how i got my agent (or, an unexpected journey)

I wrote my first book over the summer of 2017, after years of knowing I wanted to be a writer but not considering it as a potential career path.

I was a newlywed and about to be a junior in college, and I had no idea what I wanted to do after graduation. I might have given up on my dream of being an author forever if not for my husband Sam’s encouragement. The book was a middle grade contemporary fantasy about an anxious girl and a rehabilitation center for magical creatures— not my favorite genre or age group, but an idea that felt manageable and homey. I revised the book to the best of my ability over the next few months and queried it that fall.

The book was not done, and the query letter was awful, but I had no way of knowing that. At least, not until the rejections started rolling in.

It was around this point that I realized all of the Writer Things were happening on Twitter, and I should probably see what that was all about. Through Twitter, I learned about Author Mentor Match, and (again, at Sam’s encouragement, who I’d be totally lost without) forced myself to apply to Round 4 mere hours before the application window closed.

To my shock, I made it in— with my first choice of mentors. I was stunned and delighted that Sarah Kapit (go buy her books!) saw potential in my little middle grade story, and determined to make it everything it could be. With her help and hours and hours of work, I completely rebuilt the book from the ground up. It took months, but Sarah helped me through the several rounds of revisions that the book needed.

Meanwhile, I started toying with another story idea. It was an idea I’d had as soon as I typed “THE END” on my middle grade, and all I knew at the time was that it was a YA fantasy about a changeling raised as the twin sister of the human she was meant to replace, about the connection between changeling mythology and autistic children. I’d been too afraid to write a character like me— an autistic Latina— when I wrote my middle grade, but I was ready to write outside the default now. In fall 2018, in between rounds of revisions for my middle grade book, I wrote a couple thousand words…but they went nowhere. I didn’t know what the story was about.

So, I went back to my middle grade. I wrote a shiny new query letter and, in early 2019, sent out my first few queries.

This time, it went much better. Within weeks, I started getting full requests. Most of these requests went nowhere, but I had about a 10% - 20% request rate. Even though each rejection was devastating, I was making progress.

(Okay, I was a complete wreck. It’s easy to know you shouldn’t take rejections personally, but it’s a completely different thing to actually DO IT. I cried. A lot.)

Determined to distract myself from the agonizing waiting, I went back to that YA idea. I outlined it, figured out what kind of story I was trying to write, and pushed myself to work on it every single day. I was a senior in college now, and for my last semester, I was in school part-time, working two part-time jobs (one of which was a 90 minute commute away), writing my YA, and waiting for query responses on my MG.

I cried. A lot.

But then it was summer, and I’d managed to land my dream job, and my writing brain was working again. I finished the first draft of that Changeling Book sitting in my favorite coffee shop on a sweltering August day, and I was so excited about it I felt like my heart could burst. I polished it up and sent it off to Sarah, since by now I’d realized I was terrible at revising without notes.

Then I got the Revise and Resubmit.

It was from a dream agent, at a dream agency, who loved my middle grade book, but thought it would work better in first-person. Fair, I thought. Writing my YA, I’d realized that first-person POV comes more naturally to me. It seemed maybe a little nuts to completely rewrite my book for just one agent, but at that point, I was desperate.

So I rewrote the whole book in six weeks and sent it off. Knowing that this would be my last round of queries for that book, one way or another, I sent the new version to the last few agents on my query list and waited.

One late autumn day in 2019, I was standing over my stove, cooking spaghetti for dinner, when the email came in. The Dream Agent had finally responded to my first-person Middle Grade manuscript, the one I’d rewritten just for them…

And they still didn’t want to represent me.

That had been my last hope for my middle grade book, a book that had wound its way tighter and tighter around my heart with every polishing pass. I knew it was over. I cried in my kitchen. All the rejections were the same, over and over— You write well. I know readers will love your book. But I just can’t connect with it in the way I’d need to represent it.

I’d put so much of myself into this book, and I couldn’t help feeling hopeless. That there was something wrong with my voice, something fundamentally unrelatable.

Sam found me crying into the spaghetti sauce and hugged me, reassuring me that everything would be okay. He presented me with a little box, and told me it was a gift that he’d been waiting to give me until the right moment. Inside, nestled in tissue paper, was a resin necklace containing a tiny spray of forget-me-not flowers— a necklace just like the one my changeling character wore in my YA book. “So you don’t forget that I believe in you,” he said, clipping it around my neck.

My YA book needed extensive revisions. I knew that my dream for the project was bigger than what I could do on my own, but I was determined to make it as perfect as possible. Using Sarah’s notes (again…Sarah is the best mentor that anyone could ever ask for, and I will be eternally grateful to her!), I slowly pieced together a new version of the story. I was almost done with revisions in early spring 2020, and as I watched the PitchWars showcase unfold, I promised myself that if I didn’t have an agent by that fall, I would apply for the program.

Then the world shut down. My job went fully remote. My biggest unrealistic fear became my new reality, and my book still wasn’t done. I carved out a new writing space in the back room of my house, somewhere I could force myself to work, a page at a time, and I wrote a new ending to the story I loved. I knew it wasn’t fully done— that it might never be— but it was ready to query.

In spring 2020.

So, that went badly. Really badly. After the relative success of my first time querying, the complete lack of responses was maddening. And when I say lack of responses, I don’t mean rejections. I mean absolutely nothing.

