how I got my agent! (eeeek!)
ft. drafting a book in 7 weeks, 3 rounds of querying in the trenches over 2ish years, and snagging 3 offers of rep!
I read my first HIGMA post sometime in 2019 when I googled, “how to get a literary agent” for the first time. I started reading them for sport soon after. I have probably read hundreds in the 6 years that have transpired from that first, rudimentary Google search.
So, if you found this post from googling “how to get a literary agent,” hello! I am Emma Ilene and I am a newly agented author. This is my story on how I did just that so buckle up!
Fair warning, this is the longest newsletter/blog I’ve written and substack is currently yelling at me for making it “too long to read in email.” I have no idea what that means so I guess if you’re getting this in your inbox and it looks… extremely weird? Mayyybeeee click into substack to read this one!
Table of Contents Because That’s What We Do Here in Authorland
I am splitting this post into a few parts so depending on where you want to start, feel free to use this as your navigation bar! How I Started Writing feels pretty explanatory in itself, but I also have Querying is a Trench where I talk about my first two unsuccessful attempts in the trenches with my book, DAGGER OF THE TSAR, or DAGGER/DOTT for short. It also gives some sneak peeks into where I almost went down the self-pub route and how I got foreign rights interest that catapulted me back into the trenches! Now it’s Mid-January and I have to Send out My finished Draft :,) is where I would start if you want to skip over my entire R&R writing process and just cut to the chase of reading my Query Letter and offer process (which is under Getting the Offer). I’ve also included my Query Stats! at the end of this newsletter since I love me a good stat post.
Okay now that housekeeping is done, let’s get rolling!
How I Started Writing
Technically I can think of a few moments where being a writer kind of clicked for me. I attempted my first book when I was 11 (which was about two sisters where one sister turned evil and KILLED their parents for the throne. Yep, even at 11 I had some dramatic flair) but then abandoned it after 3 chapters. I also put in a TON of hours in fanfic on fandom forums. Fanfic was my birthplace!
But let’s touch on a few moments that solidified me into a writer anyway:
At 10 or 11, my grandpa got me a notebook (which I still have) so I could write stories down. I never expressed verbal interest in writing but I think my grandpa just paid attention to what I liked doing (spending a lot of time by myself typing on a keyboard)
Holding a copy of CATCHING FIRE that I stole off my brother’s bookshelf and thinking to myself “Haha that would be so scary to write a WHOLE BOOK, no thanks”
Started reading fanfic on ao3/wattpad/tumblr, which made me WANT to write but seemed impossible
Then came December 2018. I had read a popular YA fantasy series a few months earlier and loved it. Wrong. I didn’t “love” it, I WORSHIPPED IT. I also wanted more of the series. Ever watch or read something and then your gnawing at the cages of your enclosure to get MORE of the story and characters? Yep, that was me.
But, instead of reading fanfic, I had scene ideas churning in my head. So, one morning I opened up a Google Doc and started typing. I quite literally never edited this manuscript. Nor did I plot it. Nor did I edit it. But, I did post it on Wattpad, a writing platform. This is the first time I experienced building a community with other writers. I literally still have friends from today that I first met on Wattpad. Insane. It was also the first time I had readers! I was lucky enough to get a select few readers who loved my fanfic and kept up with my (never) weekly updates as I uploaded the manuscript chapter by chapter. And before you ask, yeah my profile on Wattpad still exists but you’ll never find this manuscript because I privated it. My worst nightmare would be for someone to read what my writing was like when I was 16. I am shuddering thinking about it.
