My agent search history

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I posted this earlier over at Verla Kay’s, in a thread where someone asked about our agent search histories. For anyone curious, I thought I’d repost it here. I hope it gives some inspiration and hope to those of you still looking for an agent because I know how long and frustrating the search is.

The very first time I queried an agent, I was about 13 years old. I really didn’t know much about the publishing process, but I had known since the age of 8 that I wanted to be a writer. I’d had a subscription to Writer’s Digest since I was 11, so I had read about agents, but I thought it was so easy to get one. Just send a letter off and the agent would immediately love me! I got rejected and it’s no surprise now, when I look back at the things I’d written then.

(Yes, I was a really geeky kid. While my friends had subscriptions to Tiger Beat and Teen, I had subscriptions to Writer’s Digest and The Writer, lol.)

I didn’t try to query agents again until 2002, when I was 22. I had written the first book of a fantasy trilogy and sent out queries to various fantasy agents. No one wanted to see even a partial. I kept writing the rest of the trilogy and sending out queries through 2004, still getting only rejections. Form rejections, none with specific remarks or anything, just “Dear Writer.” I did finish the trilogy and even started another fantasy book. But I abandoned that new fantasy in early 2005. I still love reading fantasy, but I was starting to feel that it wasn’t what I was supposed to be writing. Not only because of the form rejections, but because my mind was starting to create characters and situations that didn’t fit the fantasy books I’d been writing.

So in April 2005, I went back to an old character I had created as a teen and wrote a contemporary YA, which I finished in three weeks, the one I refer to here as LIBBY. In June 2005 I started sending out queries for it. Surprisingly, I got requests for partials and fulls. About half of the queries I sent out came back with requests for more. But then I got only rejections after sending out the partials/fulls. Just a lot of “Didn’t work for me” and “Not quite right,” nothing specific that I could use to make changes. I felt like giving up lots of times and did go through a period of not sending any queries out for a couple of months because I let myself get into a funk. I did get myself snapped out of it though, and queried through the rest of 2005 and the beginning of 2006, working my way through the list of YA agents I’d put together.

In mid-May 2006, I sent out three snail mail queries although I didn’t really like the snail mail ones. I’d had much more success with email. Two days later I got an email from one of those agents I’d snail mailed, asking that I email him the full. (I had included my email address in the queries in case any of the agents wanted to respond to me that way.) A week later he offered representation, which I still feel shocked about even now, almost six months later. 😉

So for the book that got me the agent, it took 49 weeks from the first query I sent out to the offer with 16 agents queried in total, but my entire agent search (not counting my one experience at 13) took four years and a LOT more agents queried. I don’t have the exact number right now, but I was sending queries to anyone I could find that had ever represented fantasy.

I know everyone says it and it gets frustrating to hear when you keep getting rejections, but don’t give up. You just need one person who believes in your story as much as you do.

9 comments

    • admin says:

      Yours are fantasy, aren’t they? In my experience, I found fantasy a much tougher market to get attention than contemporary YA. You’re doing MUCH better than I ever did with fantasy agents since you’ve gotten requests for partials and fulls. 🙂

      • ravelda says:

        Yes, YA fantasy. But the first was on the paranormal side, which is supposed to be “hot” right now, and the second is more of a historical fantasy. I should try a contemporary YA sometime.

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