Friends!
I assume you have all been on tenterhooks wondering what the Vague Publishing Tweet in my Bread Loaf newsletter was all about??? I assume you have thought of nothing else for the past month???
The cat is out of the bag: I got an agent. I got two agents.
This post was surprisingly hard for me to write. I’ve been querying agents for a long time — not with this book, which tbh went unbelievably fast, but in general. Last spring saw me crying in my friend’s apartment after three back-to-back agent rejections on fulls, sobbing that I should have just thrown my writing dreams away after college and gone into investment banking. I have read a truly endless parade of blog posts and tweets and ~aesthetic Instagram posts about how random strangers on the Internet got their agents.
And… does it sometimes feel like every single one of those How I Got My Agent posts is giving us advice? Like we haven’t already learned how to write a banger query letter from the eighty bajillion blogs out there? Like we aren’t already going to conferences, if we can even afford them, and trying to network and whatnot? Like we aren’t, uh, Writing The Best Book We Can?
Well, I am not going to give you advice. I am going to excavate my feelings.
The year is 2003. I am eleven years old. I have just written my first full-length novel, a 40,000-word middle-grade fantasy, although I’m not actually familiar with things like “genre” and “category” yet. My dad buys me a copy of Writers’ Market. (If you weren’t querying twenty-one years ago, you probably have never seen a copy of Writers’ Market, but it was a phone-book-sized paperweight containing blurbs and contact info for all the literary agents in America. They used to update it every year, but I think they stopped in 2021.)
Anyway, I mail thirty-three query letters to thirty-three agents, with SASEs and pages and everything. I get three full/partial requests! (In retrospect, this was probably due less to literary merit and more to the fact that I was so young, and so there was a 1% chance I might have turned out to be a literary phenom.) One of those requests turns into a revise-and-resubmit. That revise-and-resubmit does not turn into an offer, because I’m eleven years old and I don’t really know what “revision” is. Still!
2003 – Middle-Grade Fantasy Novel – Query Stats
Query Count: 33
Request Count: 3
That novel goes back in the drawer as soon as I turn, like, twelve. Throughout high school and college, I work on another novel, a YA second-world fantasy. From 2009 to 2017, I write thirteen drafts of this novel from beginning to end, re-outlining it and tearing it apart and starting from scratch each time. (Afterward, I will think of this as the novel on which I trained myself to write a novel.)
I query the YA fantasy three times, in 2010, 2015, and 2017. The first two times, I only send 10 queries, and I don’t receive any requests. That’s okay, though, because both times, I realize that the novel isn’t actually done. Like I said, I’m learning how to write a novel in real time. But in 2017, the novel is done, and I cast a slightly wider net.
2017 – YA Fantasy Novel – Query Stats (including 2010 and 2015 queries)
Query Count: 59 (10 in 2010, 10 in 2015, and 39 in 2017)
Request Count: 3
I still don’t sign an agent. I do learn how to write a query letter, though, thanks to QueryShark. That’s a skill I keep in my back pocket for the next *checks notes* seven years.
(In retrospect, I probably could have queried more agents with this novel, but honestly, after eight years, I was over it. That’s okay! I cut my teeth on it, it taught me how to write both a novel and a query letter, at least I hope it taught me how to write a novel and a query letter, please God don’t let my next novel also take eight years and thirteen drafts.)
Meanwhile, in 2015, between drafts of the YA fantasy, I had started a new project — an adult historical fantasy set during the French Revolution. In 2016, I enrolled in an MFA program, and from 2017 through 2019, I wrote and revised the French Revolution novel for my MFA thesis. I graduated from my MFA program in 2019; I revised the novel one more time; I started querying it in February 2020.
In March, lockdown hit.
Sidebar: I don’t know if there are hard numbers supporting this, but I think querying got a LOT worse after COVID. Everyone I’ve talked to about this agrees that the difference is stark. Pre-pandemic, you used to get more feedback on queries and partials and fulls; people used to respond faster and more consistently; “extras” like pitch events used to generate more interest and more results. Obviously, it makes sense that some of this has slimmed down somewhat — everyone’s gruesomely busy, and a lot of these opportunities also lived on Twitter, lol. But in the spring of 2020, I didn’t realize that I was querying in the middle of a permanent paradigm shift.
