Let's talk about how I have an agent!!!

It’s Pride March day in NYC 🏳️‍🌈

And I’m going to my first ever Pride event! Which is overwhelming, because it’s a parade in the middle of summer and I’m bad at standing upright, but!!! I’m also terribly excited. I have a whole outfit created specifically for the purposes of celebrating Pride. If you’re interested in seeing photos, I’ll be posting on Instagram so, you know, check that out!

In this edition of the newsletter, you’ll find:

1. From the heart: just a lot of feels about being agented

2. From the shelf: a book I’ve loved lately

3. From the page: some more technical aspects of the querying journey

Hope you enjoy!

From the heart 💗

I hardly know where to start. If you’re interested only in, like, how querying went and some numbers, scroll on down. This is from the heart, and I’m about to bare my soul.

The first time I sent a query, it was Christmas break, 2014. I was a senior in college, a fresh-faced 21, and I’d just finished revising my first-ever completed novel, Red Rain Boots.1 I got a partial request a few months later, around Spring Break time. I know this because I have a visceral place-memory of sharing this news with my school counselor, and how we celebrated because, “in a few weeks you could have an agent!”

My life was on the brink of change, I just knew it.

Eight years came and went. My life did change, in many ways: I moved to New York, dropped out of my first dream job’s grad school, got my first adult jobs, came out as bisexual, left the church, went back to grad school. I made and lost friends. I fell in and out of love with people who never returend my feelings. Seasons passed.

And still I wrote. I queried three other books, two impulsively and wholly unsuccessfully (poor Saving Grace2 and Claudia’s Tale3 both netted me a whopping zero requests), one that I’d worked on for four years and thought was sure to be my debut, my grand entrance into the world of published authors4.

Each time I entered the trenches with high hopes. Each time I dragged myself out of them a few months later, bedraggled and heartbroken. I got two partial requests for Allie Mae, and that was it.

Years of work, improving my craft, striving, and I had nothing to show for it.

In mid-to-late 2021, I really thought I’d reached the end of my ability to strive. I felt broken. I poured so much of my heart into Allie Mae, and it just…didn’t go anywhere5. I thought I’d put out my best, and it was turned down.

Then, in September 2021, I decided to apply to VCFA, almost on a whim. On September 22, 2021, I got a phone call from the program director that made me sob tears of joy and literally changed my life: I was in. Things were looking up.

Then I didn’t get into Pitch Wars. And I felt broken again.

In November 2021, I woke up from a dream with the seeds of an idea for the boarding school book I’d long wanted to write: two girls, spending late nights in a secluded bathroom with heated floors, falling in love. A phone call with my good friend Auriane later, I had the secret GSA plot. I spent December meticulously plotting out the story, and when I started my first semester in January, I dove into drafting.

I wrote the first draft in a fever dream of a first semester. I spent the next eight months revising, while juggling work and coursework and friends, and on February 25th, 2023, I sent my first query.

Three months later, I got The Email That Changed It All.

Words are insufficient to describe the emotions that I’ve had over the past month. It’s head-spinning, because I went from constant stress and anxiety and knowing that my life could change in an instant with just one email, to actually…experiencing that life-change. I walked up and down my kitchen/living room on the phone with my friend Christine, muttering “this is fine I’m fine this is fine,” and then Jené got home and we jumped up and down and I just…felt things.

Truthfully, signing with an agent is the first step of many. If publishing is a ladder, I have just made it from the ground onto the first rung. There are hopefully hundreds of rungs for me to continue to climb. But, having been on the ground, trying to get onto the first rung, for 8.5 years? This is fucking huge.

I’m gobsmacked. I’m delighted. I’m living my dream, and it is glorious.

Going forward, I also want to start giving back, in the sense of lending a hand to other authors on the ground floor wanting to get on the ladder6. So if you have any questions about querying, or want someone to look over your query or pages, or just need advice or something…please hit me up. I’d love to help if I can!

From the shelf 📚

For my final packet of the semester I read, upon my advisor’s recommendation, Inheritance: A Visual Poem by Elizabeth Acevedo. I’ve previously read two of Acevedo’s YA verse novels, and am obsessed with the way she uses language to craft beautiful stories. This is a quick read, illustrated by Andrea Pippins, that definitely reads like the spoken word piece it originally was.

I think it’s a good read whether you’re someone whose natural hair has traditionally been frowned upon or someone whose natural hair is considered the default, and acceptable. Because there’s so much love in this book for natural hair for people of color, and I think that can be encouraging and also eye-opening.

This is worth the (quick) read because of its beautiful language and beautiful message. And then check out the rest of Acevedo’s backlist!

From the page ✍️

Let’s talk numbers & dates, shall we?

• First query date: February 25, 2023

• First full request: February 28, 2023

• Total full requests before offer: 6

• Total partial requests before offer: 2

• Total full requests after offer: 5

• Total queries sent: 82

  • Queries that got no response: 22

  • Query rejections: 47

  • Partial rejections: 1

  • Full rejections: 11

  • Offers: 1

• Date of offer: May 30, 2023

• Date of offer acceptance: June 13, 2023

• Date contract signed: June 14, 2023

Three months, give or take, feels long but in today’s querying world, it’s not actually that bad. I’m incredibly lucky in this regard. I got requests from some incredible agents, and was lucky enough to have them read my work.

Most of my full rejections were complimentary, with agents either giving no feedback or saying things like, “I love the voice,” calling my story “timely,” and using words like “adore” to describe my characters and “talented” to describe me as a writer. Yet they stepped aside, because they either didn’t fall madly enough in love with the project, or they found the writing style didn’t quite fit their list, or something ephemeral and unable to be put into words wasn’t quite clicking.

Which is all to say, getting a pass on a full says very little about the writer, the quality of the work, and its overall marketability. I know, that’s hard to believe until you’re on the other side. But I promise it’s true. Some of the passes that I got wound up screenshotted and in my “nice things” folder, for me to look back on when I’m crushed by impostor syndrome, they were that encouraging.

After I had my offer phone call with Eric7, I sent nudges to 40 agents, ones who either had my full, partial, or query, and alerted them to the offer and to the fact that I had a June 13 deadline. What followed was a whirlwind of responses, both passes and requests, and then two weeks of counting down the remaining fulls I had out.

It was chaotic, and emotional, and rollercoaster-like. Even with an offer in hand, the first few full rejections stung. Turns out, one piece of outside validation doesn’t mean you immediately divest yourself of impostor syndrome!

Which actually ties in really well to my next point, which is that I received one offer for this book, and only one offer. Of course, Eric is, like, a dream agent8 and I didn’t need other offers because I was so incredibly happy with this one. But there was a moment of feeling, like…bad about myself? A moment where I thought, well, surely this was just a fluke! Maybe he felt bad for me, or like he ought to offer to rep me because we’ve been friendly on the Internet for a few years. You know, that totally normal thing that busy agents do where they offer to work with someone for their entire authorly career out of obligation9.

And the point of sharing this is because I know we’re so used to seeing agent-success stories where the author got multiple offers, and I just want to share a story of that not happening, and say that that can be good, too! I didn’t have to reject anyone, I didn’t have to agonize over a difficult choice, and I still get to work with an incredible agent who loves my book — win/win, in the end!

And that’s a wrap on my querying newsletter! If you have any questions or want me to talk about anything else (or anything in more detail!) please do leave a comment or reply to this email and I’ll be happy to tackle those questions in a future letter :)