Welcome back to another blog!
I am so beyond thrilled to share that after years of hard work, I’ve finally reached the next milestone in my journey as an author: I signed with a literary agent!
First, a disclaimer
This is not a blog about how to land an agent. This is about my experience getting an agent.
This distinction is very important to me.
I cannot stand when authors sign with agents and then immediately become experts on how to land an agent. It just doesn’t work like that, for two reasons:
- This industry is so subjective that nobody can tell you exactly how to get a literary agent.
- I fully believe that luck and timing play some role, even if it’s small.
This was not an overnight win
I wrote my first book about 15 years ago. Since then, I’ve written roughly nine books.
From the beginning, my goal was always to get a literary agent and be traditionally published. I did explore self-publishing at one point. Long story short, it’s just not for me.
Looking back, something I can acknowledge now is that while I always took this process seriously—because I’ve always wanted to write books for a living—for the first several years, I know now that there was so much I didn’t know. Those earlier books that I wrote probably didn’t stand a chance. I would say that it wasn’t until maybe the last three books I wrote that my work had real potential.
I don’t regret any of it because I learned a lot.
I’m not going to discuss any of those earlier books because they were so rough. I will say that over the years, I’ve written (and read) in different genres, which proved to be immensely helpful. I explored, and I challenged myself. You just never know what you’re going to love and be good at, so I’m really glad I kept an open mind.
I’ll quickly recap the last three manuscripts because this is where I think things started to shift.
The last 3 books (when things really started “clicking”)
I wrote an adult paranormal horror, an adult fantasy romance (romantasy), and most recently, an adult romantic comedy (rom-com).
The paranormal horror didn’t gain much traction. In a nutshell, I paused about 35 queries in because I was getting rejected so fast, and I thought, “Something must be wrong here.”
I worked with two editors who are also agents on my query package, incorporated those revisions, and, sure enough, got my first request for the full manuscript.
While I was querying that book, I wrote the romantasy. I started that book almost a year ago, spent a lot of time plotting and outlining, wrote it somewhat quickly (for me, anyway), and then I got a developmental edit. That editor said it would take about a month.
During that time, I had said, “I’m going to take a full month off from writing. I’ll keep querying the paranormal horror, and just enjoy being a reader.”
That didn’t happen. I love writing too much.
That was how I ended up writing a rom-com. Start to finish, this book took me about a month, which is a record for me. I have never written a book this fast. But I had so much fun writing it, and I think it also had to do with the fact that I wrote it on the heels of a fantasy romance, which was very challenging. I knew I wanted to write something lighter, with no magic system, set in the present day. I think that played a role in how quickly I wrote this. I purely wanted to have fun.
I got the fantasy back from the editor and did another round of revisions, and then I suddenly had three manuscripts that were ready to query. I liked working on multiple books at once. Querying multiple books at once…I wouldn’t recommend it!
It’s a lot to juggle because you can’t query one agent or agency with multiple projects. I had to be very careful that none of my queries across those three books overlapped.
This wasn’t intentional. I didn’t plan to have three books ready to query.
I ended up pumping the brakes on the paranormal horror. It wasn’t really going anywhere, and importantly, I felt so good about my rom-com. This was the most confident I’ve ever been in my writing.
I did send a few queries for the romantasy, but knowing how competitive that genre is—even more competitive than all of this already is—I said to my husband, “I feel like my best bet is to query the rom-com, and hopefully land an agent that will be open to considering the fantasy.”
So, I focused mostly on that.
Querying my rom-com
This time around, querying felt very different. Because I was so sure this book was something special, I didn’t query as aggressively as I have in the past.
I’m going to talk about mindset more later, but my attitude with the rom-com wasn’t, “Gosh, I hope someone wants this.” It was, “It’s only a matter of time until an agent grabs this.” This is very unlike me.
I started querying this book on September 1, 2025. My fifth query got me a request for the full manuscript. After that, over several weeks, there were around four more requests.
These were the best results I’ve ever gotten, and the fastest.
When I got the first pass on the full, I cried because I felt like I had gotten so close. She said she couldn’t quite put her finger on what to do to fix it, which meant that she wasn’t open to a revise and resubmit, which is when an agent gives you feedback, you revise the manuscript, and then you send it back to them to reconsider.
I was so sad. But I moved on and kept querying, with the same leisurely attitude. After that rejection, the self-doubt started creeping in, but I did my best to silence it and keep my chin up.
And as I said, I kept getting requests, so I still felt okay, all in all.
I only query agents I can really picture myself working with, and one of the agents I queried, I reached out to her, among other reasons, because on her manuscript wish list, almost everything she said she wanted is stuff I’ve written or want to write. I remember finding her and going, “Oh, cool! We have a lot in common.”
So I queried her via email!
She responded in about 30 minutes and asked for the full, and she seemed excited about it.
After a few days, she followed up and turned me down. She said that she loved the plot, but it wasn’t her flavor of humor, and that was that.
I thought, “Well, what the hell. If it’s a no, I might as well try.” I followed up and basically told her that I was very comfortable making revisions, if she’d be open to reconsidering, and she was!
We exchanged a few emails and talked about what would need to change, and I told her I’d get to work.
She ended up emailing again, telling me that we should hop on a revision call first—which was so exciting for me!
We got on that call the next week, and she said, “I read it again, and this is actually an offer call, not a revision call.”
Trying (and failing) to contain my excitement
I struggled to play it cool, and honestly, I probably didn’t.
