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A part of me still can’t believe I can type the words: How I Got My Agent. For about two years, the travails of pursuing traditional publishing seemed all but endless, as if I (and my intensely personal writings) were a cog in the machine of submission, rejection, get hopes up, try again, have faith again, lose again.
So it is with heaps of humility that I finally put my querying story to paper, in the hope that another writer out there might find it encouraging, useful, informative or perhaps cathartic. But before we get to that…
A Few Caveats
In no particular order, let me offer a few crucial points up front:
- In no way am I implying that my querying journey was “typical” or standard – every writing journey is unique in its own ways and influenced by a number of external factors including various facets of privilege (or lack thereof), ease of access and wider industry market conditions and problems therein.
- My background as a queer-identifying (asexual/aromantic) woman was especially important in ways I’ll describe below. Those aspects of my story may or may not apply to other queer-identifying persons and writers of other marginalized communities (and intersections therein).
- I benefited from multiple forms of privilege in my querying journey as a white woman in an industry which is still ridiculously tilted in favor of authors who look like me, as well as the fact that I have a stable full-time job which provides me with economic security that other writers may not have access to.
- My experiences and/or recommendations (given all of the above) are therefore based solely on my own journey and should be taken with a grain of salt. To anyone reading this: please take anything you find useful, and leave the rest with my blessing!
Psst – if you’re here for just querying stuff, go ahead and skip to the “On to Querying” section below! Or, if you just want my Recommendations, you can scroll all the way down for that, too!
One Midsummer’s Day…
I’ll begin with a sunny afternoon standing in my little sister’s driveway just over two years ago.
I could begin in my childhood, defined by my voracious reading habits and hours spent penning fanfiction alone in my bedroom. I could also begin telling you how I fell in love with history in high school. I probably should begin with my Ace Story – but we’d literally be here all day and I already wrote that one in a separate blog post!
All of those were pieces of the puzzle that led me to becoming a queer Historical Fiction writer, but the true spark was a Sunday afternoon like any other standing in my sister’s hot East Tennessee driveway in May 2021.
We were casually saying goodbye for the day – I can’t even remember if I had been there to help look after her baby or just to commiserate with her over the joys and woes of motherhood. I had been back in my hometown for a little over a year since “the plague” had overtaken my fast-paced DC life. Back in March 2020, my boss told me we were working remotely until further notice. So I had decided to ride out Covid-19 at my Mom’s home back in Tennessee. After all, she had a bit of land for me and my dog (really her dog, but who cares?) to chase rabbits around – that seemed a better deal to me than wasting the time away with my Arlington, VA roommates in a group house of dubious structural integrity. Besides, I could deal with living with Mom for a few months, surely?
Welp – a few months, and then a year, came and went – and I was hungry. Not for food; my cooking kept me and Mom well fed – but for an opportunity, a new horizon for my weary mind which had grown tired of the same assignments, the same research, the same briefs and powerpoints. Not that I did not enjoy my job – I did and still do! But in the simmering quiet that had come to rule my life, I was grasping for something more.
That was the moment when my little sis dropped a bombshell as we stood together on concrete:
“Hey, I’m writing a book by the way.”
I stared at her, blinking. “What?” I practically spat out. “You wrote a book? Huh?”
She shrugged, as if it were a trifling matter. “Well, I’m about 30,000 words in so, not quite done yet.” She proceeded to tell me bits and pieces about it, how she’d been working on it in the evenings when her daughter rested.
I was astonished. My little sis has a habit of dropping major information like a brick falling out of the sky – one of her trademarks, I suppose (and I have no doubt she could cite plenty of my own). But as I gripped the steering wheel all the way back to my mother’s home, I couldn’t keep the thoughts from cycling through my mind: she wrote a book? How? She has a baby! What the hell have I been doing this whole time besides whining?
Queer Queens and Queer Dreams
My little sister’s achievement, her dedication despite being a brand-new mom, both impressed and challenged me. But even more than that, the idea of writing a novel – a real novel, my very own novel – was like a loom weaving together so many heretofore disparate threads wandering about my mind.
I had adored creative writing as a little girl; I was, after all, practically alone during my elementary school years and had no friends apart from my two sisters. But I wrote stories in my mind, watched them on the imaginary screen constantly playing in my head, dreamed and dreamed on swings and rocking chairs (the motions always soothed me, and still do) until my heart was bursting with ideas.
