How I Got My Agent

When I was a querying author with a manuscript and a dream, I desperately combed through roughly 100,000 posts just like this one. I had a version on my old website, but since this topic is so important to so many aspiring writers (and readers seem interested too), I thought I’d do an updated version that hopefully helps a writer querying a book in 2025! Come along on my journey and you’ll see that in order to find representation and publish a book, you don’t social media status, a network of people to get you “in” or anything fancy. Just a solid manuscript, a thrilling pitch, and a tolerance for constant crash outs.

The Rejected Manuscripts

The first thing I want to make sure you know is that CAKE EATER was NOT the first book I’ve written or the first book I queried. It was the third. I collected roughly a hundred rejections on my previous two book attempts. There are tons of incredible writers who have had to shelve ten or more books before getting an agent.

Does this suck? Yes, absolutely. It is soul crushing. One of my besties and I likened querying to getting on a carousel of pain that features sticks and clubs that beat you as you whirl around instead of a fun pony ride. While you are on this cyclone of pain and fear, you scream “stop the ride! I wanna get off! And NEVER do that again!” And you might stop the ride and take a break. That’s a valid choice. Sometimes a crucial choice. But if you love writing, if you’re going to survive the world of traditional publishing, if you’ve got what it takes to be a professional author, then something insidious and magical will happen. Once you’re off the carousel of stick beatings, you’ll somehow forget how painful and vomit-inducing it was. You’ll say, “eh, that wasn’t so bad. I can do it again. Yeah, actually? I’m gonna go prepare to do it again.”

And you will unhappily receive another beating, wonder what’s so terribly broken inside you that you keep doing this, and go happily chasing the next plot faerie into the sunset, already mentally preparing for your next nightmare carousel ride.

I want to be encouraging and supportive of aspiring writers. But I also don’t want to serve up a bunch of BS. That’s why I won’t downplay how dramatic and awful this process can feel. The writing industry will serve you rejection no matter how talented, skilled, well-educated, original, or trendy you are. There is no escaping eventual soul-crushing rejection. If you can understand and accept that now, if you feel that writing and sharing your writing feels incredible, drives you to get up in the morning, is worth a shredded self-esteem, a murky existential crisis, and KO punch-level self-doubt, then you’re ready. You can do this. We can compare our scars together and pull each other through the journey.

Writing Cake Eater

I’ll write a lot more about the actual process and techniques used to write CAKE EATER in other posts, but for story purposes I’ll do a quick re-cap of how long it took me to write the book and how I did it.

CAKE EATER started with my French Revolution obsession which re-ignited after I took a short trip to Paris and visited Versailles. The seed was planted in high school when I loved Les Miserables and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette film. (Remember that soundtrack?! Served my Myspace for years.) When I got home from my trip, I re-watched the film and got ahold of a few non-fiction French Revolution books.

The obsession returned full-force as I discovered the distinct personalities of the Bourbon family, the court gossip, and drama, and the tragedy that was the dream of the Revolution versus the eventual reality. I texted my friends facts about these historical figures constantly. We imagined who they might have been, really, what they thought of each other, what an average day was like, how they spoke.

And this is, more or less, how you develop fictional characters. One day, I randomly imagined the anachronistic Converse-wearing Marie Antoinette of the Coppola film as a modern day teenager (this was actually Coppola’s inspiration for the film’s themes), the more I thought about it, the more twisted and Black Mirror the vision became, and the idea for CAKE EATER was born.

My ideas for the novel were so clear I was able to draft the whole book during (the now defunct) NaNoWriMo, which challenges authors to write 50,000 words in a month. This was the first (and last?) time I’ve ever written something so quickly. CAKE EATER had a special spark for me. But my work wasn’t done. The book went through several drafts and beta readers before I felt it was ready to query.

The Query Letter (aka The Carousel of Pain)

To get a literary agent, you’re going to need an effective query letter. Your query letter pitches your book in an attention-grabbing fashion, showcases your voice, briefly summarizes your credentials as the author, and lets the agent know you understand your market and what kind of reader will pick up your book.

Does that sound like a lot of work for one letter to do? It is. Writing a query letter takes knowledge and practice. For me, the most helpful resource was by far, Query Shark. Unfortunately, the editor who ran the site, Janet Reid, passed away, but the archives are still a great source of knowledge. Janet gives writers feedback on their queries, and you’ll get to see these writers attempts to implement that feedback, learning what works and what doesn’t along the way. Seeing these letters workshopped and watching them progress is the closest thing you’ll get to experience-based learning outside paying for a class or workshop. I highly recommend looking at Query Shark and seeking out the many examples of successful query letters gracious authors have so often shared for free online.

