How I Got My Agent

Or: musings on unicorns.

*Disclaimer: this is not the typical experience in the querying trenches. It definitely wasn’t mine the first time around, either! It’s not my intention to brag unkindly or make anyone feel bad or self-conscious about themselves, their work, or their querying journey. I always enjoy reading HIGMA posts, so I’m sharing mine!*

All that background stuff

As mentioned above, this book wasn’t my first time in the trenches! I’ve always loved writing, since I was a little kid (my mother happily brags about still having the first story I wrote saved), but I got back into it as an adult during the pandemic, when I got sent home after my university closed for lockdown in my freshman year.

I wrote a couple, shall we say, “practice books” (none of which will hopefully ever see the light of day, including a dystopian novel that was thinly veiled Hunger Games fanfiction—a rite of passage, dare I say) without thinking much about what publishing was, let alone querying or agents. That came in the summer of 2023, when I discovered the online writing, querying, and publishing community.

Armed with my new knowledge, I polished up the current draft I was working with, revised it, and sent it to beta readers. HEADLINER, was a Killing Eve-esque darkly comic sapphic rival spy romance-thriller.

Querying, 1.0

I sent out my first queries in November 2023. It was fairly well received, I even got some requests from my first batch, which was encouraging! But most of my rejections over the seven months I queried it came back with similar responses:

“I enjoy the voice, your writing is engaging, and the premise is fun, but I don’t see a place in the market for this right now.”

Spies, apparently, are rather unmarketable.

While I was querying that, I started brainstorming a few other projects. I’d taken a film class about monsters and myths in university, and one of the movies we studied was Suspiria, specifically the 2018 version, and a few scenes really stuck with me. I’d always been fascinated with dance and ballet, consuming every tv show, movie and book under the sun with a dancer main character.

And slowly—very slowly, brainstorming the direction I wanted this project to go took months to even get to a cohesive outline—threads pulled together. In March 2024, I started drafting what was then known as balletwip, an adult speculative horror novel.

Unfortunately, Headliner was dying in the trenches. I still had a couple queries and one full request out, but by the early summer of 2024, I’d made my peace with it. It stung, but I was actually way more excited for balletwip.

Meanwhile

Over the summer, I introduced balletwip on Twitter with a few casual moodboards and trends, but it made its official pitch event debut in April’s #PitLight.

It started collecting some interest among agents and editors, and while I obviously wasn’t ready to send anything off yet, I kept track of all the names who asked to see it.

By August I had a very, very rough draft that clocked in at 86k.

I lovingly called balletwip the book of 3000 rewrites because good grief, was it ever a pain to revise. My second draft came to 91k, and I sent it to an alpha reader on September 3. (She finished it in 6 hours, because she’s insane and I love her.) I finished my third draft in December, complete at 96k, and sent it out to betas shortly after!

(I’m planning on doing a more in-depth post about the editing process for this project, so hang on for that!)

While beta readers had it, I pulled together my query package, after critiquing it with a couple friends.

Editing balletwip had been such a nightmare I no longer knew if it was any good. In fact, I was pretty sure it was borderline-incomprehensible around the middle.

Imagine my surprise when beta readers told me it was essentially query-ready—save for a multitude of typos. So I made some minor tweaks, and absolutely ready to crash and burn, I sent my first queries on January 13th.

Querying, 2.0

Or, as I called it, the start of my annoying era.

My first batch of queries went mostly to agents who had expressed interest in the project, to test that my query package worked. As I mentioned, I’d pitched this project a couple times, and I’d come out with agent and editor interest. I also made an agent guide to announce that I #AmQuerying, and as that circulated, a few agents requested to see my query.

I’d also had a couple agents who passed on my last project ask to see anything else I ended up querying, and I sent it their way as well, noting that request in my opening.

Within 2 days, I had 8 full requests. And that was my cue to send queries out widely, to pretty much every dream agent on my list.

(And to be clear, for full transparency, rejections were rolling in too, on queries and submissions!)

The call…s

Eight days after sending my first queries, I woke up to a request for a call and I did all the appropriate screaming crying throwing up with my writing group. 8 days in the trenches was unicorn territory all on its own, and I was thrilled. My hands didn’t stop shaking all day. And then that evening, I put a frozen pizza in the oven and checked my email again.

And I burned my pizza because I was too busy freaking out with my writing group again, because I had a second call request.

I obviously hadn’t nudged any agents yet since I hadn’t had The Call yet. Totally independent of each other, I got two call requests on the same day. That was a pretty accurate sign of how my vague era was going to play out.

I scheduled both my calls on the same Friday afternoon, giving myself a few days in between to send out any (read: a LOT of) last minute queries, and I was absolutely an anxious wreck. I was paranoid that both were for some kind of elaborate R&R. But I didn’t need to worry. Both agents were absolutely fantastic, so easy to talk to and so genuinely enthusiastic about my book, and yes, both were offers of representation. I let the second agent who called know I had an offer, as it was a bit of a funny situation, two offers coming in on the same day. She said “I’m not surprised, though. And you’re going to get more.”

She was right.

I sent out my offer of representation notifications on a Friday afternoon; advised by a friend, I made sure to mention that I had two offers of rep already. And the next couple weeks (17 days, to be exact, based on how my schedule worked out, but make sure to take AT LEAST 2 weeks) were an absolute whirlwind, start to very finish.

