How I Got My Agent

Or: How I Hit My Rejection Target

A few years ago, in conversation with a colleague who was at that time preparing for the launch of his second novel I made some vague sounds about gee I had always dreamed of being a writer myself. Instead of rolling his eyes at me, he took me more seriously than I took myself. He asked me: Did I just want to write for my own sake? Or did I want to get my work published by a traditional publisher. “Yes, that is what I want.”

It was only hearing myself say it out loud that made me realise for the first time that it was true.

“Then you’ll need to get yourself an agent,” he told me.

The Writing Process

I had his advice in my mind when I finally got to the point where I was ready to start working on this book, a story that I had been telling myself in my head for more than a decade.

It was right after the worst of the Covid lockdowns and something about having been locked up at home for nearly two years had given me a manic energy. I was haunting bookshops (I had missed bookshops so much), but unusually for me I kept walking away without buying anything. I was in the mood for something speculative so I would excitedly flip through every book in the Sci Fi Fantasy section before putting them all back on the shelf. None of them were the book I wanted to read. I wanted something that was infused with myth and fae lushness, but contemporary, not historical. Something that was set in another world, but connected to ours. Something lighthearted, maybe even funny, but that would also touch on some of the real life terrors that haunted me.

I dug out a file that I had stored away on an obsolete laptop, an abandoned first chapter of a story where an American political pollster becomes the new human lover of Titania, Queen of Faery, and convinces her to hold an election. That was the book I wanted to read, so I decided I needed to go ahead and write it.

But I realised that I would need external structure and support if I was going to really do this thing, so I applied for and was accepted onto the Faber Academy How to Write a Novel course. A year later, I had a decent first draft and eight months after that I felt ready to start testing the waters with agents.

I should note at this point that because I am a weirdly obsessive person I had been building a database of agents for all of the time I was writing the book, and I had already learned a lot about the querying process and which agents and agencies seemed like a big deal.

Querying Phase One

I had a whole plan for how I was going to go about this. You see, I was clear eyed about the reasons I hadn’t managed to complete any of the books I’d tried before this one, or to take myself seriously as an author. I’d quit too early. I always quit too early. I had a mental image of myself at someone who quits too soon. I didn’t want that to happen this time, and I was very aware that I’d chosen to do something that was stupidly hard. Like, ridiculously hard. It had always been hard, and if all the publishing chatter was to be believed getting an agent was harder now than it had ever been. The whole industry was slower, less responsive and more competitive than ever before. This did not sound like an ideal fit for a recovering quit-a-holic. So I decided to reframe the whole enterprise around embracing rejection. Seeking it out. Forcing myself to put myself out there often enough that I could get rejected a LOT. Like exposing yourself to an allergen in order to build up a tolerance.

I set myself the goal of receiving at lead 50 outright rejections from agents. I’d read that lots of people weren’t finding their champion before they’d queried upwards of 100 agents. I figured if I were rejected by 50 people at least I would know I’d given my story a fair shot.

But I did want to sense check my query package first. To make sure it was in good shape. So I booked an Agent 1 to 1 session with the fabulous people at I Am In Print. The agent in question sounded like a great fit - a relatively new agent but with a good sales record and who specialised in SFF. I sent him my stuff a week ahead so he could read it, then dialed in to the fifteen minute zoom call with my adrenaline skyrocketing.

And he… loved it? Those were his first words, actually. “I loved this!” We had a great conversation where I felt like we got each other and at the end he asked me for the full manuscript.

WHAT WAS EVEN HAPPENING?

I took about a month to make the changes he suggested and get the ending of the book to a place where I was happier with it (I struggled with the ending throughout this story, and kept rewriting it over and over, so at any given point in this story just assume I was also rewriting the ending. Because I pretty much always was) and then I sent it over to him - let’s call him AGENT 1.

Meanwhile, I had signed myself up for a SFF workshop that included agent-tutors who would give us feedback on our query letters, synopses and pitches. At the end of that workshop, the agent tutor who had read first few chapters got back in touch and asked if she could read my full. WHAT! So I sent it over and now AGENT 2 is in play.

Feeling pretty good about myself at this point, I decide I’m ready to start the process of cold querying agents off my list. So I sent out an initial batch of 12 and braced myself for the expected rejections.

The very next day, a full request came through from AGENT 3.