I struggled with writing query letters. There’s a lot of conflicting advice. Some of that advice will become outdated fast in a reader market that moves at the pace of a TikTok trend. But here’s something universal to remember, a good query letter effectively shows the reader who your character is, what they want, what’s stopping them from getting it, and emotionally involves the reader in your characters journey (offering the agent reading some evidence that you can do this throughout the course of a novel).

Sure, things like trends, dead markets, overused tropes, and unpopular character archetypes could stop you, but if you offer a hook of a plot so intriguing that the reader can’t say no, you’ll likely receive a request for the full manuscript despite these other stumbling blocks. They may not lead to an offer, but you want agents to request to read your entire novel. If they do, it means your query is working. If they don’t request, they probably aren’t even looking at your sample because the pitch just didn’t grab them.

In the novels I queried before CAKE EATER, out of around 100 queries I only received about three requests to read more. That means my query letter bombed. I can see now that I didn’t know how to write a good pitch back then. But that’s ok. If you can figure out how to finish an entire novel, you can figure out how to pitch as long as you’re willing to practice with an open mind to criticism.

Contacting Literary Agents (aka Screaming)

Stunning query letters and rock-solid sample pages will only you get you so far if you don’t know how to contact literary agents. The practice of mailing out printed copies of your manuscript has been left in the pre-Internet age. Now, even sending out a simple email with QUERY in the subject is a little passe for some agents. Many of them want you to submit via form on the site Query Tracker.

The good news about this is that Query Tracker is an easy tool to navigate that can also supercharge the speed of your agent research. It contains a database listing agents, their contact info, the agency they work for, submission requirements, genres represented, and authors represented.

This is everything you need to build out the list of agents you want to query, and you absolutely should create a list that will track submissions statuses before you hit send on a single query. Please bear in mind that each agent and agency has their own preferences and rules for submission. Yes, this is inconvenient for querying authors, but you MUST follow these rules, or the submission will end up in spam or the trash before the agent reads a word of what you’ve sent.

How I Chose My Agent List (aka Being Delusional)

First, I had to figure out which agents represented my genre, and which ones were open to queries. Some of them close their submission pool for holidays or to catch up on other work.

With the basics out of the way, I built up a list of agents who were newer to the industry but belonged to a reputable agency. This criteria meant the agent was trustworthy, had the support of more experienced colleagues, and they were more likely to acquire new clients as they worked to build their lists. These newer agents are seen as “easier” to get an offer of representation from, but as you’ll see from my story, that’s not always the case.

About 60% of my list contained newer agents and I reserved 30% for more established agents and 10% for dream agents that represented big name authors that I admired. I figured the 10% list was just for fun. If I’m sending out dozens of queries, I might as well send out a few delusional ones as well. When rejection is inevitable, I wasn’t scared by the idea of receiving a form rejection from an agent I never expected to land in the first place, so no harm done.

Receiving Requests for Full Manuscripts (aka Crying)

My CAKE EATER query letter was leaps and bounds more successful than any I’d sent before. Sometimes I received a request to send the full manuscript within the hour of sending it. I averaged around 6 requests for every ten queries sent. Imagine my shock when one of these requests came from a DREAM AGENT.

I told myself not to get too excited and went out to stress eat ice cream.

Some of my queries ended in quick rejections with a polite form note. Unfortunately, you should expect a boilerplate rejection. Agents receive hundreds of queries a week and can’t offer personal feedback to all of them.

Now, imagine my surprise again when my dream agent… rejected me but offered personal feedback???!!!

This was different from any of my other rejections. Her assistant offered me a kind and complimentary rejection, emphasized how much she liked the concept but pointed out what wasn’t working for her. Cue my existential meltdown (the night before my cousin’s wedding at a hotel bar with my sister). I had been SO CLOSE. I felt like I had a chance to bat at the big leagues and struck out. I wasn’t good enough. If only I’d worked on my craft more before I sent that query.

But here’s the thing. When I sent my query, my book was the best I knew how to make it at that time. There was nothing else I could have realistically done. But of course, while I queried and waited for responses, I wrote other things, learned about craft, and thought about the fate of CAKE EATER and the book I wanted it to be someday when it was a finished product on a reader’s shelf. I improved and got new ideas for my book.

