HIGMA 2.0, or the 10 day whirlwind after the seven year slog
This one is gonna be a ride.
I’m leaving my first “How I Got My Agent” post up in the interests of transparency, because it’s still relevant and chronicles the first seven years of my publishing journey.
So why did I leave my first agent? Honestly, it doesn’t matter. This happens a LOT—more of my author friends are on their second or third or even fourth agents, than their first. Sometimes agents just don’t work out. They leave the business, they move agencies, they change genre focus, you find out you have different communication styles, you write something they’re less passionate about, something just not clicking… There are as many reasons as there are agent/writer partnerships. Some agents are fantastic for some writers, and just not a good fit for others. Suffice to say I hold my first agent no ill will, and I’m still incredibly grateful to her for picking me out of the slush pile and believing in me at a time when it seemed like no one ever would.
ANYWAY. Long story short, I ended up agentless in January of 2024. While GOTV died a slow death on submission, I’d been doing what they tell you to do and drafting the next thing. Slowly. Very, very slowly. I had just finished my accelerated BSN program, during which I had no free time and got almost no writing done at all. I got my RN license and started a new job on a disaster zone of a trauma floor. I was, to put it concisely, a bit overwhelmed.
But losing my agent lit a fire under me. I wanted to query ASAP, so I spent the next few months in something of a fugue state. I drafted every spare moment I had, revising and rewriting as I went, and by April I had a pretty polished product. I’m still not completely sure how it happened. This book also triggered a breakdown almost weekly, because it’s the toughest, most deranged, most personal thing I’ve ever written. I spent the entire process questioning whether I was anywhere near skilled enough to write this thing. By some miracle, though, my three beta readers did NOT hate it, and I’d finished my final revisions by late May.
On May 22, I called off work and did not move from my couch for about 10 hours straight as I fired off 54 queries. Yes, I shotgunned my entire list (barring a few who closed a bit earlier or opened a little later) in a day. Why did I do this?
This was not my first rodeo. I’d been workshopping my query letter since November—let people absolutely brutalize it, had several breakdowns over it, etc etc. I knew I needed a slam dunk, so I did not stop picking at that thing until the overwhelming response I got was “I would read the hell out of this.” I was equally confident in my pages.
I’m an impatient little monster. I have zero chill. I queried my last two books over 2.5 years and 13 months, respectively, dutifully sending in batches like they tell you to. I was not about to go through that again. I figured, either I’ll have an agent in three months or I’ll shelve this book and write the next thing. I’m ripping the bandaid off.
Querying in batches used to be a lot more effective than it is now. In the post-pandemic publishing landscape, personalized feedback is incredibly rare, and average request rates are lower than they’ve ever been. You can’t rely on either like you used to be able to, to tell you whether or not your package is working.
So yeah. Was I a little reckless? Probably. Did it pay off? Well…
I woke up on May 23 to three full requests. I got a handful of rejections, and then a couple more requests, and by the end of the week I already had more fulls out than I’d had for my last two books COMBINED (I’d got a weird amount of partial requests, in the past). On May 31, ten days after I started querying, I got an email asking to set up a call.
TEN DAYS. I’m still pinching myself. This was not supposed to happen to me, the anti-unicorn who had to query for seven years and three books to get one solitary offer. With GOTV, it took several months before I even got a full request.
I had to wait a minute for The Call. One of the agents was traveling, and then the other one got sick, and I ended up actually getting the offer on June 17. In those two weeks leading up to The Call, I was a bit of a mess. I talked myself in and out of thinking it must be an R&R, especially after my first full rejection rolled in. Then I had ten days straight of crickets, during which I was like CLEARLY NO ONE IS EXCITED ABOUT MY BOOK OR ELSE THEY WOULD LITERALLY BE BREAKING INTO MY APARTMENT AAAAAA I’M THE WORST AHHHHHHH.