While I may cringe at the thought of rereading that manuscript, it did tell me I could actually write a book. Yeah, maybe a badly written one but hey a book is a book! This manuscript also gave me the “writing itch.” I basically define this as, “If I don’t write something right now I’m going to peel my skin off and set it on fire.” I get this a lot nowadays, but it was my first time experiencing it then. To scratch the itch, I had the idea to write a fantasy Anastasia Romanov retelling where Anastasia survived the revolution. Sound familiar? It should be because this is what became DAGGER OF THE TSAR. If you follow me on my socials, you should be tired of hearing about it because it’s the only book I’ve let myself tease online for like 3 years (I promise you guys I do write other books and hopefully you’ll hear about them in the future)
Now we’re in 2020. I technically wrote the first chapters of DAGGER OF THE TSAR in the fall of 2019, but abandoned them since they were literally 5 chapters of prologue (I know, I was insane. But I did NOT know any of the rules in publishing at this time LOL) But, I consider 2020 the year I truly started drafting it. And yes, DAGGER OF THE TSAR is the book that got me my agent. I still cannot believe I can say that. Only, the version I first wrote in 2019-2020ish is nothing like the one that got me agented today. Which is why I’m setting this newsletter into parts.
Book 1 will be the first version of DOTT, Book 2 will be the second, and Book 3 (the version that got me agented) will be the last. There’s this saying amongst writers I strongly believe in that goes, “You either write 10 books before you’re published or your first book 10 times.” I really am no exception to this. I rewrote DOTT a lot. Some parts have probably been rewritten a dozen times. Or 200. I stopped keeping count a while ago. I have other drafts of other sandboxes I have written, but I kept coming back to DOTT. She was a nut I really wanted to crack, I guess!
Anyway, let’s get on the DOTT Versions and how I queried each of them!
Querying is a Trench
Book 1
I wrote this version of DOTT when I was 16 (a mere infant) and was 17 when I submitted it to PitchWars! No fulls from PW occurred, but I did meet the amazing group called Velvet Steel which boasts some AMAZING members, friends, and authors. (Peep Jenni Howell’s debut BOYS WITH SHARP TEETH pls. Jenni is a fantastic human AND writer!!).
To my surprise, most of my rejections were that “Anastasia Romanov stories don’t sell” and “retellings aren’t in.” I figured, well that’s the entire premise of this book so I guess we just keep querying it! Eventually, after actively querying it for like 2 months, I stopped sending it out due to a mental health dip. This pause turned into me mentally shelving DOTT and I started working on a stream of other projects.
Eventually, once my health was better I started feeling the nag to query again. I was pretty active on “writingtwt” at this time (and somehow still am despite the meltdown of the platform by the child-like maneuvers of a certain billionaire) so my community around me was still actively querying, getting rep, book deals, etc. But, I wasn’t sure if DOTT was right for traditional publishing anymore. I kept thinking back to the rejections that said it couldn’t sell or wasn’t wanted by the market. In December of 2023, I announced I was going to self-publish the manuscript.
I did not expect the support I got when I announced going indie. On TikTok, strangers who had never met me were DMing and commenting asking me when they could order, asking about arcs, etc etc. It was like all the dreams were happening. On Twitter, long-time authors I admired for SO LONG began to reach out with support (and I can call so many of them my friends now).
You might also remember me freaking out because my long-time favorite Booktube, withcindy, featured DOTT in an “anticipated 2024 reads” video. I felt immensely supported by the community and SO excited for this next step. I had a whole self-pub plan for DOTT, had the GoodReads link, had release plans, and then something happened.
Book 2
In the spring of 2024, a foreign rights editor at a big foreign publisher emailed me wanting to inquire about foreign rights for DOTT! My first reaction was “lol scam email of someone impersonating an editor smh” and I almost deleted the email. I didn’t though, and when I got home I reread it and realized… it doesn’t look like a scam. A quick Google search showed me that no one was reporting any impersonation scams was going on with this publisher or editor either. It started setting in that the DOTT interest I had that I laughed off as a scam was not a scam at all! So, I did what any rational writer does: I ran into my friend’s discord server we share and started screaming.
Foreign rights were something I had no idea about (or if that was wise to sell rights pre-publication) so I reached out to agents for advice on what to do with it. Funnily enough, I initially tweeted about it because I had absolutely ZERO idea who to ask, if it was okay to ask agents, or WHAT. So I tweeted it, and to my surprise, a lot of agented authors and agents reached out with help.