It was... deeply disheartening. I stopped after 54 queries. I probably should have sent more, but I just ran out of steam.
2020 – French Revolution Fantasy Novel – Query Stats
Query Count: 54
Request Count: 9
I didn’t stop querying this novel just because of the pandemic, though. I also knew I hadn’t stuck the landing.
The French Revolution novel was a really sprawling, ambitious project, and frankly I didn’t yet have the chops for it. Pandemic or no pandemic, once I got over my disappointment, I could understand why no one had taken it on. It was so far beyond anything I’d written before; it required tons of research, and a voice I never quite settled into, and it had seven point-of-view characters and bounced back and forth in time, yadda yadda.
So I decided that for my next novel, I was going to play to my strengths. I was going to write a fun, straightforward, plotty, voicey book, with just one protagonist. I was going to absolutely nail it.
2021.
I wrote a novel that I later called a “speculative thriller,” or “Godzilla vs. Kong but with character development.”
I submitted it to Pitch Wars. (This was my fifth time submitting to Pitch Wars, by the way!) And I got in! I had a great mentorship experience. At the end of Pitch Wars, in the agent showcase, I got nine requests – not an outrageous number, but very respectable for a sci-fi-ish novel. I received some early rejections from those requests, but a bunch of those rejections came with glowing, elaborate feedback. I thought, You just haven’t found the person it resonates with yet. I thought, You only need one yes. I was not going to give up after fifty-four queries, like I did with the French Revolution book. I was going to give this one its full chance.
Over the course of the next year and a half, I queried one hundred and fifteen agents.
2022-2023 – Godzilla vs. Kong But Make It Good – Query Stats
Query Count: 115
Request Count: 17
I gotta be honest, guys: This one really knocked me out. I couldn’t write a word for the entire year of 2022 and half of 2023.
I think there were two reasons for this. One is that I was querying in batches, so there was always another rejection popping up in my inbox — and because response times are so long in this industry, it took until mid-2023 for me to really clear that book off my psychological slate. I now powerfully recommend against querying in batches for this reason, and I am happy to talk about this recommendation with anyone who sits still long enough, because I know it runs against the usual advice. Email me!
But the other reason was that I could see, craft-wise, what had gone wrong with my previous books. The middle-grade novel had been too amateurish; the YA fantasy, too derivative; the historical fantasy, too ambitious and clunky. But with the Godzilla novel, I felt like I had written it right. (I still think this.) And the feedback from my Pitch Wars mentors, and even the rejecting agents, also indicated that I had done it right. So if I had actually written a good novel, and I was still failing, then what was the goddamn point?
And I didn’t think it was just a problem of marketability. I kept getting rejections that said the book was “commercial,” it had an “audacious and immediate hook,” it “pitched itself,” they could “see it on TV.” (PUT IT ON TV THEN, YOU COWARDS!) What was more, I kept reading recently published books that I felt were doing the exact same thing I was doing: books about young women grappling with family or internal issues, books that also had a sci-fi or fantasy element. What were those books doing that I wasn’t doing??????
But eventually, when I had clawed out of the mire of my disappointment and frustration and I’m gonna say despair, I scraped some of the mud off and took a deep breath and asked myself: No, really. What are those books doing that I’m not doing?
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that all of those books fit into a very specific niche. They were first-person, present-tense narratives from the perspective of a single woman in her 20s or early 30s, and they used a speculative “metaphor” to talk about a feminist cultural issue, and — importantly — the speculative element came later, after the first couple of chapters had already established the book as grounded in modern-day issues, unlike my Godzilla book, which had slammed into the monster element on page one.
I took a deep, aggravated breath. Okay, I said. Okay.
Summer 2023.
I was done querying the monster book. I’d come to terms with it as a book that was going back in the drawer. I still didn’t know what to write next, though.
