i really can’t think of a better indictment of my time management skills than the fact that i’m writing the classic “how i got my agent” post precisely 4 years and 4 months after i signed with my agent and 10 months after i’ve published my debut novel.
but i digress. let’s talk about my writing journey, shall we?
like many wee writers, i began by reading and writing fanfiction. i first tried my hand at inuyasha fanfiction when i was eleven or twelve years old, and i very quickly moved on to harry potter, which is where i really cut my teeth on writing, mostly due to the particular fansite i haunted at the time: mugglenet. unlike most, or in fact the majority of, fanfiction websites, mugglenet fanfiction did not allow unmoderated submissions, which meant that several of my fanfics were rejected for, among other things, incorrect punctuation and grammar. (i still remember how much i sucked at properly formatting dialogue tags!)
the mugglenet forums, which no longer exist but were very robust at the height of the books’ popularity, offered ways to improve your writing, including groups/clubs and beta reader services. i even became a beta reader myself at one point, but not before i had to pass an exam that made sure i knew what i was doing (i cannot for the life of me remember the name of the website this exam was on, but i do remember that i failed the first time).
later, in my late teens, i started writing original fiction, but my problem was that i could never finish anything. i wrote snippets and vignettes, not books. i lost interest quickly, and i struggled to construct complete storylines. even in my fanfiction days, i only ever wrote one-shots, and my chaptered works were short and incomplete. i won nanowrimo a couple times out of the several that i entered, but even though i technically hit 50k, neither of the stories was in any way complete.
in college, i came close to finishing a book, but i still couldn’t quite do it. it was too short, too messy, and felt more like the opening act of a story rather than a complete book.
then, in 2017, i started writing what would later become the daughters of izdihar, though at the time it was called city of sand and strife (and that’s the name i queried it with too — it was my agent who made the title change much later!).
at that point, i’d already been on twitter for quite a while, and so i’d learned a lot about agents and querying, as well as pitch contests! i’d witnessed several pitch contests over the years and knew i wanted to try my hand at one, so it helped to have that deadline for myself. and so, for the first time in my life, i finished a book (kind of, more on this later), and i was ready to enter pitch contests.
first was #dvpit:
yes, at the time, the daughters of izdihar was pitched as a YA, mostly because i was very into YA at the time. i got a decent amount of engagement and excitement. 25 agents liked this post, which meant they were inviting me to send them a query. but i didn’t query everyone — i put them into a spreadsheet with links to their mswl/website and started researching them to make sure we’d be a good fit and that they were all reputable agents. out of the 25, i believe i actually ended up querying 7.
despite all the prior research i’d done about querying and pitch contests, one thing did escape me: naive little me thought that submitting to an agent via a pitch contest meant a quicker response. oh, how wrong i was…it was very much a waiting game from then on.
in the meantime, #pitmad was coming up, so i entered this one too, with the same tweet that had worked well before:
again i got a lot of great engagement, but out of all the likes i isolated 25 agents to look into, and out of those i queried 13.
in the meantime, i was also sending out queries traditionally, otherwise known as the slush pile. and i was just waiting, and waiting, and waiting…a couple of agents reached out with rejections (several told me the book read more as adult than YA), a few reached out with full and partial requests. one even requested an R&R (revise and resubmit) but they ended up ghosting me when i followed up.
then, a friend of mine asked to read the daughters of izdihar. this friend also happened to be an agent. i wasn’t formally querying them, but they liked the book so much they made an offer! i hadn’t been expecting this at all, but it meant that i now needed to send out emails to all the agents who had my query, letting them know i’d had an offer.
only then did the responses come in like rapid fire. i got some more fast rejections, but i also got offers from two other agents, which meant setting up phone calls that i took in one of the conference rooms of my day job at the time.
once that was done, i had to make a choice between three agents. i agonized over this decision for a while, as each agent had much to recommend them, but in the end what helped me decide was one of alexa donne’s youtube videos, in which she stresses that when choosing an agent you are making a business decision and choosing a business partner. that’s why i signed with dongwon song — i wanted someone who was already very familiar with the industry and had the sort of experience i could trust.
and so, on may 6, 2019, i officially announced that i had an agent! my stats, according to my spreadsheet, are as such:
total agents queried: 34
full requests: 12
partial requests: 3
r&r requests: 1
time spent querying: 7 months
pitch contests aren’t really a thing anymore (i don’t think, anyway, not with twitter’s implosion), but i still wanted to stress that despite having relative success in two pitch contests, i ended up getting an agent traditionally anyway.
i will also concede that my journey was more straightforward than most people’s, since the daughters of izdihar is technically the first book i’ve ever finished, but it will never not be hilarious to me that it is actually the first in a duology and ends on a cliffhanger that doesn’t really resolve very much. (i can, however, promise you that the sequel, the weavers of alamaxa, has a very definitive ending that ties up all loose ends.)
and that’s how i ended up here, etc etc. please preorder the weavers of alamaxa if you’d like to see how the daughters of izdihar actually ends.