A year ago, I got my literary agent
A breakdown of what I did wrong, and what I did right
This week, an email arrived that felt auspicious: my QueryTracker premium membership was set to expire. For normal folks, this may mean nothing, but for authors seeking publication, it’s usually (hopefully) a good thing. QueryTracker is a wonderful website that allows you to submit queries directly to literary agents and track their responses. I could let it expire because I now had an agent.
One year ago, I was still very much in the trenches of my querying journey. A query is the letter that would-be authors send to prospective agents advertising their book, alongside a writing sample and other materials (like a book synopsis) as requested. If you aren’t familiar with the querying process, consider yourself lucky. It can be grueling, and there’s a cottage industry of podcasts and blogs and coaches out there dedicated to getting you through the process. Signing with a literary agent is the first step on the road to publication for many traditionally published authors, and it’s a process that, for better or worse, requires a whole different skillset than actually sitting down and writing a decent book. In this newsletter, I thought I’d share my own querying journey and hopefully demystify it a bit.
First, here’s a little timeline of my book, from inception to getting an agent:
2019-2020: Had the idea for the book (a historical novel set during the early years of WW2, inspired by the place where I was living in England at the time); wrote a few pages that became chapter one
November 2021: Committed to getting serious on the book through NaNoWriMo (RIP); did NOT write 50,000 words in a month but did get maybe 20,000 words down; continued working on it desultorily
Fall 2022: Finished the first draft; worked up the courage to send it to a few friends who read it and were kind enough not to say it was terrible and I was crazy to have written it
Spring 2023: Began to halfheartedly research agents; sent about ten queries to UK-based agents—only rejection or ghosting in response!
Summer 2023: Moved internationally; no time to write/query.
Late Fall/Early Spring 2024: Revised the manuscript (including turning all the Britishisations into Americanizations, because I enjoy hard labor) and began researching the query process in earnest and getting my query materials together.
March 6, 2024: Sent my first tranche of queries!
Sometime in March 2024: Decided my book needed a prologue; wrote it the next day and included it with all future queries (I don’t recommend this, kids, but it turned out OK).
End of April 2024: Received my first offer of representation!
Mid-May 2024: Signed with my wonderful agent, Kesia Lupo
All things considered, my primary querying journey was short. I was incredibly lucky to have less than three months between when I started querying and when I signed with my agent. But as this timeline indicates, the project itself was old; it had been gestating for years by the time I started querying in earnest. In the first ten or so queries that I sent in Spring 2023, I made several mistakes that many first-time writers make when they begin the querying process:
Mistake #1: The project wasn’t as polished as it could be.
This book was the first work of long fiction I’ve ever written—and the first work of fiction, full stop, I’d written since high school. I had LOTS of writing experience in other genres, but fiction was totally new to me. In retrospect, it makes total sense that writing this book felt awkward and wrenching at times. I had no idea what I was doing.
But once I had a draft together—a collection of words fitting within the proper word range for my genre with a beginning, middle, and end—I thought I was ready to send it out into the world. This draft wasn’t terrible, but I hadn’t fully fleshed out all the aspects of the plot or motivations of the characters. (I’d also given the book a vague title that only made sense to me—not a great selling point.) When I came back to my book a year later, I could see much more clearly what I’d been trying to achieve and the relatively small tweaks that could make it better. (And, as the timeline above shows, I was still making tweaks—writing a brand-new prologue!—even as I began querying for real. The first book is hard, y’all.)
Mistake #2: I hadn’t done enough research to allow me to pitch my project correctly.
As I said earlier, querying requires a skillset entirely separate from the skills you need to write a book. You need to understand the publishing market, how genres work, and how your book resembles other recent books. You need to know how to write a grabby pitch. You need to understand how literary agents work, what they’re looking for, the differences between agenting in different countries, etc. There’s a reason whole podcasts are dedicated to helping writers figure this stuff out—it’s not intuitive!