Now perhaps you are thinking, “This is going to be a boring and annoying story of an author achieving quick success without struggle.” Well, stay tuned because as it turned out that was… not my story.

But at this point, I’d got myself into a head space of thinking maybe that was exactly what would happen. Maybe I would be the exception! Maybe people would fight for my book and I would become the Voice of the Age and the publishing world would fall at my feet. Drunk with overconfidence, I blasted my query out to a dozen more of the dream agents I had been originally planned to hold back from querying until I was sure my query was polished. What was the point of waiting? People were going to SNAP this book up and this big shot agents deserved the chance to get on board.

In the days that followed, the hangover hit hard. The rejections. So many rejections. So many form rejections.

AGENT 3 passed with a brief note that she’d found the book entertaining but she wouldn’t know how to sell it.

AGENT 2 responded with a… rejection? Or an R&R? It was hard to tell exactly. She said the book needed work, she wasn’t sure the subject matter was what editors were looking for right now (did anyone really want to read about politics given grimness of the world?) but she offered me a phone call and spent a solid hour talking me through her concerns with the book, brainstorming ideas with me, and asking me about my idea for the next book, which she loved. Finally, I just came right out and asked her, given that she didn’t think the book was for her, “Why are we having this call?”

She told me that it was because I was “so close.” I’ll take that! Close is good.

But the rejections were coming thick and fast. I got some robust feedback from a much trusted beta reader from my Faber course who loved the book, but had some smart suggestions for improvement that would mean big changes. AGENT 1 seemed to have ghosted me.

And by January I decided to pause on querying while I worked through all the feedback I’d had. If I was “so close” then surely it was worth the work to get it right.

So I went back to the grindstone. This was the hardest editing phase I’d done, because I was unpicking things that I had been happy with to make them better. I was throwing out things I loved to replace them with more story-forward things that I had to invent from scratch. And I rewrote my ending over and over again.

Querying Phase Two

By around March/April I was starting to emerge from my Winter of Edits, sending out a few queries here and there, building up to a stream and finally a flood. Around that time I went to Gollanz Fest, a wonderful one-day festival for SFF writers and fans hosted by the legendary publisher. And as part of my ticket I had the chance to meet with some industry pros. I had an amazing one to one with a big name editor (seriously, this is someone who works at an imprint you probably read and on authors whose names you will know) and he was wonderful. “I love this,” he said. We had just the best chat and at the end of it he actually gave me his email address and offered to refer me to some agents who might be a good fit.

WHAAAT!

I bumped into AGENT 1 there and he apologised sincerely for not responding sooner and assured me he was still interested. I told him I’d done a revision since we spoke. “Oh, send it over I’ll take a look.”

Not long after all that I got another full request from AGENT 4, a fantastic guy who shared my love for Fae stories and seemed like a great fit. Wow!

Again, I thought “It’s all happening now!”

And then the Great Silence began.

The Great Silence

The editor did not respond to my follow up email. AGENT 1 continued to ghost me.

AGENT 4 responded after a couple weeks with a form rejection.

To make matters worse, I was hearing NOTHING from the other agents I was querying. I started sending out more and more queries, just in hopes of getting at least a rejection. I did get some of those. But mostly there was deathly silence. For months.

I ran some numbers and decided that I was getting a better hit rate on the book before I’d done my revisions. Had I somehow made it worse with my months of painful work?

Eventually, I got so frantic that I paid for another Agent 1 to 1 session and that agent… did not love my book. She hated the voice of one of my two POV characters - the Fae one, whose voice is deliberately a bit formal and archaic, but whose voice I LOVED. Loved loved loved. It was that voice that made me love writing the book.

I figured I needed a second opinion so I found myself an agent who was also available for editorial services and I paid him to give me honest feedback on my first 8K words and my query package. (I should note here that this person quite rightly made very clear to me that he could not represent me as an agent if I was an editing client of his - fellow writers, you should never pay for an agent to read your work as an agent.)

When his feedback came, he had some good thoughts on how to improve the query and synopsis. He loved my human character and his voice. But he also HATED the voice of my fae character. “You’ll probably have to change that if you want to get published.”

Shit. Shit shit shit.

I… wasn’t going to do that. I just couldn’t. Didn’t want to. Didn’t really even want to put my name to any version of that book without Adiana’s voice.