Eventually I began committing them to paper – often fanfiction (Sailor Moon, anyone?), but every so often an outline or an original story of my own creation. But alas – the halcyon creative writing days of my youth had evaporated by the time I was taking Advanced Placement exams as a high schooler and had far bigger fish to fry. Oh, I wrote plenty for my “grownup job” – thousands of words every week for client memos, briefings, research papers and more.
But what was stopping me from writing for myself now, in the hazy hot summer of 2021? What did I have to lose? All I needed was a topic – and she had been swirling in my head for months.
By that summer, I had already come to fully accept myself as an aroace, queer woman although I was only “out” to a handful of close, trusted friends. As I came to better understand my own queer identity, I made it a point to start searching for my community throughout the annals of history – a discipline which has endlessly fascinated me for years and became one of my bachelor’s degrees. But my education had been curiously low on queer individuals (let alone queer theory as an analytical lens). Even now, I can only recall one of my history undergraduate professors ever discussing queer historical analysis or assigning books (cough: Gay New York) centering queer figures or issues in history.
So I was amazed, at the ripe old age of 30, to stumble upon someone I had somehow totally missed in my years of studying the European monarchies: Queen Christina of Sweden.
Queen Christina, who I found at the Royal Palace in Stockholm earlier this year!
I cannot possibly do her justice here – but the renegade Swedish (perhaps transmasc?) monarch who loved her lady-in-waiting and then abandoned her throne for a life on her own terms was like a breath of fresh air when I discovered her at last. I had been amazed by her wild, unpredictable life for over a year before the idea to write a novel ever occurred to me standing in my sister’s driveway. But as I set my mind to penning a story of my own, the real work (and the real research) began in earnest.
I wrote, read some more, and wrote like my life depended on it: every day, without fail. It sustained me. I found myself calmer, more secure, more joyful and hopeful than I had been in years (even long before the onset of Covid). By the end of that summer, I had written my very first novel draft at 165,000 words.
But…now what?
On To Querying
So I had a VERY long manuscript – but no idea what the hell to do next. I knew almost nothing about publishing except the vaguest notion of the difference between “traditional” and “self-publishing” routes. What I did have was a close friend who knew a little bit about both. They had already been an indie romance author for years, and had an “agent” (whatever that meant) and had published via the so-called “traditional” route. For lack of a better idea, I called them up, told them I wrote a novel and asked for advice on my next steps.
Their advice was to point me to a freelance editor friend who would be willing to review my novel (for a reasonable fee) and let me know their general thoughts. In hindsight, I would have probably done better to find a critique partner or just a beta reader, but back then I had no clue what either of those was let alone any notion of the “Writing Community” on social media.
The editor was lovely, and while she did assist me with fixing some bad writing habits, her suggestions for my existing manuscript were relatively minor. I even asked specifically if my word count was too high, but she replied that my story justified the word count and she would prefer I didn’t change it.
I wanted to attempt the traditional publishing route, but quickly discovered I would need a “query letter” to get started at all. I pored over articles, read samples of successful query letters and even hired a query editor through Reedsy to review that and my synopsis (another fee, for anyone keeping track!) With all those extra eyes on my materials, I felt certain I was ready to query my first manuscript. Ultimately, I began querying “QCL” at 145,000 words (thanks to some more careful self-editing).
What happened? Well, it was a mixed bag – but I quickly learned what “querying trenches” meant.
Ah, querying! The seemingly endless journey…
The first dozen or so rejections didn’t bother me too much – I knew they were coming and that was part of the deal. Not even the one that came within two hours of the query troubled me. I was, after all, a hardened DC professional where rejection is the spice of life. But they kept coming…and kept coming…and kept coming. All forms, all virtually useless in terms of understanding what wasn’t working.
Finally, though, I got one that stopped me in my tracks. In so many words, it said the following:
Andrea, the premise of your story sounds fascinating, but your word count is way too high. A debut author’s manuscript in this genre should be between 80,000 – 100,000 words.
That, to put it mildly, was not welcome news. The idea of shaving nearly a third of my already thoroughly edited manuscript was a painful thought indeed. Even so – I kept seeing the same sentiments, the same advice, over and over again all over the Writing Community. Ah – publishing costs! Inflation! And so on and so forth.
Undeterred, I took the scissors to my manuscript one more time and cut it down to 125,000 – the absolute best I could do at the time. But no matter what I did to slice up QCL, the cold querying still seemed to be getting me nowhere. Whatever edits I did, the form rejections kept on coming.