For my particular project, I needed to learn more about US vs. UK agents. Because I had written a UK-set book and was then living in the UK, I sent my first sad set of queries to UK agents only—but I’m an American. I didn’t understand at that point that US-based agents might also be interested in the project, and that they would be able to pitch my project to the UK market. When I began querying in earnest, I was back living in the US, so I focused on US agents while also sprinkling in some UK agents. And somehow, I ended up with the perfect combination of the two—Kesia is a Brit who is currently based in the US with extensive experience in UK publishing. The best of both worlds!
It’s also really important to read extensively within your book’s genre to get a sense of comparison titles for your project. As an English professor, I had read plenty—but very little recent historical fiction. I needed to fix that in order to make the project appeal to agents. You may feel like the book you’ve written has no parallels, but in the publishing business, being similar to something else is a good thing. Go to the library or your local bookstore and spend a long time hanging out in the section for your genre. Read, read, and read some more.
Mistake #3: I was afraid of commitment.
Querying is a full-time job (that many people do while working full-time jobs). It’s not something you can do halfway. It requires loads of man hours in terms of research and effort and wrangling of information. You have to have the mental and physical capacity to commit to the process, and when I dipped my toe into the cold waters of querying the first time, I was definitely not ready to fully jump in. I was going to be moving internationally in a few short months. I didn’t even know at that point where we were moving to. I didn’t have the time or the confidence to wholeheartedly commit to selling my book.
A year later, with the international move done and a big revision completed, I was ready to query again. Here’s what I did right the second time around that helped the process move (relatively) quickly:
What I Got Right In My Querying Process #1: I did the homework.
As I already said, there are LOTS of resources out there to help querying authors if you know where to look. You could start with my agent Kesia’s super helpful Substack. (I first learned about Kesia from her excellent and generous Twitter feed, before Twitter fully imploded and I left. Nowadays, you can find a lot of agents offering really valuable info on Bluesky and Threads.) The Shit No One Tells You About Writing podcast does query critiques every single episode; go through their back catalogue and find some in your genre. I also really relied on the BookEnds Literary Agency Youtube feed, and agent Jane Friedman’s long-running blog/newsletter.
Look up sample query letters. You can find hundreds of amazing ones online; here are two successful ones from Kesia’s authors Marve Anson and Caroline Madden. Subreddits like r/PubTips and r/writing can be super helpful to give you the lay of the land. Read, read, and read some more—or at least until you’re seeing diminishing returns. (At a certain point in my research, I felt confident that I understood what a query letter needed to do, so I stopped inundating myself in research, as it led me to second-guess my own instincts. Immerse yourself in research, then trust your gut.)
Once you’ve got your query letter and submission materials in good shape, you need to actually find agents to submit to. To research agents looking for submissions in my genre, I used QueryTracker, MSWL (a website where agents list what they’re looking for), individual literary agency websites (which you’ll always want to check for more specific submission instructions/info on whether an agent is open to subs/info on whether the agency allows multiple submissions), and Twitter. I kept an Excel spreadsheet with different tabs for US and UK agents. The columns of information I pasted there included: Agent Name, Agency, Looking For, What to Submit, Date of Submission, Result, and Contact Info. When I submitted to an an agent, I color-coded their row: yellow was “Query Submitted,” green was “Full Manuscript Requested,” blue was “Offer Received,” and purple was “Rejected.” (Red just seemed too cruel.)
Many US agents helpfully use QueryTracker for this submissions, so this is an essential tool for not just research but also managing your query subs. And I also kept a Word document plotting out each tranche of submissions (I sent queries to about 5-8 agents at a time, every few days) and keeping copies of different versions of my query letter/comp titles/one-sentence pitches, etc. This document eventually totaled 34 single-spaced pages!!
What I Got Right In My Querying Process #2: I stayed realistic and flexible.
Like many aspects of the publishing process, 95-97% of querying is rejection.1 You’ll be rejected immediately. You’ll be rejected on your birthday. You’ll be rejected late at night and first thing in the morning. You’ll be ghosted, which is rejection by another name. You’ll make a mistake with a submission and feel like you’ve rejected yourself. THIS IS ALL COMPLETELY NORMAL.