I acknowledge that this is sort of pathetic, considering I’m a veteran of the query trenches and have historically endured MONTHS of silence.
When The Call finally happened, it went so well. I got off of it basically ready to sign on the spot—the agents love and understand the book, they know their shit, they have a fantastic sales track record in my genre and represent writers I really admire.
Still, I elected to be patient and nudge all 44 people who hadn’t responded yet. That took… some doing.
I got an offer REALLY FREAKING FAST, and a consequence of that was a lot of passes due to timing. A couple were very apologetic, and had some incredibly kind words. I got a bunch of form rejections, a really nice pass on one of my fulls, a few more requests, and a couple “still reading, more soon". I think I got 17 responses that first afternoon, which was unreal. Much more surprisingly, less than 24 hours after requesting the full, another agent emailed asking to set up a call! By this point I was fully losing my mind.
Agent #2 ended up offering as well, leaving me with a choice. Now, I’d have sold a kidney to be in this position two years ago, and it’s still a hell of a good problem to have. But it was still a lot harder than I expected to have to make that choice. I agonized over it. Both agents came with strong sales and great reputations. One had stronger sales, but not in my genre. One had a clearer vision for the book, but wasn’t quite as experienced. I did a LOT more probing after the calls. I interviewed clients, I made spreadsheets, I trawled the depths of Publishers Marketplace, The Bookseller, AbsoluteWrite, reddit and twitter. In light of all that information, I sent additional emails to the offering agents with all my followup questions.
I got very, very lucky. I couldn’t really have gone wrong here—both my choices were absolute dream agents. So in the end, I went with the agent who I felt best understood my book: Agent(s) #1.
All of this happened over the course of one very surreal month.
So what changed? What did I do so differently, to go from an excruciatingly long querying journey to a lightning fast one?
It is true that I queried a 108k manuscript instead of a 180k manuscript. But my final request rate for this new book was actually on par with what it was for GOTV. I don’t think I’m a dramatically better writer, or that I’ve gotten that much better at pitching.
I have a stronger community now than I did two years ago. I have more writer friends, more connections, and better support. I did get three referrals to query this time. But of those, one stepped aside due to time constraints, one ghosted, and one requested the full but ended up passing. Both my offers came from agents who had no idea who I was—one from a cold query, the other from a #QuestPit like.
So what ACTUALLY changed? What’s the secret sauce?
Literally the only aspect of this I controlled, other than the manuscript itself, was sending 58 queries in one day. Then one of the fast responders HAPPENED to connect with my pages, and my very first full request turned into an offer. There are agents who don’t respond to queries as quickly, who don’t typically request fulls until a month or longer after you query them. Some request quickly but have a huge backlog to get through. I just HAPPENED not to run into any of those problems this time, and the fact that I didn’t says nothing about me as a writer.
Also: the market. The pendulum seems to be (maybe, hopefully?) swinging back toward sci-fi and space opera, so a book in this genre is a lot more exciting to agents now than it was two years ago.
tldr: it was luck and timing. Of course “luck” is the intersection of hard work and opportunity, but… still. Those opportunities are not something we as writers can control.
Now, some stats, because I know some of you are here for those:
Book 1 (2016)
We don’t talk about Book 1.
Book 2 (2017-2019): 2.5 Years
Queries: 50
CNR: 16
Form Rejections: 22
Partial Requests: 7 (4 from Pitch Madness showcase)
Full Requests: 4 (2 from PM showcase)
R&R: 1
Offers: 0
Book 3 (2021-2022): 13 Months
Queries: 65
CNR: 32
Form Rejections: 27
Passes After Nudge Citing Time Constraints: 1
Partial Requests: 6
Full Requests: 4
Offers: 1
Book 4 (2024): 10 Days
Queries: 58
CNR: 14
Form Rejections: 25
Passes After Nudge Citing Time Constraints: 6
Partial Requests: 3 (2 upgraded to fulls)
Full Requests: 10
Offers: 2