Then Came The Pitches
It was around this time that I discovered Twitter Pitch events, and here I feel I must admit that my advice may go against the grain. Yes – many agented writers (perhaps the vast majority) got their agents from cold querying. That, however, was not my experience. For both of my manuscripts – QCL and Burning Girls – my success was closely tied to my efforts in Pitch contests.
By Spring 2022, I was a solid four months into querying QCL. About fifty queries had been punctuated by one partial request, but that request turned into a rejection fairly soon after. Then I stumbled upon two tantalizing events: MoodPitch, and LGBTNPit. The former, of course, is a graphics-based pitch event open to all members of the Writing Community; the latter is for queer or otherwise LGBTQIA+ authors.
I participated in both contests, working my hardest to make new Twitter friends, build lists to support other writers (and get their support back), engage, prepare and build relationships in the Twitterverse. And after a few likes here and there at each event, my querying luck began to change: by the end of July, almost one year after I finished my QCL manuscript, I had five full requests.
I couldn’t believe it – progress! Five different agents MIGHT consider representing me! It was a delightful, astounding feeling – so I should not have been surprised when it all faded away just as quickly.
By the autumn, every full request had come back with a “no thanks”. Only this time, I did get feedback – I just wasn’t sure what I could do with it. Structure, pacing, lack of focus in the story, too much going on; all valid points, but ones which I simply could not see how to resolve in a manuscript I could hardly bear to look at anymore.
So, my first run at querying went as follows:
Queries: 70+ (I lost count!)
PR/FR: 1/5
Passes: all the above
Thankfully, when the final rejection on my last full came in October, I had already begun drafting my next manuscript.
Querying, Take 2
One common piece of advice that I will endorse with ALL my heart is this: when you are querying a project, get to work on your next one. For me, this advice paid dividends as my mind kept on churning while the rejections were rolling in.
For my 2nd manuscript, I brought to bear all I had learned over 2022 about querying, the publishing industry and how to think strategically as a writer. I wrote myself a detailed outline with a clear goal: below 90,000 words or bust!
I prepared a tight, sharply contained narrative focusing on two 17th century women in love, bringing their skills and tenderness for one another to bear in a battle against institutions and society at large. No sprawling side plots, no complex backgrounds for peripheral characters, no historical info dumping, no grandiose explanation of the era’s zeitgeist: just a historical love story featuring an ace main character. Clear. Straightforward. To the point.
In a superb irony, I finished my Burning Girls draft at 89,000 words the week of Valentines Day 2023. Even so, I was terrified to query it. FAR more terrified than I had ever been to query QCL; failing once was one matter, but if I failed again having come so far and learned so much? What would I do then?
That spring, I soft-launched myself into querying with the first MoodPitch of the year, and then PitDark, to see how industry professionals would react to my new pitches and new manuscript. The result? Crickets. Almost no engagement, no agent likes – no indication that my Burning Girls were of particular interest to anyone.
So it was without much enthusiasm that I sprung into more querying, hoping against hope that this time would be different. After getting some free advice from other writers to polish up my query letter and synopsis (another invaluable resource in the Writing Community) I sent out my first tepid queries to a handful of agents who I knew were looking for historical fiction which centered queer and marginalized perspectives. Most of these were agents I had queried before, a few who had previously had my fulls who I already suspected would be up for a very similar text.
Remember that agent who told me that a debut must be under 100,000 words?
To my surprise, she became my very first full request for Burning Girls. Not long after, I got a partial from another agent who I happened to catch the day she reopened to queries (and who had previously had my QCL full as well). So far, so good – I had about a dozen queries out, and I was getting requests. I still anticipated a long, brutal road ahead throughout the summer – until something changed dramatically.
QueerPit
The previous year I had gotten a few of my full requests for QCL from my participation in LGBTNPit. Unfortunately, the organizers of that contest were unable to continue it for another year, and so 2023 seemed set to have no queer-specific pitch events at all. For someone writing queer-centric HistFic, that was a major bummer.
Social media is a blessing and a curse for authors…
Until a fabulous member of the Writing Community – Nicole Tota – proposed the idea of a pitch event to replace what had been LGBTNPit. A few DMs later, and I was officially on the #QueerPit contest board with the rest of the amazing QueerPit team. Our sole focus was preparing for a brand-new event set for August 1, 2023. We hit the pavement running before I think any of us even knew what exactly we were doing!