I was advised to query with the interest in hand since DOTT was not published yet. With an agent, I would have someone on my side for any possible contract negotiations with said publisher! So, I planned to get back into the trenches. All my self-pub plans were halted and I revised my entire 95k-long manuscript in a weekend. From my tweet, I had agents reach out asking me to send DOTT their way so I wanted to get the manuscript out in a pinch! To give you an idea on my timeline, I received the foreign rights interest on 4/24/24. I sent out my revised fulls and initial query back on 4/27/24. I still have no idea how I cut some 20k words in my manuscript and added some 15k in return in 3 days but alas I am insane but I am free.
So, as my fulls were out I sent out some queries with the interest and just did what we all have to do in the trenches: wait. I’m not good at waiting, but this term in the trenches was very different from my last one. I hadn’t just revised my book, I also revised my pitch and query letter (Arianna Siddiqui, my amazing friend and a kickass agent on her own, actually helped me fix my query for round 2 in trenches with DOTT). I seriously credit Arianna’s editorial eye and market knowledge with the success I had. She helped me figure out exactly how to pitch the romance and the gritty vibes I wanted to emulate in the pitch.
And it worked! I started getting a lot of action on DOTT this time and was lucky enough to have a really good request rate (I think QueryTracker spit out like a 45-50% request rate at this time). Small disclaimer for my querying crowd: if you’re actively querying, a request rate is something you can use to see if your pitch is working, but I wouldn’t use it as a marker for “success.” I have had friends with a 9% request rate and still get agented. I’ve also had friends with a 60% request rate and die in the trenches.
Despite the requests, I only queried DOTT for maybe 2-3 months. While I revised DOTT on a line level and reworked a few scenes, much of the book was original from when I wrote it back when I was 16-17. In short, it reflected what I liked as a teen and also my skillset as a teen writer. I had grown in my writing and wanted a lusher, darker, and different story for DOTT. When I had a full rejection come back emulating my thoughts on a completely rewritten DOTT (aka they wanted to see DOTT sit more firmly in the adult space with a heightened romance and darker elements) I immediately connected with it. And then I had an idea… what if I completely rewrote the manuscript?
I asked the agent if I could revise and resubmit (aka R&R) and to my surprise they said YES!
Once I got a green light to do it, I honestly stopped sending queries and just waited to hear back on the fulls I had out already. Here is where my note about the “illusion of a request rate” comes in. I had almost a 50% request rate, and when all my fulls came back I had 0 offers of representation. See! Request rates mean nothing! So don’t let that number scare you when you see it on QueryTracker. It’s a great tool, but isn’t a crystal ball.
One thing I did do though is with my vision for an R&R if a full rejection came back mostly complimentary, as a close yes, or with notes similar to what I wanted to fix in my rewrite I did ask about a possible R&R. I think in most cases R&Rs are given to the author, and not asked by them. I felt comfortable inquiring because 1) I seriously admired and respected every single agent that had DOTT and 2) The worse that could happen is no.
I often think about what would have happened if I never asked that first agent about an R&R and shudder because I think I would have shelved DOTT for good!
Book 3
After securing my R+Rs you would think I would have immediately got to work on revising DOTT. WRONG! I did ✨nothing✨
Literally did not write a single word for the edit for 3 months. To give you an idea I got my first R&R in June and didn’t start the edit until October *insert skull emoji here because wow emma that was sooooo dumb* But I did have a reason for this (or at least an excuse)! lol!
I knew what I wanted to change in DOTT, but I didn’t know how. So, I just let myself simmer on it. By “simmer” I mean watching TV shows and movies, going to the beach, bed rotting, and not letting a single thought of my book come into my mind. This sounds counterproductive, but I swear it works for my ADHD-addled brain. If I don’t think about it, I won’t stress about it. If I can’t stress about it, it can’t scare me. I even made a TikTok in which I asked people to bully me into writing my R&R.
