Happy Times: How I Met My Agent

So last night it was pizza and beer all the way, because that’s how I roll when I really have something to celebrate.

This is me, doing my best Marilyn Monroe imitation. (Okay, yeah, it’s really Marilyn. Shut up. I’m celebrating.)

Yesterday, after a fairly extended process (which I will detail here because my friend Sandy pointed out that other writers might learn from my experience) I signed a contract with Margaret Bail from Inklings Literary Agency.

And this is what it looked like when I made the announcement…

Last night was fun, for sure. It’s a milestone in what I hope will be a long and productive writing career. And this particular step started about eighteen months ago. I read about Margaret in a New Literary Agent Alert column in Writer’s Digest back in January of 2013. At the time, I was just finishing edits for my urban fantasy novel Hell…The Story (currently an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award quarterfinalist – jump HERE for a free sample download) so I sent her a query. She got right back to me, asking for the full.

Yay!

It took a little while for her to read and evaluate my manuscript, and when she did, I got one of those mixed blessing emails. She liked the book but saw problems with it, so wasn’t able to offer me representation at that point. However (and this is huge) her email went into some detail regarding her concerns, giving me a ton of feedback that I was able to use for the rewrite.

In the meantime, I’d started a new project, King Stud. (Jump HERE for a Six Sentence Sunday blog post from April ’13 – this is still one of my favorite bits in the story.) Last September, the novel was just about ready to go, so I came up with a pitch for a #pitmad twitter pitch party. I will confess that I kept an eye on the stream, and when I saw Margaret lurking, I sent out my pitch.

I had three agents ‘favorite’ my tweet. One requested a partial, but a few weeks later sent me a nice note declining to read more. One requested partial and real quickly got back to me with an offer of representation.

Wow!

The third agent to ‘favorite’ my tweet was Margaret (who, hello, was the one I was after in the first place). She read the partial then requested the full. When the other agent offered, I let Margaret know, and she was able to move King Stud up to the top of her TBR pile. I had a telephone conversation with the other agent, and it didn’t feel like the right fit, so after taking a deep, deep breath and saying a couple Hail Marys, I declined the offer. Even though I didn’t yet have anything concrete from Margaret, I knew she liked my work and felt like we had the beginnings of a relationship, so I was willing to wait for her decision.

And…

Again with the mixed-blessing email, although this time she framed it as, “if you can fix X, Y, & Z, we’ll be discussing a contract.”

One of the hardest things I’ve ever done was sit back down at the laptop and open up King Stud for another major overhaul.

I promised her I’d get the revision back to her in two months. It took me four – partly because the project turned into semi-major surgery, and partly because I needed a couple mental health breaks which took the form of a pair of novellas, The Clockwork Monk and Aqua Follies. That said, after I finally emailed her the revised version it only took her a week to get back to me. That email was different from the others. For one thing, it was much shorter:

Are you available for a phone call?

Yesterday afternoon we signed the contract, and now we’ll be moving forward on King Stud. There are still some things I need to tweak, but I’m terribly excited about the future.

So, why Margaret? She’s smart, she’s visible (check out #tenqueries on twitter where she’s a frequent contributor),  she’s responsive and seems fairly transparent via email. I felt good about our phone conversation, and she was pretty enthusiastic about my ideas for upcoming work. Most importantly, we have some history, which I think will help our future working relationship.

Now, what have I learned through this process? First of all, it’s a process. Things take time, and you need to apply a happy mix of determination and oblivion to keep going when people don’t pick up what you’re laying down. (I didn’t mention the 20-some other agents I queried between the two projects, some of whom requested more but all of whom ultimately turned me down.) And while it’s difficult not to compare yourself to other writers, try to remember their story is different from yours.

I imagine I’ll be reminding myself of the lessons in that last paragraph many times in the future, but for today, I’m still partying.

Peace,

Liv

One last YAY for the road!