In a precious few weeks, we were racing toward our pre-contest hype events, seeing dozens of industry professionals accept our invitation and hundreds of writers prepping their pitches. I was both thrilled and terrified; as desperate as I was to see the event succeed for all of my queer writer friends who had supported me throughout the prior year, I was also so hopeful that my own pitches would get some traction.
In the end, I was successful beyond my wildest dreams: I ended QueerPit with six likes. Within the week, those likes had morphed into multiple full requests and my Burning Girls were flying out to agents all over the country (and even one across the pond to the UK). Somehow – my Burning Girls got noticed. I was in disbelief for the remainder of that wild week; it felt like something was changing, that this was different from the year before. The ground was shifting beneath my feet, and I wasn’t quite sure what was coming my way apart from certainty that it was coming fast.
The Calls
Finally, on the morning of my late August birthday, I got one hell of a present: an email I had waited two years for.
Thanks so much once again for sending over the full manuscript for The Burning Girls. I’ve very much enjoyed reading it.
I was wondering whether you might have availability to speak sometime this week or next.
A few moments later, with flawless timing, my little sis texted to wish me a happy birthday.
For their privacy, I won’t list out all the agents who offered representation here, but I will describe roughly what happened over the next few weeks:
I scheduled my call with Agent 1 for the following week after she sent her email. At that time, multiple other agents had just received my full manuscript as recently as a week prior. If my first call was indeed an offer of representation, I knew I would have to send a Notification of Offer to the others with a timeframe for their responses (more on this below).
After a wonderful chat with Agent 1, I put my bursting heart aside and plopped myself down in front of my laptop. Typing as fast as my fingers could move, I sent the following email to every agent who had a full or partial of my manuscript:
Good morning XYZ, I hope you are having a lovely end to the summer season.
I’m excited to share that I’ve just received an offer of representation for THE BURNING GIRLS from ABC. I have let her know that other agents are considering my manuscript and I would need time to make a decision regarding her offer.
I’d love to gauge your interest in my manuscript. Could you let me know your thoughts by Friday, September 15th?
Thank you so much for your consideration. I’m looking forward to hearing from you, and please let me know if you have any questions.
Very best,
Andrea
Yes – I did careful research on how to word and frame this email, and I made sure to give those reviewing my manuscript a couple extra days from the standard two weeks since my timeframe overlapped with a major US federal holiday. Agent 1 was very amenable to my timeframe, and encouraged me to take my time making the right decision for me (green flag, btw!)
At that point, I assumed that I would very quickly get a half dozen emails in the vein of “congrats but no thanks!”
Instead – I got a request for another call that Friday. Then another the following Wednesday, and then another on Thursday.
Not only had I found myself somehow with an agent who wanted to represent my novel, but I was about to be in a competing offers situation. The turnabout was not lost on me – how a year prior I had watched in defeat as the last of my QCL fulls turned into more broken hopes, only to find myself a year later with four agent offers of representation.[1]
So, for my Burning Girls, my querying stats were as follows:
Queries: 17
PR/FR: 1/6
Passes: 13
Offers: 4
The Choice
As I come to the crux of this story, I cannot over emphasize this point: any one of the agents who offered me representation could have been fabulous partners to me and I would have been proud to be a client to any of them. Each was thoughtful, gracious and conscientious on our respective calls, and each one encouraged me to make the best possible decision based on my goals. I would, without hesitation, recommend any of those agents to any of my querying friends.
Ultimately, I chose to accept an offer from Tricia Lawrence at Erin Murphy Literary Agency. There were many reasons why I selected her offer; in the end, I think all of those reasons boiled down to how profoundly Tricia seemed to understand my Burning Girls and, by extension, understand me. Speaking with her felt like chatting with a friend I had known for years, a sensation that is both striking and, in my experience, quite rare.
(For anyone interested to know my more detailed thoughts on managing a competing offers situation, and choosing among potential agents, please do feel free to DM me or reach out to me by other means.)
Astoundingly, I would never have queried Tricia had she not “liked” my QueerPit pitch despite the fact that she proved to be an ideal partner for me. Her agency, after all, primarily caters to the children’s and young adult age ranges, whereas I write in the adult/new adult categories. Had I simply read this information while doing querying research, I would have probably assumed that I was a poor fit for her list and never made the attempt. You never know who exactly it is you are really looking for – or who might be looking for you.