If you ask the internet to bully you, they will not let you down. (Special thanks to Kage and AJ Yorek for smacking me upside the head!)
Somehow this highly-unlikely-&-very-unproductive plan worked. I was sitting in my bed one night (bored out of my mind because I missed writing and I had nothing else to watch after burning through all my reality tv shows and movies) when the idea for a new DAGGER OF THE TSAR came into my mind. I won’t go into too much detail about new DOTT, but essentially it turned old DOTT from a YA fantasy to a darker, lusher, and hotter adult fantasy with crossover appeal.
Within an hour I had the first act planned out mentally with a few notes jotted onto the pictured notebook. The next night I was writing. This kicked off my mad sprint of finishing DOTT in 7 weeks. Which I had never done before. It usually takes me 7-8 months to finish a book, so asking myself to finish it in what? 1/3? 1/8? 1/1,000,000,000? of that time seemed insane. But like I said, I am insane but I am free.
No, in all seriousness, I really only think I accomplished this for 3 reasons.
I have ADHD, which means when I hyperfocus I can crank IN. Literally all sorts of responsibilities fall away and my main focus is MY TASK. You should have seen my bedroom and my desk after I finished my draft. They were a mess and I was a worst one.
I am a procrastinator who thrives off deadlines. I put a very hard deadline on myself to have my draft done by January. I am the kind of student who will sit and write my 10-ish page essay in an afternoon (if you are my professor who is reading this, please promptly forget you read that). I just like to crank things out when the heat of the deadline is starting to burn my skin. This may sound insane, and you’d be right! But it’s how I work. I love making a deadline. The rush of it makes it (by “it” I mean late nights, no sleep, and no breaks) worth it.
I love the “carrot” I had R+Rs that I knew I wanted to send out. If I finished my manuscript quickly, I could send it out to the agents quickly. So, the carrot on the stick kept me moving. I realize now that this metaphor just makes me sound like a pig in Minecraft but oh well.
I was writing with friends. My most productive days were when I was doing writing sprints with friends.
Anyway, I drafted DOTT over three months (October-December 2024). I just did not write every day. You’ll see what I mean later, but I only locked in to write the last 5ish weeks of my deadline! This is how I normally operate it. The beginning is slow and then once I pass the fun & games section of the draft I usually start hitting bigger daily word counts.
Fun fact, I also didn’t write most of November for a very specific reason. The US was in an election year, and so I promptly lost all creativity after our election was decided :)))) ANYWAY, I logged my WC daily so check out how I hit 70k in 7 weeks:
October
November
Ft. the epic 14-day run of nothingness post-election
December
For fun, here is my month-by-month word count as well:
October: 7,352 words
November: 10, 940 words
December: 53,368 words
As you can see, one month was particularly busier than the others LOL. I wrote more than half of my book in December (to catch up because of my election slump). By the end, I had a draft of just about 70k words. The first week of January was filled with me going back to chapters I skipped to finish writing them (yes, I sometimes write out of order. yeah. I’m a panster who writes out of order. When I said I was insane I really, really meant it). After I did that, I spent the next few days doing small line edits and copy edits to make sure everything lined up correctly with name changes, etc.
The bulk of my editing went quickly because I was sending out DOTT chapters to beta readers weekly from November to December. To my surprise, there were 0 big structural changes from the first draft to the final draft. Which surprised me because I completely pantsed this book without an outline. I fully expected my plot to become a mess at some point, but it just worked out where it didn’t! I still have no idea how I managed that but tah dah!
Instead of having to make huge structural changes to fix my first draft, my edits consisted mostly of strengthening the prose and expanding on interiority based on beta reader feedback. I’ve been told I write “clean” drafts, so I think this played a role in how quickly I was able to edit since it’s mostly just going back and writing in sections I skipped, etc.
