I know that getting a literary agent can be a somewhat mysterious process, so this post is to explain the route I took.
I’ve heard stories of writers being contacted by agents after viral pieces, and these stories are very cool, but alas, are not something that happened to me. Trying to write something that will go viral and catch the attention of agents is not necessarily the best plan because a) turns out you can not will something into going viral and b) I’ve known people who have been contacted by agents, but those agents turned out to not be the right fit. But sometimes it does work out and this is great! But that is not the only way to get an agent. I found my agent via a method that many authors use—querying.
Query history
I first queried a book project in 2004 (!) — and spoiler alert, that querying did not lead to me finding an agent. I had written a proposal for a travel narrative about a trip I had taken through Asia that felt unusual at the time. I got some requests for the full proposal and some nice rejections, and then let that idea go. In retrospect, it’s one of those things that I’m glad never came to fruition because it was kind of a straight travelogue and probably not the best idea for a book, but hindsight is 20/20.
A few years later, I took a book proposal writing class and tried reworking the same basic idea into a book of humorous travel essays (naively not realizing how difficult it can be to sell a book of essays). I sent out a few more queries/proposals, but when those didn’t pan out, I threw in the towel on the travel idea.
Then life happened (mainly, having kids) and I shelved the book idea for a while and also shelved doing much writing for a while. When I eventually got back into writing, I just focused on submitting shorter pieces here and there where I could. Post-kids, I picked up a lot of momentum and got some good bigger name publications under my belt, and then one day, I got a new idea for a nonfiction humor book aimed at introverted parents.
In the meantime, I had also been reading things like Jane Friedman’s site and listening to things like the #AmWriting podcast and knew that platform was pretty essential to getting an agent and selling a nonfiction book proposal. I worked on continuing to build up relevant publications as well as build up my social media following so that when the time came, I would hopefully have some kind of platform.
Next round of querying
In 2017 I decided to really try to buckle down and write a new proposal. I knew the basics of writing a proposal from the previous class I had taken/proposals I had written (so writing them was not a complete lost although I probably didn’t want to hear that at the time!) I also used books like the aptly titled How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen and read through some of the proposals that had successfully sold that are available to members of ASJA. I worked on my proposal on and off for about six months.
During that time, I also researched agents through things like Twitter, MSWL, Publisher’s Marketplace, and Query Tracker. Around month four of working on the proposal, I wrote a query letter and set up a “10 minutes with an agent” chat with an agent through MSWL, just to make sure I was on the right track. I had a nice video call with an agent who offered some small tweaks to my query and then said she was willing to look at the full proposal once it was done.
A couple of months later, I finished the proposal. I sent the full proposal to the MSWL agent and then queried about 12 other agents who looked like they were good fits and then obsessively checked Query Tracker to try to determine when they would reply. A few days later I got a couple more requests for the full proposal and checked Query Tracker some more to try to calculate how long it would take them to read it.
Two agents got back to me with declines about two weeks after I had sent the full proposal. Both sent really helpful personal notes and they declined for different reasons (one thought the idea was better suited for magazine articles and the other liked the idea but thought the approach should be different).
I was still waiting on a response from the third agent but decided to keep up the momentum by sending out a few more query letters. One of the agents I queried requested my full proposal later that same day and then a couple of days later emailed me to say she had read it and wanted to set up a call. Later that week, we talked and she offered me representation. She gave me a couple of weeks to think about it and tie up loose ends with other agents I had queried.
So I emailed all the agents that I hadn’t heard back from and said I had an offer and to contact me within a week if they were interested. With my email “nudge” about the offer, I got one more decline and one more request for the full. The agent who requested the full ended up politely declining it.
In the meantime, I did some research on the offering agent and talked to one of her clients. I liked everything I found out and I also liked her enthusiasm for the project and I felt like she really understood it. So after thinking about it for about a week, I decided to sign with the offering agent.
After I signed with her, I ended up getting a couple more requests for the full proposal, but I told those agents I had already signed.
After signing
I signed with my agent in 2018, but my proposal wasn’t ready to send out. It needed some revisions and I needed to continue to work on my platform (which turns out is kind of an ongoing process). We eventually sent it out in late 2019 and then the world shut down in March of 2020 and I kind of assumed nothing was going to happen with it for a while, so I was surprised when my agent called me in April of 2020 to say a publisher was interested. That publisher was Countryman Press (an imprint of W.W. Norton), and the book came out in August of 2021.
I also know writers who have published books by going straight to the publishers and published without an agent or found agents after they already had an offer with a publisher. This is all just to say, there are many possible paths to publication, and finding an agent is only one step on one of them.