In the meantime, it was wedding season! I traveled to a couple of weddings. My friend got engaged (yay!); we started talking about her wedding. Another friend’s sister got engaged; we started talking about her wedding. I found myself constantly talking with these friends about other, third-party weddings, for comparison. I noticed myself spending an unhinged amount of time on Wedding Reddit. I was, and am, not engaged, but that didn’t stop me from making wedding-planning spreadsheets FOR FUN. (Hi, Morgan!) Meanwhile my cousin eloped. I reread Jia Tolentino’s essay “I Thee Dread.”
I outlined a horror-tinged literary novel about the wedding-industrial complex.
Over the course of three months in the fall of 2023, I rough-drafted the novel. I didn’t even care if it was good, to be honest (although I also kind of hoped it was good). I was just so unbelievably goddamn relieved that I could still write, that the love of the thing hadn’t left me, that it really had returned to me after the emotional desert of 2022 and early 2023. I was so glad to be writing again, you guys! I was so glad, even, to be glad!
I finished the novel in December. I let it sit for a few months.
Then, in May of 2024, I got accepted to Bread Loaf.
They have agents at Bread Loaf, you know.
I resolved to spend the summer revising the wedding novel. I wanted to show up in Vermont with an absolutely finished novel, and a polished query letter and synopsis, all ready to go, just in case. That gave me thirteen weeks to complete the revision; I did some back-of-the-envelope planning and allotted myself one full working day a week. Thirteen days in total, in other words.
Someday, I’ll talk more about this. But I fucking sledgehammered my way through that book.
Somehow I pulled it off, more or less. Off to Bread Loaf I went. I showed an agent my query and synopsis. The agent requested my novel! Good for me! I sent it, but I didn’t get my hopes up too high, because that would be insane, for an agent to just offer at Bread Loaf. That’s the kind of thing that happens to other people. I also fired off about ten queries, just so I wouldn’t feel so dead in the water when the agent said no.
The agent did not say no. The day after the conference, the agent said yes.
I… did not really process this at the time, to be honest. I decided that I had better not tell anybody, just in case the agent changed their mind, lol. But I did inform the remaining agents, plus two agents who still had my previous novel from 2023.
And… I got more yeses.
I agonized for a week.
2024 – Literary Horror Wedding Novel – Query Stats
Queries: 12
Requests: 8
You will notice that after the rest of this post — years’ worth of words, you could say — this part has gone very, very fast. It did go very, very fast.
Lifetime Stats (including the book I wrote when I was eleven, sue me)
Years: 21
Novels: 5
Queries: 273
Requests: 40
And on September 9, 2024, I signed with Stephanie Delman and Allison Malecha at Trellis Literary Management.
OK, now the part where I kvell: I am so excited to work with Stephanie and Allison, you guys. I’m in the middle of edits now, and I just can’t even articulate how thrilled I am. I can’t believe I get to do this; I can’t believe the world is letting me do this. I love my horrifying little wedding novel! I’m so, so pleased and lucky that it found such an amazing team!
Believe it or not, it was worth crying in my friend’s kitchen about investment banking, to get to have this feeling. And if you are in the middle of your twenty-one years — or even your six months — and you are crying in your friend’s kitchen, then this is the only piece of advice I will give: It will be worth it for you, too.
If you DO want advice, though, I’m going to talk about the Query Letter That Worked, including the revisions that got me there, in my October newsletter. Subscribe here to get that in your inbox:
And in a far-distant future newsletter, I hope to talk about my edits process. I’m afraid to talk about it now because I’m a superstitious old lady and I don’t want to jinx anything! Everyone keep your fingers crossed for me!!!!!
(P.S. What has YOUR querying process been like? Feel free to kvetch in the comments or by replying to this email!)
Hi Mary, this is Dimple from the workshop at Bread Loaf. Just wanted to wish you a very hearty congratulations! I’m so glad that you’re on your way to having your work out in the world.
Mary, I love this! I love you! What fantastic amazing news!