Now it’s Mid-January and I have to Send out My finished Draft :,)
With a draft done, I had a few agents who liked the pitch on Twitter, and I had my R&Rs to send out. You would think I would be feeling happy and ready to go. I was not. I think at this point I had just spent way too much time reading my own writing. I felt horrible about my draft. I thought the plot was good, but the writing was terrible. I hated every sentence I was painstakingly proofreading. I started seriously doubting sending out DOTT at all.
But, I had a deadline to meet. I needed my “carrot” of sending my book out. I also had good writing friends tell me I was being ridiculous. Thank god for them (you know who you are, wee wains). So I wrote out my query letter + synopsis, told my self-doubts to shut up, and went to send out DOTT.
The Query Letter
This is the query letter that eventually landed me 3 offers of representation.
Dear (Agent Name),
I’m thrilled to share DAGGER OF THE TSAR, an adult fantasy complete at 75,000 words with crossover and series potential. Inspired by the story of Anastasia Romanov and steeped in Slavic culture, it combines the sizzling enemies-to-lovers romance in THE PHEONIX KING by Aparna Verma and the twisty, dark court intrigue in Thea Guanzon’s THE HURRICANE WARS.
In Sarlatova, an empire under siege by a ruthless tsar, 24-year-old Alya survives by ruling in the shadows as a notorious assassin. There is a catch to her lucrative career choice: no one can know she’s the assassin. So when a powerful, royal client with unsettling charm and sly hands threatens to expose her identity to the world, she strikes a risky deal: help him eliminate the tsar's enemies from within the palace walls in exchange for keeping her identity buried. To succeed, Alya must work alongside someone almost as deadly as her: the beautiful and ruthless Crown Prince Nikolay Volkov.
Inside the palace walls, Alya learns it isn’t just rich nobles she must kill. Rumors stir that a long-lost Raskov heir survives and rallying rebel forces seek to restore them as the rightful heir to the throne. To maintain order, Alya and Nikolay must hunt down the heir to quell a rebellion before it can ignite. But if the heir is found, it threatens to unearth a secret Alya has destroyed herself to protect—that she's the lost heir Nikolay seeks to destroy.
With palace secrets unraveling and enemies on all sides, Alya’s forced to face the possibility that the people she has been ordered to kill may be her one chance at survival—and that the greatest threat to the tsar’s reign is herself.
Born in California, I grew up on imaginary stories in my head where sticks became swords and blankets became capes. Aside from writing, I’m a university student specializing in health policy and am currently researching at the University of Oxford. In my free time, I am an iced coffee fanatic and enjoy adding books to my endless TBR.
All my best,
Emma Ilene
I plan to do a breakdown of my query letter in a later newsletter, but overall I do think this letter was strong! I finally figured out how to balance pitching my plot + romance, which I think helps a lot in today’s current market. As of critiques I have for it, maybe the first paragraph is a bit wordy? But hey! It didn’t scare agents away so maybe that’s just my perfectionism coming out.
One thing I will say about my query is I did not personalize it. Why? Well, I used to personalize every single query I sent out. Not only was this a huge time commitment, but I don’t really think it helps turn a query into a request! I know, I know, this is a slightly hot take! But truly, if an agent wants to read more based on your submission they will request your manuscript with or without a personalization. This isn’t to say I hate personalizations (I think they are great and can be used to make your query stronger). I even personalized some of my queries when an agent listed a specific thing on their MSWL that my book had. Other than those one or two instances, the query above is exactly how I sent it to agents!
I sent my queries and R&rs out on January 13th. After sending them out, I sat in wait. This wasn’t my first time in the trenches. I knew this was likely going to be a months-long process and more than likely was going to result in no offers. I was both at peace with it and dreading a possible death in the trenches. My brain was ricocheting between both feelings at a dangerous speed.
To my continued shock, there was no months long wait. 8 days after I sent my queries, I was sitting in one of my undergrad classes when an email notification flashed onto my screen. The contents of said email made me gasp audibly very silent classroom: an agent reached out gushing about DOTT and wanting to hop on a call to discuss representation.