No requests. No rejections. Even my multiple solicited queries sat for six months, unanswered.

I cried. A lot.

And I tried to write a new book, but who was I kidding? I still had big dreams for revisions I wanted to make, and I’d written my YA as the first book in a duology despite my better judgement, and it was summer of 2020. That was never going to happen.

I waited. I watched the world fall apart. Slowly, rejections trickled in, though most of my queries remained unanswered. Friends and acquaintances and published authors reviewed my query letter and sample pages to see why I wasn’t getting any bites, but they couldn’t find anything glaringly wrong to explain it. And that deep, excruciating fear— the fear that I was (and my neurodivergent characters were) fundamentally unrelatable, that no one would ever “connect” with my stories— grew deep and wide enough to swallow me whole.

I pushed it aside. I entered pitch contests and barely made a splash— no agent likes, and only a few editors who accepted unagented submissions. I yeeted my book into the void of their inboxes. It didn’t matter anymore! No one was ever going to want my books! Might as well!

PitchWars rolled around, and I applied. I got a full request— from the mentor I wanted most! This is it, I thought to myself. This is Fate. This was how it was meant to go all along. I’m going to get into PitchWars, and my mentor is going to help me do everything I want to do with this book, and I’m going to get dozens of agent offers in the showcase. It all makes sense now!

I was waiting for the 2020 election results, mindlessly scrolling through twitter, when I saw that the PitchWars mentees had been announced early, and my stomach sank.

I’d never heard back from that full request. I hadn’t heard back from anyone.

Still, I clicked the link, just to confirm what I already knew: I didn’t get into PitchWars.

I cried, possibly more than any of the times before.

PitchWars had been my last, last hope. I believed in this book even though no one else did, but its chance seemed to be over before it had even begun. No one wanted my stories, no one saw them the way that I did. To most of them, the book I’d poured everything into didn’t even deserve a response. I curled up into a fetal position and played Breath of the Wild and slowly accepted that I was going to have to start over, from scratch, with a new book.

Exactly one week later, I was at the same aforementioned Favorite Coffee Shop, listlessly noodling away at a feeble attempt at A New Book, when something completely different dropped into my inbox. It was from one of the editors from the pitch contests months ago, who I’d sent my full manuscript and then promptly (hopelessly) forgotten about.

They loved my book. They wanted to make an offer on it. They had to run it by the rest of their team first, but they wanted to reach out and let me know.

I burst into tears again, right there in the coffee shop. I called Sam at work, still sobbing:

“Someone— wants to buy— my BOOK!”

It was mid-November 2020, and I was still unagented, but SOMEONE WANTED TO BUY MY BOOK!

With help from Sarah and my more experienced writer friends (shoutout to Cat, Vika, and Lyndall!), I put together what was affectionately referred to as the Hail Mary Query List— my actual last chance.

Weeks later, after the editorial meeting and the acquisitions meeting, the official offer came in, and I was able to nudge all those agents, because now, it was urgent.

Of course, because My Luck, it was also like a week before Christmas, and everyone was going on vacation. The publisher graciously extended my response deadline into the new year, so I’d have the chance to hear back from agents.

And then, finally, this silly little book, the one that was more me than anything I’d ever written, started to get full requests. I was on an anniversary weekend trip when I had my first The Call, and Sam listened in from the other room of our Airbnb, a goofy grin on his face the entire time.

I got an offer from an agent I loved at one of the first agencies I’d ever queried, who said they said they read my entire book in one day. Then, right after Christmas, I got another offer from an agent who was enthusiastic about everything that made this project weird. They both said they would negotiate with the small publisher who’d made me an offer, and that they could get me a better advance and better terms from them.

Either of these agents would have been great choices, but there was a deep, dark part of me that kept dreaming bigger. I liked the small publisher, but who doesn’t have that dream of a big, splashy debut with a Big 5?

Then Victoria Marini at IGLA emailed me. She was the Hail Mary-est of my Hail Mary queries, the agent who represented one of my favorite authors ever, Margaret Owen, along with a bunch of other established authors. She hadn’t finished my book yet, but my deadline was quickly approaching, and she loved the first few chapters so much that she wanted to make sure she was able to set up a call before I had to give the publisher my answer.

It was too good to be true, but it was true. I literally danced around my house for days until— finally— it was the day of The Call.

Victoria had finished my book, and— thank God— she still loved it.

She wanted to offer me representation.

And she wanted to turn the smaller publisher down, because she thought that with one more intense round of revisions, I could possibly sell it to someone at a Big 5.

IT WAS EVERYTHING I HAD DREAMED OF. I already had a list of things that I wanted to improve about the book, constructed over the months of waiting and dreaming about PitchWars. I liked the other agents who had made me offers, but come on, this was meant to be.

In the end, I sent 60 total queries for both books over the course of about 3.5 years. I got seven full requests and three offers on my YA— all after I’d received an offer of publication (which is completely out of order, and nearly fried my poor little rule-following autistic brain!). If you’re doing the math, that totals over fifty rejections. 

So I signed with Victoria, and we got to work on the revisions that slowly shaped my little Changeling Book into the lighthearted YA fantasy epic I always hoped it could be.

And Sam, the true hero of this story, my biggest cheerleader ever, took me out for a celebratory dinner.