How I got my agent

Never was a tale of more woe...

Whatcha waiting for?

For me? Okay.

Cue the lights.

It was January 7, 2020 when I sent out my very first query for Dark Moon: The Resurrection Sword.

Wait, you say, I thought you got your agent with The Wandering Dolls?

Shh. Pay attention.

It was a quick rejection. But I persevered, even did a few pitch contests. I don’t think I got a single full request off that manuscript. The manuscript I’d been writing and rewriting since I was nine years old. The book of my heart.

But that’s okay. Because, during the time I was querying, I was also working on my next book, codenamed Death Dream, real name Alice, Undone.

It was a YA fantasy with horror elements and I finally got some fulls on it. One rejected me because it was an Alice in Wonderland retelling (which, incidentally, was noted in my query). It was disheartening, to say the least. Turns out, the market wasn’t ready for a fantasy about mental illness.

But during that time, I’d been working on yet another YA fantasy, this one a dark fantasy called, you guessed it, The Wandering Dolls.

But wait, I thought Dolls was adult fantasy?

Shh, we’re getting there.

I queried it as a YA fantasy and got a few bites but no offers. I then revised it as an adult fantasy and sent it to about XX people.

But I didn’t give it much of a chance. While querying Dolls, I’d been working on The Beautiful Enemy, which some of you know as Godkillers.

So I gave up on Dolls and queried Godkillers. Got a couple of high profile fulls and close calls, even got some interest from an editor at Orbit. In the end, it burnt out just like Dolls did.

But that’s okay because—are you sensing a theme?—while querying Godkillers, I was working on Howleirauh, my fairy tale retelling, which still doesn’t have a good title.

Howl was a doozy. As a YA it was going nowhere, and my career was starting to feel more adulty, so I pivoted again. Howl the adult version. And I queried it. Got fulls from some really great people. But I was getting rejections on those, and I was running out of steam, and hope. It was then that I was looking through past stats of The Wandering Dolls and I realized that, as an adult book, I’d never really given it much of a chance. Besides, it had been 2 years. The market was different now.

So, on May 25, 2023, fully three years and change after I’d sent my first query, I participated in #PitDark, a twitter pitch contest for all things horrifying, dark, and eerie.

I got 5 likes total, and one like on the above tweet. If you read my last newsletter, you might have guessed that the person who liked this tweet was Maria Brannan, an agent unfamiliar to me from the UK.

I sent out my materials. A couple weeks later, I got a full request from Maria. Three days later, she sent me an email asking if we could talk.

Guys, it’s the good kind of “can we talk.”

My conversation with Maria was magical. She’d loved Dolls. She understood its feminine rage and folk horror elements and flawed characters. She had big plans for sending it on sub and getting it translated. I knew I was going to be in safe hands with her.

And that, my friends, is how I got my agent.

Yes, that’s a very awful photo of me signing my contract. Don’t judge.

What I haven’t told you is, in that time, I drafted four more books that didn’t make the cut. Grave Sins, I Am Become Death, NecroWIP, and The Ghost of Hightower Pond.

Five if you count TarotPunk, which was going to be the book I queried after Howl if Howl failed to get me an agent.

So yeah, that’s a lot of near misses. A lot of failure. A lot of starting and stopping. Some people do write one book and get an agent in less than a year…but that wasn’t my story, and it probably won’t be yours.

And that’s okay. Because you’re going to keep writing, right?

I also haven’t mentioned all the people who helped me along the way. My betas. My writing friends. The Goattes. The Mighty Pens. My family, even though they kept asking me “when’s the book coming out.” I had help through the process. I also had luck. I worked damn hard, but I’d be nowhere without that luck.

For you stats junkies:

• The Resurrection Sword

  • data unavailable on querytracker

• Alice, Undone

  • 38 queries / 2 full requests / 0 offers

• The Wandering Dolls (YA)

  • data unavailable on querytracker

• The Wandering Dolls (adult)

  • data unavailable on querytracker

• The Beautiful Enemy

  • 46 queries / 4 fulls / 0 offers

• Howl (YA)

  • 10 queries / 1 full / 0 offers

• Howl (Adult)

  • 53 queries / 2 fulls / 0 offers

• The Wandering Dolls (take 2)

  • 20 queries / 3 fulls / 1 offer!

Taking a look at this, I know what I’d do differently. I’d cast a wider net. I got very selective towards the latter books and I gave up too easily. I assumed that if I wasn’t getting requests, then the book was bad, when maybe I just hadn’t queried the right person yet. Maybe I’d have gotten an agent sooner. But would I be as good of a writer? I don’t know.

What I do know is, don’t limit yourself. Because maybe that agent you’ve never heard of is the perfect person to represent you.

In Conclusion

I won’t do updates because it hasn’t been that long, but I’ll see you in August for another round of “What’s C.J. writing, reading, listening to, and art-ing”