Getting the Offer
Let’s pause. I wish I could say I jumped up and down. I wish I could say I walked out of my classroom and fainted. I also wish I could say I screamed or cried. How I didn’t do any of these things, I have no idea. Instead, I just clicked on my writing friend’s Discord server and screamed via all caps and screaming emojis instead. Now, don’t worry. I definitely was having a silent scream going on because I started getting really weird looks from my classmates because I looked kind of looked like The Scream
So I whispered, “SORRY” to my annoyed classmates and replied to the offering agent saying, “ohmygodhihelloheyyesIwouldlovetogetonacallwithyou.”
The offering agent and I scheduled our call for the next morning at a completely normal time around 10 AM. At 4 AM the following day, 6 hours before my call, I was awake. And vomiting. (TMI? But hey I said I would tell you the WHOLE story). No worries though I was vomiting for a good reason. I wasn’t sick, I just get extremely nauseous when I’m highly stressed. For me, stress can be good or bad. Stress/anticipation over a call I do NOT want to screw up and have been dreaming about for like 4 years? Good stress! Even if it makes me vomit! I literally had my head in the toilet bowl and thought, “This is publishing, baby!”
Anyway. I got on the phone with the first offering agent (Agent #1). Since I had less than 24 hours to prep, I solicited the help of some of my agented friends to get a list of questions to ask on The Call (THANK YOU SO MUCH RACHEL, SOUMYA, and ARI). As it turns out, I didn’t have to ask many of the questions I had. The agent touched on almost everything my friends and I thought to ask during our call! Which I think is a great sign the offering agent knows their stuff and came prepared. It put me at so much ease that when the call ended I immediately sent out nudges to other agents with the query or full about the offer.
I received some step asides (which is expected btw!) and some messages to let me know they’d be reading and getting back to me soonish.
One thing I will say is I asked for 3 weeks. I did this because 1) I had just started querying. No agent had a chance to get me further up in their slush or had started reading my full, so I wanted to give agents as much time as possible. 2) I wanted to give my book its best chance.
If someone came to me and asked, “Hey should I ask for 2 or 3 weeks?” I would say 3 weeks no question asked. I know 2 weeks is the industry standard, but a large number of agented writers told me to ask for 3 to give an extra window for my book. At the end of the day, an extra week isn’t going to hurt to ask for. If an agent seems to object to waiting 3 weeks, I’d consider it a red flag. You want an agent supportive of you, and that wants the best for you. With how slow everything is, I think 3 weeks really gives you that chance to count all your ducks and give agents that extra week to read your manuscript (and hopefully offer!)
Stepping off my soapbox, I received my second offer of rep a few days after my first (I was shook, mind you. I couldn’t believe I had one offer, and then I got my second). Agent #2 was also one of the agents who wanted to see the revised version of DOTT, so it felt really good that I somehow improved on the old version enough to snag an offer! We scheduled our call, and I am happy to say this time I did not vomit. Success! I was way, way calmer for this call and actually managed to ask some questions and toss in some jokes. The call went great, and Agent #2 was LOVELY!
I was very lucky that both agents had a great editorial vision I agreed with and that I very much vibed with both of them tremendously. They were extraordinary and amazing! I did my due diligence like speaking to clients and looking over the contract of each agency. If you can, always get second, third, fourths, or however many eyes you need on the contract to feel comfortable. I am lucky that I have some amazing agented friends who helped look over the contracts with me so I was able to fully understand what I could be signing. Of course, if you DO have any questions about the contract don’t hesitate to ask your offering agent. I didn’t, so I didn’t need to, but if you do ASK! If answering your question about your agency contract annoys them, it just gives you a reason to RUN since that would be a huge, flashing red flag.