But if it couldn’t be published with that voice in it… maybe this just wasn’t a publishable book. Maybe I had finally arrived at the moment when this reformed quitter actually needed to just… quit.

The Twist in the Tale

I was in the Lake District on holiday with my husband and daughter when I checked my email late at night and there it was. An email from the Big Name editor I’d met at Gollancz Fest, apologising profusely and explaining that my email had gone into his spam filter. I had not forgotten his promise and send me a list of 5 agents who he thought might be a great fit for my book. He was happy for me to use his name as a referral and though he’d be off work for a little while, he was happy to “help you more when I get back.” What does that even mean? I was stupidly, tearily overwhelmed. Sometimes people are so nice!

A few weeks later I sent off the queries to those agents, mentioning the Editor’s Big Name. By 10AM the next morning I had an email in my inbox from one of them loved the Editor’s taste and she was so glad he had thought of her. From what she could see his recommendation was “spot on” because she loved my pages and could she see the full, please?

I sent it off in a state of bewildered excitement.

And another thing happened, that made me rethink my instinct to quit now. Having entered a bunch of awards as part of my “train yourself to cope with rejection” programme, the shortlist was posted for one of them - the I Am Writing Awards, hosted by the same wonderful people from the I Am In Print team. And… my book was on it.

I was… shorlisted for a novel prize!

SERIOUSLY WHAT IS HAPPENING!?

I wasn’t a winner in the end, but the judge for that category, a legendary agent, did reach out to me to ask if he could read my full. So of course, I sent it off to AGENT 5.

I nudged AGENT 4 to let her know that I’d been shortlisted and she replied to say that she’d really been enjoying the book. It was soooo close. But she thought it needed a bit of work to flesh out the relationships. Would I be willing to take another pass at revising it with that in mind?

So I buckled in for yet another round of edits.

That same week, I noticed that some of those old queries I’d had no response from back in March had now officially gone “stale” and it was time to mark them as “Closed No Reply”. But I emailed a round of polite nudges just to give them one last chance before closing them out, and the next day AGENT 6 replied to say that he was grateful for the nudge and the sample pages were “Delightful”. Could I send over the full.

I didn’t want to sent him a version that didn’t reflect what I thought was very on-point feedback from AGENT 4, so I went to work on her suggested edits with lightning speed and I was able to send a revised version out just a few days later.

Two days after that, I was on a bus heading home. Picture a London double-decker - it was one of those. And I was on the top deck just randomly checking my email when I saw that I had a response from AGENT 6. That was fast.

I opened it. Scanned it. He loved the book. It’s subject matter is so timely. The Fae world has “just the right touch of thorn tipped whimsy”. I scrolled down for the “however.” Scrolled to find the, “though there’s so much to admire here…”

But there was none. It was just “can we get on a call to discuss possible next steps?”

The next day I posted this tweet:

So we had The Call. And he told me in the first 30 seconds of our conversation that he would love to represent me. He loves the politics in the book. He loves the voices. He doesn’t think I’m “so close” - he thinks I’m there. And we talked about his editorial ideas, and they made sense to me and they sound like things I can totally do. And we talked about the next book I am working on and he loves that too.

We agree a three week deadline for me to make the decision, so I can reach out to all the other agents. And in those three weeks I had great conversations with the agents who already had my fulls out, and I got new requests from AGENTS 7 and 8 who were interested in taking a look before the deadline.

I had been so nervous on our call that I had forgotten to ask him several of the questions I had carefully written down on my notes, so I had to keep emailing him to ask - even though I knew he was travelling at the time. But he responded within a few hours every time with thorough and professional answers. I called his existing authors, who were effusive and enthusiastic about him as a knowledgeable and ethical partner and all around good egg.

One by one, all the other agents wound up stepping away with what I truly believe were sincere good wishes and encouragement.

And on the night before the deadline, I sent AGENT 6 an email with the subject header “Yes, Please!”

My new agent is Eric Showers, of Howard Morhaim Literary agency in New York. And I am beyond excited to work with him.

On the day I received my offer, I checked my query stats and can confirm that by that point I had received exactly 49 agent rejections, just one short of my rejection target.

My final stats:

Total Queries Sent: 77

Full Or Partial Requests Received: 12

Query Rejections: 54

And AGENT 1 never did get back to me.