed at which things happen at this stage. Slow!
March 2018 – He responded it was ALMOST there (in all caps) but he didn’t feel the hook was strong enough to place it.
March 2018 – I replied by thanking him for his time. I was prepared to move on when he replied to me again. This time he said “Well, maybe this one is good enough to get an offer.” He wanted to know if I was working on anything else, and I said yes. Then I asked for a phone call because I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on. Was this an offer of representation? I had no idea. (This should have been my first clue this might not be the best fit for me).
May 2018 – Two months later he was finally able to talk on the phone. (Another clue). He made an offer to rep me, and I accepted, even though something in my gut was still a tiny bit worried. I knew I was going to need some hand holding and I was about to sign with an agent who out of the country and out of communication for large chunks of time, but I felt this was an offer I couldn’t refuse. (No horse heads, thankfully.)
October 2018 – After a massive revision and lots of patience on both our parts, we went out on submission to publishers.
So YAY. I have an agent for the first time and I’m out on sub to publishers for the first time - about one year after I started querying. I was giddy and it was a great confidence booster. But then, as with most publishing stories, reality struck.
October 2019 – One year later my novel still had not sold to publishers, and my agent and I were having a hard time connecting because of his travel schedule. I realized something: I may have over-edited my manuscript. This is as bad as under-editing. Another part of my learning curve: don’t say yes to every edit.
I think of it like the bronze statue of St. Peter at Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Visitors are encouraged to rub his foot for good luck. But, over the decades, hell centuries, his foot has changed into something unrecognizable after all the hands that have touched it.
I feared this may have happened to my manuscript. And I was starting to become disillusioned with the idea of traditional publishing. So I emailed my agent and told him I may need to find another path. We’d exhausted our editor list and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go through that again with another book. We parted on good terms. He was so kind and so understanding, and I will forever be grateful for his hard work. But I decided I was going to self-publish my next book.
So I pulled out the NaNo book and turned back to Base Camp 1 and started revising. I hired another freelance editor and started researching the best way to self-publish.
Suddenly, traditional publishing didn’t look that bad.
Then one of my writing friends read my new draft and said I might want to at least try to get an agent with it. It was better than the last book. It might have better luck - and, yes, luck is huge part of this process.
Have you ever heard the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. Welcome to my insanity.
Tomorrow, Querying Lit Agents (Part II)…
Cheers until next time!