After my second call, I spent the remainder of my 3-week deadline holding my breath. I had some agents reach out for the full, pass, or update me on where they are at in reading. One thing that was cool to experience was that all of the updates I had (and passes) were lovely. Some came down to running out of time, others were just “not for me.” I was really shocked by the positive reception DOTT received from agents. I think I am still shocked. If you followed me along on Twitter or Instagram (@emmailene_ over there btw!) while I was writing it, you know I wrote it in like 5 minutes and then kicked it into the trenches like a crazed beast. I essentially queried a first draft (which is crazy in hindsight) but I guess in my gut I just felt the story was ready.
I think if I overthought when to query DOTT too much, I would spend months revising something that didn’t need it. (Not to say DOTT doesn’t need edits. It definitely does, and I am currently excitedly waiting for my first edit letter for it as I write this!) But I got DOTT as far as I could on my own. I had the beta feedback, and I had a submission package I felt was strong. So, I sent it! If I didn’t have that hard deadline set for myself on when to query it, I feel like I would have let the manuscript sit in my files for a few months and then stressed about how imperfect it was when I finally came back to it to prep it for the trenches. All this to say follow your gut. I wouldn’t recommend querying a first draft (which makes me a hypocrite since I did) but follow your gut. Test it out with agents and see what the reception is. In my first week, I got several fulls so that told me I was doing something right and gave me confidence to keep querying!
The Final Countdown
My third and final offer came in right at the end of my deadline! I had basically signed off my remaining fulls as “no’s” so this came as a complete shock, but an extremely excited, squealing SHOCK. Agent #3 was one I’ve admired for a long time, so I felt so honored to even be in the position to consider an offer from them. We scheduled our call for the next day, and by now any anxiety I had about offer calls was gone.
Now comes the cliche part. The agent and I clicked. I don’t enjoy Zoom calls. Maybe it’s because I’m traumatized from being a student during the pandemic, but they tend to tire me out because I feel like I need to be on during them. As if someone is grading me to see if I slouch or stop smiling (Can you tell I’m the perfectionist eldest daughter, yet?)
But, as soon as I hopped on the phone with Agent #3, we were cracking jokes, talking about edit ideas, and future wip ideas. The agent really understood the vibes I wanted to achieve for DOTT and the vision I had for it. It was all *chef’s kiss*. I will say it was a big gut feeling with this agent. I can’t really explain it other than I just felt like career-wise we meshed.
I got off the call, my mind fully made up, and texted my friends “I’M SIGNING WITH AGENT #3!!!”
And then I did! I wanted to email Agent #3 and say, “ YES YES YES PLEASEEE PLEASE TAKE ME AS YOUR CLIENT!!” but instead I managed to write a semi-professional email where I (tried to) calmly accept their offer of rep.
And as you all know from my agented announcement on my socials, Agent #3 is the fabulous, amazing, stunning agent Alex Brown at Mad Woman Literary Agency.
I am so, so excited to be in the MWLA family and on Team Alex. Seriously, I am still reeling that I am agented by such a powerhouse. A day after announcing on Twitter, I got sick so my brain has not fully soaked in the fact that in my conscious life where I am not taking gallons of cough medicine, I am now agented. Maybe that reality will catch up with me, but as of now I still am like, “Did that happen, or am I going to wake up and it will be allllll a dream?”
Well, guess what emma, it happened! And it’s been an amazing month. I seriously think I have found my dream team and I am so fortunate for that.
Now I gotta go back to my writing cave as I have an edit letter to get to and hopefully a platter of sushi too!
Query Stats!
Small reminder that Book 1, 2, and 3 are all different versions of DOTT. It’s the only book I’ve ever queried which is insane to me!
Book 1 (2021-2022)
73 queries sent
6 full requests
0 offers of rep
Time in the trenches: 4 months (off and on)
Book 2 (2024)
45 queries sent
19 full requests
2 partials
0 offers of rep
3 R&Rs
Time in the trenches: 2 ½ months!
Book 3 (and the one that got me my agent, 2025)
24 queries sent
13 full requests
3 offers of rep
Time in trenches: 8 days (eeeek!)
I cannot wait to get my hands on this book! 😍