Kesia has recently written about the number of queries she receives; in one *week* of being open to queries, she got 1,029 submissions. HOLY MOLY. Agents can only sign a handful of new writers each year; and, as Kesia writes, her first obligation is to the authors she’s already signed, and to managing those existing relationships. Thinking about these numbers can drive a newbie author to despair, but I tried to look at the situation a different way: Rejection is the expected outcome of any query. You can’t take this rejection personally; it’s a numbers game. But if you’ve written a good book, done your homework, and committed to querying, eventually the numbers may go your way. And that number might be one: one full request, one offer of representation. That’s all it takes, as the hosts of this podcast say at the end of every episode.
Try not to take rejection personally, and try to stay flexible to where the querying journey may take you. Here’s a little secret from my own experience: I never actually queried the agent I ended up signing with. I queried another agent at her then-agency who seemed like a better genre match based on her MSWL; she passed the query on to Kesia, knowing that my book might fit her growing list. I had absolutely no control over this process, and I absolutely got lucky that my book ended up in Kesia’s capable hands; but you have to put yourself out there to have these lucky situations come your way. Last year I went to a talk by an established writer who told us that she queried her first book for many years, with no bites. Eventually there were no agents left, so she decided to try again with the first agent she’d queried years ago (generally a no-no), hoping he’d forgotten her book. He immediately sent her submission to another agent in his agency, who signed the writer. Weird shit happens in publishing. Know that the agent you think is absolutely perfect for your project will probably reject it, and that the agent you queried at midnight on a total whim may be the perfect advocate for your work. Stay open to the unknown.
What I Got Right In My Querying Process #3: I leaned on any resources at hand.
“The slush pile” is the somewhat insulting name for the literal or digital stack of manuscripts that are sent to agents without an invitation. I definitely had not been invited to submit my manuscript to any of the agents I queried, and most of the writers I now know weren’t, either. I had no industry connections, no one to recommend me or my work. In some ways, this is a good thing; it meant my success was dependent on my work alone.
But as I continued along the querying journey and started getting a tiny bit of traction (some full requests, eventually an agent offer), I realized that I *did* have a lot of resources at hand. Social media, for all its ills, evens the playing field between writers and agents; you can write to an agent directly and many will very kindly and helpfully write back. You can get a free query critique on a podcast or in a Reddit group. People want to help you!
Then I remembered that my sister had a good friend from college who was a literary agent for nonfiction. When I received my first offer, I asked my sister to connect us, and Katherine was incredibly generous in helping me think through my options. She also put me in touch with other writers, so I could learn more about their agenting journeys. These writers ended up being a tremendous help—and I met even more of them once I received offers from a few agents, who passed on the names of their clients. (This is something any agent worth their salt should be willing to do for a prospective client!) A huge lesson I learned was that writers want other writers to succeed, and they are, as a whole, open books about their own paths to publication.2
At the end of the querying process, I had nine full manuscript requests from roughly 100 US and UK submissions, and three offers of representation. (For reference, I had 208 US agents and 43 UK agents listed in my original spreadsheet that I *could* query, though many were not open to submissions and some probably weren’t even agents anymore.) Since I was only actively querying for about two months, I had a lot of nonresponses. I’m not sure if these numbers sound terrible or great to you, but I think, on the whole, I was really lucky—and I had put myself in a position to get lucky by following the steps above.
In the next newsletter, I’ll post the query letter that landed me my agent, annotated to explain what each sentence is seeking to achieve and why it worked. Join me then! xo Jill
This is an estimate based purely on vibes. I’m a writer not a mathematician, y’all.
A very cool thing: most of the writers I connected with in my querying process now have published books! They include Michelle Collins Anderson, Kristin Kisska, Gabe Henry, and Caroline Madden. Authors are awesome!
Thanks for the extremely useful insights. 👍
Great to read your journey, Jill! Congratulations! So much good advice here. Happy I got to be a part of the ride… 💙🖤💙