She had so many positive things to say about the rom-com, along with ideas to make it even stronger, and it just went so well. I thought we had great chemistry. I mentioned my romantasy, and she was interested in that, too! (In fact, I just sent it to her this week.)
And here we are.
I didn’t sign the agreement right away. The etiquette is to let the other agents with whom you have pending queries know you got an offer, and that was a chore because I had pending queries for three books. It all moved fast and was a bit stressful, but it was a chance to learn and grow, and I did!
Now, it’s official, I signed the contract, and it’s a done deal. I am so happy. So grateful. So excited for the future.
Agents aren’t lying to us about the publishing industry
One thing I learned throughout this experience is that agents are being very truthful when they say the publishing industry is subjective.
Off and on, I wondered if this was something that said just to gently let us down. But I believe that it really is that subjective.
With my rom-com, one agent passed because she didn’t love the pacing. One didn’t like that it had swearing in it—which I could easily remove, but anyway. One said he liked it, but it was just far enough outside his lane that he didn’t feel like the right agent for me.
The changes my agent mentioned wanting to see were different from things I heard from other agents. She also mentioned things she liked about it that were specific and unique, that other agents might not have noticed.
All of this is to say that I do believe you can send the same manuscript to 10 agents and get 10 completely different opinions. We can choose to look at this as frustrating, or we could choose to see it as an opportunity. One agent might hate it, another could easily love it.
What did I do differently this time around?
I want to share a few things I did differently with this book that I think helped me. Again, I’m only sharing my experience.
A shift away from a mindset of fear
As I said, my mindset with this manuscript was different. I was calmer and slower with querying. I would send one to three queries a day, and then let it go.
Even if this didn’t contribute to getting an offer of representation, and even if you don’t believe that mindset matters (personally, I do), it certainly felt a hell of a lot nicer than desperately sending queries and stressing, and refreshing my inbox, and refreshing Query Tracker, and agonizing over everything.
And let me be clear, I have been rejected hundreds of times at this point. Sometimes, I’m able to let the rejection go very quickly. Other times, it hurts really badly. It really wears on you.
But the last couple of manuscripts, I just told myself, “I’m going to be writing no matter what because I love it. So if this manuscript doesn’t make it, maybe it’ll be the next one.”
Something else that was interesting…I can be the most positive person in the world, but I realized that I was regularly saying and thinking, “I know it’ll happen for me, but this industry is so competitive. I know it’ll happen, but it’s so saturated. I know it’ll work out, but…but…but…”
It was always positivity with fear latched on at the end.
I start most mornings with meditation or affirmations, and recently, I started writing affirmations in my journal that were entirely focused on how easy this is—how easy it is to get an agent, and how it’s already done. I already did it.
I got the offer three days later.
If nothing else, it felt good to try to be less fearful. But could that have played a role? Maybe.
Getting hyper-specific with who I sent query letters to
Something else I did differently? I was very picky with who I queried. I’ve always been targeted in my queries, but with the rom-com, I got even more laser-focused. I especially utilized Publishers Marketplace to find recent deals for books like my own, and I tracked down those agents to query.
To do this, I went to Deals > Latest Deals, and then I used the search field to look up keywords relevant to my book, like rom-com, romantic comedy, Denver (my book is set in Denver), influencer (my protagonist is an influencer), and so on.
Researching comps relentlessly
Another thing I did—and I actually did this before and after writing the manuscript—is I got really serious about researching comparable titles, or comps, for short.
I largely used Publishers Marketplace for this, but also Amazon.
I’ve talked about comps before, in this video:
I spent hours researching comps for this book, both to help me understand what readers of this niche like and to understand what currently sells.
Looking back, I think this was very important.
It’s a bit of trial and error, but I unearthed so much helpful information, and I learned a lot about this segment of the market.
Why was this time different?
Why, ultimately, did this work out? Why did I get an offer on this book, but not on any of the previous manuscripts I wrote?
Well, let’s retrace my steps a bit.
I first queried my agent with my query letter and first three chapters. She wrote back about a half-hour later, asking for the full.
So, we can assume it was a strong query letter and strong opening pages, and it was a concept she really liked.
The perfect query letter wouldn’t have mattered with weak opening pages. A perfect query letter and killer opening pages wouldn’t have mattered if I queried an agent who just wasn’t interested.
So, I feel like it all matters.
I don’t think there’s any magic trick. I think there are several variables, and this time, with this book and this agent, they all came together exactly as they needed to.
I’m so glad I followed up with her. If I hadn’t followed up after she initially passed, that would’ve been it!
It’s crazy. We are sometimes one decision away from either progressing to the next step or not.
Looking back, I feel like over the years I’ve pursued agent representation, every step has been about trying to increase my odds even a little bit. And maybe that’s what this is, what a lot of things are in life: trying to increase your odds.
Every time I sent a query letter, I increased my odds. With every new manuscript I wrote, I increased my odds. It’s about constantly finetuning your approach and dialing it in.
It’s so ironic that the book I wrote in one month, “just to have fun” while I was waiting to get my fantasy edits back, is the book that got me my agent.
My future as an agented author
I know that getting an agent doesn’t guarantee success. But this is such a huge step forward for me. I’ve enjoyed every moment. I’ve celebrated it. I’m so happy and so proud of myself, and so glad that I never gave up. I can’t wait to see what comes next. I think amazing things are around the corner.
And I’m happy that I can now move past querying and progress to the next step! I closed my Query Tracker account, which felt even better than I imagined. :-p I learned a lot from querying, but I won’t miss it.
Thanks, as always, for going on this journey with me. Here’s to the next step!