What this Sweet Summer Child learned through her excruciatingly long agent-acquiring process

Learn from my errors

Cute lil summer ‘scape because finding an agent is stressful

It took me 3 years to get an agent. It’s a long story that I want to share because when I was looking and querying and strategizing, I craved hearing about other people’s experiences. It won’t be a how-to (if anything, you’ll get plenty of how-not-tos). It’s meant to be an illustration of a very winding road that did end up in a great book deal, in hopes that other writers, particularly other journalists, may find some tactical inspiration and above all, encouragement. Getting an agent might take a while. It might take 3 years. Don’t give up too easily.

(By the way, if you’re short on time, you can skip to the TLDR section at the bottom)

When I was a reporter on the Quartz tech team, I stumbled upon a brief magazine mention of 1960s “computer dating.” Paper questionnaires, punch cards, and room-sized IBM computers matching up tens of thousands of college students 50 years before Tinder was invented? I wanted to know everything. I had the idea to trace the history of online dating through interviews with regular users. My editors were very supportive. Alas, a widespread national scam needed investigating, and the story went on the back burner -- even more so when I was selected for the investigative team covering misinformation. 

And then, Covid hit. My team, along with 40% of the newsroom, was laid off. Suddenly, I had a lot of time. Like many other journalists, I decided this was the moment to write a book, and my book would be this idea that had been on my brain for more than a year. It would be a sweeping oral history of how we find love online, much like Studs Terkel’s 1970s doorstop masterpiece Working (If I’m being completely honest, I was enamored with Working and the idea of it, but I never actually finished it). 

I worked on it during the summer of 2020, consulting only online resources on “how to write a book proposal” and the classic book with the same title. I came up with something I was pretty proud of. 

Now, I was not one of those talented people who’d been contacted by an agent because of their journalism work (I still feel a certain way about it, god help us ambition-pilled millennials), but by pure accident of birth, a cousin’s partner worked for a prestigious literary agency in New York. They are not an agent, but were very enthusiastic about the proposal and the idea, and I had high hopes. Sweet summer child. The senior agents were much less enthused, the bottom line being “dating books are hard to sell.” I was irked by that categorization, but okay. I did not consider going to someone just starting out within the agency, which was my first massive mistake, fueled by a stature-addled brain and probably some hubris.

I got over most of my self-doubt after this first rejection and figured I should send some cold queries. I chose two high-powered agents who represented 1) a book that was an inspiration to me 2) a writer roughly my age who I admired. One never responded, the other said the book wasn’t the right fit. Mind you, I was doing all this one-agent-at-a-time, and publishing is MUCH slower than any other professional world I’d been a part of (this is not a dis, they are all reading A LOT). This all took weeks or months. In the meantime (in addition to, um, getting married to my own online date, and a historical election I helped cover), I had been working on my sample chapter, the genus of the project -- the story of computer dating. 

One of my sources, whom I found through a 1966 magazine article (then a sophomore at Yale, now in his 70s), was an author in his own right, and he connected me with an agent at his own very prestigious agency in New York (I never learn). The agent responded, very nicely, that she found my ideas, research, and writing “fascinating,” but didn’t have a “vision” for how to structure the book and tease out an argument. (I’ll get back to this question of argument in a future newsletter, since this was something I struggled with and that I understand is a common issue. Also, you should know that agents love to use the word vision in their rejections). 

“I’m sorry to say that I’m just not the right agent for this particular project, but I have no doubt that others will feel differently:” I agonized over whether her sign off was genuine or whether it was something she said to everyone, but I decided to feel hopeful.