As more rejections slowly trickled in, I realized that I really resonated with the advice sent by the dream agent. It mostly centered on some issues with the opening of the book. I pondered and mulled and talked myself in and out of revising again, and ultimately? I stopped sending queries after about my 20th letter and took a month to rewrite the first third of the book.

When I was done with that revision, I felt great about the result. I felt like I’d truly made the book better. It was too bad my dream agent couldn’t see it now.

Or could she?

I wasn’t sure if it was a faux pas to re-query someone who rejected me. Sure, I could query a different agent at the same agency, but the same one after a pass? Well, without that agent’s feedback, I wouldn’t have completed a revision I was proud of. Maybe her note would end up being the difference between representation and this book dying in the query trenches.

I decided to send a brief email thanking the agent and her assistant for feedback that led me to a helpful revision. I did (of course) offer to give them a look at the changes if interested. I hit send on that email with the bracing, dread-filled flop of someone leaping into cold water. I was so sure what I’d done was a rookie move, and my email would go ignored.

Delusion may have led me to query this agent in the first place, audacity allowed me to send the follow up email, but I was not so detached from reality that I expected any response, let alone an offer to send the book again. Therefore, I sent about 15 other queries that same day, including one to another agent on the long shot list.

Well, let it be known that I’m chronically unable to predict anything that occurs within the publishing industry.

My dream agent’s assistant was pleased the feedback helped me and welcomed another chance to read the book.

Cue my screaming, crying, throwing up.

This HAD to be the last chance for real this time. I would hit a home run or strike out for real this time, and I’ve always sucked at softball.

To top it off, a SECOND AGENT off my longshot list asked for my full manuscript.

To say I was thrilled but also a nervous wreck during these wait periods doesn’t begin to describe the range of emotions I flew through from one minute to the next. At one point I was so emotionally drained, I pet my friend’s cat and started crying because I was so overcome by his beauty (and I’m not much of a crier). Then I had to lay down on her coach and almost fell asleep (I’m also not much of a napper.)

A few days later, my agent’s assistant told me they were loving the book and wondered if they could have an exclusive submission. I could guess what this meant, Googled to make sure, and understood it as a request to stop submitting to other agents until they’d made their decision. I explained that a few other agents had the full manuscript, but I was happy to pause further submissions until they finished reading. They were happy with this and promised to get back to me soon.

I tried my best not to launch my hopes to the moon, but I had hard, digital, hopeful evidence right in front of me. I was very close to an offer of rep from my number one agent choice.

The Offer (aka Throwing Up)

I will never forget the day I got my offer of representation from my dream agent, Merilee Heifetz at Writers House. I chose to query her, and she was #1 on my list because I really liked Writers House, personally knew an author who recommended them, and Merilee represents some of my absolute favorite writers. (The estate of Octavia Butler? Queen of Science Fiction? Hello??)

I got my offer around 8:30 AM while I was at work in the good old, pre-Zoom infested days of attending a real live office. I had been waiting for offers or rejections with unhinged anticipation, so when I heard that strange whooshing, dinging iPhone email noise, my heart stopped for a minute.

I had an email from Merrilee. The subject just said, “Wow!”

The moment didn’t feel real. My manager knew about my publication dreams, so I just sort of waved my phone at her and said, “it’s happening.” I tried to read the email, but my hands were shaking. The words blurred. I could tell from the long, complimentary paragraphs that I had an offer. I managed to type out an “I think I have an offer?” message to the bestie whose cat I cried over.

She seemed to instantly materialize from the office space across the hall. “What does it say?” she asked.

“I can’t read it, my hands are shaking,” I said.

My manager laughed. My friend took the phone and read the whole thing out loud.

It was an offer. A kind, intelligent, incredible offer that represented what the experience of working with my agent would become. This email was the culmination of so much work, practice, research, pounding at keys, sketching out plots, dreaming of people and places that aren’t real, but seemed so present and important in my life.

I’m not sure I’ve ever done anything more rewarding than writing and publishing a book, and that would not have been possible without this day, without representation from my fantastic agent.

In future posts, I can explore the nuts and bolts of how to get representation, how to write queries, how to figure out (to the best of your knowledge) when your book is ready for submission. But for now, I wanted to revisit this amazing moment and take you on a little trip through a highlight of my writing life.

I hope you enjoyed the chaotic ride, and please feel free to send questions if you have them.