How I Got My Agent

Sometimes husbands are jerks. The "how I got my agent" post is a traditional rite-of-passage for any aspiring author, and I’m about eight months late with it.  When I first heard from my agent, I was a ranger at Yellowstone for the summer, focusing mainly on telling people when Old Faithful was going to erupt and trying not to be murdered by the most murder-y park in the NPS [citation needed].  Since then, I’ve moved back to South Carolina for the off-season, landed a publishing deal, illustrated my cover, drafted two companion books, and am anxiously awaiting my publication date of May 17.  But signing with an agent was my first huge step forward.  The first, and potentially most significant.

The story about how I got my agent is, perhaps, no more intriguing than anybody else’s, except there were probably more bison involved than most.  ​Here’s more or less how it went, written inexplicably in second-person.
​You write the thing.  This is a step that many people never make it past.  Writing a book is hard.  It’s great when it’s all a perfect story arc laid out in your head, but once you start putting it on paper, you realize that your characters aren’t who you thought they were and refuse to do what you thought they’d do.  They create side plots and auxiliary drama like they’re working at daggum summer camp.  But you struggle through it, and you end up with the ugliest, nastiest piece of writing ever known to humankind.You edit.  Edit and polish and revise and discard, until you have something halfway passable. Now you send that tottering, drooling fledgling novel out to your dearest friends who won’t abandon you even if you’ve written the worst book ever penned.  They take two months to get back to you. You sit rocking in the fetal position and desperately try to think of something else.They reply!  They have suggestions and edits.  They are generally optimistic, but you’re not sure if that’s because what you’ve written is actually good, or if they’re just being nice.Repeat steps 2, 3, and 4.  During this time, you also research agents and read eleven thousand blogs on writing a query letter.Finally, you decide your story is ready.  Maybe not fully mature, but at least past that gawky, pimply stage, enough to pass as a legitimate story.  Getting to this stage alone took me about eight months.Now you take that Pinterest board full of potential agents and narrow it down to a handful.  You write your query letter.  This is much, much harder than it seems, because you must somehow hook an agent with only 300 words, introducing your story, characters, and stakes without giving away your ending.  This alone can take weeks of revision and editing. You query agents.  This is an intensely long and emotionally taxing process.  Many people outside the literary world don’t realize most authors need to find an agent to be published.  Publishers, especially big, reputable ones, rarely take unsolicited manuscripts.  An agent is sort of the publisher’s front-line defense.  They sift through thousands of queried manuscripts, pulling out the tiny percentage that resonate with them (and they think they can sell).
But every agent is different, and every agency has different submission guidelines.  Some want your query letter and first ten pages.  Some want no pages at all.  Some want a synopsis.  Some want the first five chapters.  Some say they’ll respond within two weeks, others in eight, others never.  So you have to tailor everything exactly right, making sure you don’t make the grave mistake of misspelling an agent’s name in your salutation. You email out your queries.  See step 4.You get your first rejection!  It burns.  You weep, continue with step 4.You continue to get rejections!  They’re not as bad as the first, but they still hurt.You hear back from about half the agents you queried, and they’re all rejections.  You wait out the remaining waiting period with no word from the others.You wipe your nose.  You pick yourself up.  Maybe one or two agents took pity and gave you a little bit of feedback.  You follow their advice and the additional insights you’ve gained over the last eight weeks of heartbreak.  You revise some more until your manuscript is better than it was.You query again.  Repeat steps 10-15 for an indeterminate amount of time.  Perhaps it will be all eternity, perhaps it will just be one more round.  Some people get hundreds of rejections before they find the right agent (or before their manuscript is ready for publishing). 
I was one of the lucky ones.  Halfway through my second round of queries, I had two agents request my manuscript.  Now, this is still a preliminary stage.  They could very well get part way into your novel and decide it’s not for them.  In fact, that’s exactly what happened with one agent.  But then…You get THE EMAIL.  The email from the agent saying she loved your work.  That she wants to talk about representing you. You run around screaming like a madwoman (probably at work, since it’s during working hours).  You text/call all your friends and family.  You maybe do something slightly illegal in your giddy state, like doing a victory dance on the cone of Old Faithful (okay, so all I did was send personal emails from a government computer, but let’s face it—we all did that anyway, since it was 45 minutes to the nearest wifi signal.  UP YOURS, NSA). You calm yourself down, remind yourself that nobody’s said yes yet, that you still have to talk on the phone.  You politely email back saying you’re thrilled she’s interested in your work.  You set up a time to talk.There’s a goddAMN BISON JAM when you try to bike home from work, leading you, in full ranger uniform, to stand shouting at this stupid tankbeast to get its idiot bulk off the crosswalk so you can get home to your family!!!!! All the Europeans take pictures of the park ranger losing her mind in front of said bison.Bison moves on in its own time; you get home without being gored.You get THE CALL.  The agent wants to know a little bit more about you, what your plans are for this book and the next.  Your main goal is to remain coherent.  You ask for her clients’ contact info so you can get her references.You talk to her clients.  They recommend her a thousand times over.You contact the other agents you’ve queried.  You tell them you’re signing with another agent and try not to do the Wicked Witch cackle while you type those words.And so, seven months and fifteen rejections into the querying process, I signed with Valerie Noble of Donaghy Literary Group.  She has since navigated me into a two-book deal with Harper Voyager, an imprint of HarperCollins.  She’s strengthened my storytelling and talked me away from multiple proverbial cliffs.  I'm so grateful to her for her expertise, her encouragement, and her willingness to bear the brunt of my literary drama.

To everyone still in the grips of querying—there’s no advice I can give you that you haven’t already read a hundred times over.  Keep at it.  Keep writing.  Make a point of connecting with people going through the same journey.  Vent (but not unprofessionally).  Cry (long and hard).  Rejoice (longer and harder).
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And stay the hell away from bison, because seriously, all they want is to see you suffer.   Twatbags.