Full requests, congratulations, and step-asides started pouring in immediately. Some asked who the offering agents were, and I was comfortable saying who.

Within four hours, I had a third call scheduled. By the time the 17 days were up, I’d had 12 offers of representation, with some calls literally on Sunday night, less than 24 hours before my deadline.

The Decision

I’d done a lot of research before I even started querying. I made my list while beta readers had the book, considering sales, MSWL, and overall reputation of the agent and their agency. I did not query any agents I would not have been absolutely happy to accept representation from. Which meant, oh shit, how do I choose between all these agents I’d be absolutely happy to accept representation from?

1. Vision for edits. I’m pretty comfortable killing my darlings! But, this book, in a way different from any other I’ve written or will go on to write, is my baby. My MC Eden is especially dear to my heart because so much of her is pulled directly from myself, even beyond her disability. I didn’t want to change much about this story, especially not much about Eden. I was lucky enough that not many agents wanted to make significant changes, but it was definitely a deciding factor for me. In the same vein, what was their plan for submission? Timeline for when they thought we would get out?

2. Sales. Were they selling to good imprints, Big 5s? Publisher’s Marketplace was a priceless resources here. I’d absolutely recommend purchasing a month’s subscription for while you’re deciding. Were they able to negotiate good deals, and how did their clients’ books do after they were published? If they were new, what was their mentorship and agency sales like? What was their presence like at book fairs and the like?

3. Personal connection, of course! I didn’t want to work with an agent that made me feel nervous or awkward all the time!

What else did I want, when it came to the calls?

1. Editorial agent, hands-on at various stages.

2. But also an agent who didn’t want to change much about Eden, as I mentioned above, and I wanted to feel like they really got the heart of the book.

3. Did they represent all the genres I’m interested in, as someone who dabbles in a bit of everything?

Rachel Neely was my fifth call. I already had a good impression in my mind, but I could tell from her first email to set up a call that Rachel understood my story, understood Eden, and knew exactly what she wanted to do with it. We scheduled a call, working around some classic Canadian Winter Weather Drama, and talked about my book, the publishing industry at large, and my qualms about the Until Dawn film adaptation on my longest call by far.

My decision came down to equal parts logic (sales record, reputation, all those details) and gut instinct, and on February 10th, I was very happy to sign with Rachel and Mushens!

Yes, there’s a typo. Yes, it haunts me. No, I don’t want to talk about it.

Musings on unicornism

I don’t think there’s a magical recipe to getting a billion offers right away. There’s no formula. But I do know some things that influenced my querying journey.

• The market. Horror is HUGE right now, specifically female-led horror, and with the minor rise of “horror romance”, I was very well-positioned. I had no idea the market was going to swing like this as I drafted, but it really helped, and it’s a bit ironic when considering my last book died in the trenches because of unmarketability.

• It’s commercial—apparently. I didn’t consider where it fell on the commercial scale at all as I was writing, but that was the consensus among agents, which was interesting to hear!

• I didn’t query until I was 10000% ready, a lesson learned from last time in the trenches.

• I was fortunate enough to receive some editor interest in this project, including from Big 5 imprints, and including that at the end of my metadata paragraph was eye-catching.

• I included a very brief pitch for my current draft project in my bio, also mentioning that it had received editor interest. Multiple offering agents asked to see an expanded pitch and expressed that they thought it was very well positioned as a follow-up (spoiler: and it eventually went on to be pitched and bought as the second book in a 2-book deal).

• I have a really, really awesome group of really, really talented, lovely, kind friends. They supported me through drafting and stress, they critiqued the book and the query package, and they celebrated with me. This book genuinely would not have been half as good without them and I probably would’ve had three breakdowns instead of revising it. Having a genuine support system is crucial, whatever that looks like for you.

I also did something controversial that might not have helped: I start the novel with my main character waking up.

Cue gasps of shock and horror. I know, the golden rule. But it’s not the hook of the scene and definitely not what the scene is about. The “waking up” is moved on from very quickly.

Why she’s waking up and what she’s waking up for are critical to her character, and are used to immediately introduce 1) what she wants and 2) the stakes if she doesn’t get it.

Still, one agent even said “this is one of the most uninteresting starts to a book” about my first scene… after I’d already gotten 10 offers of representation with this opening. So, luckily enough, that didn’t seem to be a problem!

Stats

Queries sent: 49

Partial requests: 2 (both pre-offer)

Full requests: 25 (+1 partial to full; 13 pre-offer, 12 post-offer nudge)

Rejections: 16

CNR: 6

Offers of representation: 12

Days to first offer: 8

*I also had 2 referrals from agent-to-agent, which both turned into fulls, then offers of representation.*

And what was that other thing I heard about?

Oh yeah, my agents (with the wonderful Ginger Clark as my co-agent!) and I sold the book in a major deal pre-empt—announced two months exactly after I sent my first queries. That’s pretty cool.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. It’s a running joke with my writing group that I’m a chronic overwriter every chance I get, and I fear it shone through here.

If you’d like more of my yapping, I’m at Twitter/X, Instagram, and Bluesky. I’m also planning substacks breaking down my query letter, revision notes, and a bunch of other stuff, and I’d love if you’d subscribe if you’re interested!