Recommendations
If you made it this far, you’d probably appreciate a synopsis of my key thoughts and recommendations for other querying writers. Again, let me re-emphasize all those caveats I listed up front. I will also add that I am by no stretch of the imagination a querying expert of any kind and frankly all I know I gleaned from the Writing Community at large. With all of that acknowledged, here are my takeaways based on my journey:
- When querying, start working on something new. This is old advice, but it proved crucial for me. Looking back on my first QCL manuscript after getting signed with my agent, I was able to see so clearly why it did not succeed in the trenches the first go around. The truth was that I learned so much from querying two different manuscripts and immersing myself in the Writing Community throughout both experiences. When I turned to writing something new, I was bringing a vast wealth of knowledge I simply didn’t have before; that knowledge informed every step of my new project. Every time you write, you are honing your craft and finding your voice.
Of course, I cannot guarantee that anyone’s second, fifth or tenth manuscript will get them agented, but I am fairly confident that with each manuscript we write, we deepen our skills and grow in our gifts. That growth can only serve us, however our writing paths develop before us.
- Take the feedback that is useful – and leave the rest! As an Enneagram Type 8, criticism is not something I particularly enjoy or seek out. But for a publishing professional, it’s the name of the game. I got plenty of feedback in my querying journey that I didn’t feel was especially useful or suggested that the agent in question didn’t quite understand my manuscript or my voice. Undoubtedly, there will be readers and reviewers who feel the same way!
But – sometimes feedback you don’t really want to entertain may be what you needed to hear. Because I had an agent early in my journey who was brutally honest about my QCL word count, I learned how to write strategically and edit with clarity, rigor and purpose. I am certain that played a significant role in securing my agent with the manuscript that I eventually did. Is that the case with all such feedback? No – of course not! But that’s where discernment and your own innate wisdom comes into play.
- Pitch Contests. Ok – this one is self-explanatory because I’ve discussed it ad nauseum already. I’ll just add here that pitch contests are great not only for getting agents’ eyes on your pitches (perhaps an agent you never would have considered before) but also to build real relationships with other writers. Follower counts don’t mean a whole lot; friends who genuinely care about you do, and they make all the difference when you are trudging through the querying trenches.
And again – cold querying can and does still work! And pitch contests may or may not prove to be helpful for you. All of this can be true simultaneously. Likewise, I am aware that with AI running rampant all over *certain platforms* pitch contests carry more risks than they used to and pitch contests themselves are in a period of transition.
But I found these contests to be important to my success in multiple ways. In the end, all four of my offers of representation came about from “likes” during QueerPit. Is it possible I would have gotten an offer at some point anyway? Perhaps, but I cannot prove or disprove a counterfactual, and I can only reflect on my own experiences and outcomes.
- Goodbye for now doesn’t mean goodbye forever. It was excruciating to “shelve” my QCL manuscript in the Fall of 2022, just a year after I had completed it. To give up on that manuscript, the one I had pored over and poured so much of my heart into, felt like a betrayal of the worst kind. A part of me, in fact, didn’t want to start the new manuscript I had already outlined and researched in preparation for its first draft. With the benefit of hindsight, moving on to a new project was obviously the right decision – but of course, I had no way of knowing that at the time.
As I’ve mentioned, I have already done another developmental edit on my QCL manuscript now that my Burning Girls are on submission. During that most recent edit, I could see as clear as daylight the problems that had somehow eluded the year-earlier version of me. But as hard as it was to set that manuscript aside, it felt like a homecoming to pick it back up again having signed with an agent at last.
In Conclusion…
Can y’all believe I struggle with high word counts? 😊
Since this post is edging toward 5000 words, I’ll summarize here as briefly as possible:
To querying writers: you matter. Your stories matter. Your stories are necessary, valuable and worthy, and I am rooting for you with all of my heart. My DMs and my email inbox are always open to talk, discuss, bounce ideas or offer any help I can. As I’ve noted, take all I’ve said here with a grain of salt; above all, you know yourself far better than I do. I wish you the absolute best of luck and all the querying success imaginable. And if that proves to not be your ultimate pathway, I wish you every success down whichever road you travel.
Go forth. Be amazing.
All my love,
Andrea
[1] For anyone who is curious – all of my offers of representation were a result of “likes” during QueerPit. While I did have one full request and one partial request from earlier querying, neither resulted in an offer of representation.