What this Sweet Summer Child learned through her excruciatingly long agent-acquiring process
Learn from my errors
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.
It was time to do some revising. That spring, I had two different people in the industry look at the proposal and get their comments (flowers were sent as thank yous), and generally kept hearing excitement about the project. I also asked a friend for her proposal and got access to another one via an online writers community I was part of.
One of the people I asked for help, a book coach I unexpectedly met through a mentoring program for high school girls I was doing at the time, suggested that my oral history framing was archaic. We were “not in the 1970s” and no one would buy it. I noted this, but while I took a lot of her suggestions, stubbornly persisted with the form. I would be the Svetlana Alexievich of online dating!
In the summer of 2021, I ended up with proposal draft number 2, which I thought was much more fleshed out. Sweet summer child.
Here comes the next big mistake and lesson. The mentorship program I’d been doing (my mentee is now a rising junior in college and I get weepy just thinking about it) had a small group informational session about query letters for both mentees and mentors. I’d been placed in a Zoom breakout room with a very big time agent, one of the heads of the same prestigious agency I’d queried the year before. She was very intrigued by the project, and loved my query. I felt like by pure dumb luck of the draw, I scored in a major way. We agreed to be in touch after the session. This was June 2021. A week later I sent her the proposal, noting I was still working on the sample chapter. I got a response in the second half of August asking me about my sample. I was almost done, but while visiting family I badly sprained my ankle, which involved flying back on crutches and dealing with PT and doctors and bad insurance. I sent the sample in September. I followed up in December, using a piece on dating I’d published as an excuse (always a good idea to use new pieces as excuses to follow up). Nothing. At that point, I had not queried any other agents because I was so awed by how big of a name was interested in my work (notice a theme here?). I followed up again in January 2022 (this is a full 7 months after the initial conversation). Here’s what I heard:
I did read the proposal and think it has promise although it needs a lot of development, and the sample chapter is good. I have passed it onto a colleague who might be a better fit for the subject matter and she will get back to me in the next few days.
She said the sample was “good!.” A big time literary agent said it was “good!” I was thrilled. Alas. Sweet winter child. I never heard from the colleague.
This time in the meantime (I hope you’re enjoying my life story), Russia invaded Ukraine and I was a) horrified b) itching to do something, anything, as I witnessed from afar all my family and friends back in Poland pausing their lives to help with the refugee crisis. I got on a plane to Warsaw, reported a bunch of stories, delivered some first aid kits and walkie talkies. I am so, so glad I got to do that. In May I had a devastating death in the family, which put everything else on hold. We were in the summer of 2022.
Here was the next idea, and I’m not exactly sure what was the sequence of events, but bear with me, because this could provide you with an idea for how to identify a good target agent. At some point in the previous years, while browsing at a used bookstore, I grabbed a book on politics that looked intriguing, and flipped through it. By some miracle, my eyes rested on the endnotes, where I saw my name: the author had cited two of my pieces.
While querying, I remembered this fact, and had the inspired idea to use this as a networking opportunity. I’d already been familiar with the agent because she had an active online presence and I liked her vibe and her helpful attitude (I’m fairly certain she was an occasional commenter in Binders Seeking Literary Agents, a group I highly recommend joining if you’re not a cishet man!). I emailed the author who’d cited my work, asking for an introduction. They very graciously agreed, stipulating that the agent was swamped. But the agent immediately responded that they were interested. Again, here I was, thinking, “this is it, I’ve found an agent!”
There was an interesting wrinkle in the response: the agent said that without even reading my proposal, they suspected they knew what would be their main suggestion, and asked me to revise accordingly. The suggestions were threefold:
a) That I need an explicit, discrete argument that would appear throughout the entire book, built into every chapter summary.
b) That I shouldn’t frame it as an oral history.
c) That I needed to be crystal clear on what my target reader was going to get out of this book, why would they invest nearly $30 in a hardcover.
These notes made a lot of sense to me, so I decided to do what this agent asked and stick with them. I wouldn’t query anyone else.
Reader, it took me more than six months to get this done. This time, I listened to the suggestion and gave up on my oral history dreams. I checked in December, she said please take your time, she was busy -- thank god. I submitted the revised proposal in February. I checked in March, and then in April. Finally I heard that she was, in the end, too overwhelmed with current work to take me on (very apologetically). We were approaching the third summer of me working on-and-off on the proposal. Sweet summer child.
I finally learned not to just query one person at a time, and asked two professional connections to introduce me to agents they’d worked with.
Someone I’d been helping with their book (if she lets me, I will reveal her in my book acknowledgments because I am eternally grateful) introduced me and sang my praises to her agent who forwarded the proposal on to her colleagues because it wasn’t a fit for her. Two agents raised their hands. Even then, it took the second call to land on someone who really got the project. And that’s the extremely long story of how I ended with (a lot of credit card debt) my amazing agent, Sarah Khalil.
TLDR:
1) Initial enthusiasm does not an agent make.
2) Be creative in how you reach out to/connect with agents. Cold querying is far from the only option, and is likely the least effective. Work your network, and think about all its corners!!!! I never expected to be connected through the mentoring program. The work that led to the introduction to my agent came from an Instagram story in which I was asking around for gigs!
3) Remember that as much as you may hate this, the proposal is a sales document. You have to convince everyone along the way that your book is worth publishing.
4) The timelines in the publishing world are looooooong.
5) Well-known, senior agents are very, very busy. Consider someone younger looking to build their list.
6) Be smart about timing. There’s varying advice out there on simultaneous querying. I was too nervous to do that, wanting to be as deferential as possible to the agents I was reaching out to. That’s likely part of what made my journey so long. Whether you’re going to query one agent at a time is a diplomatic puzzle you have to figure out for yourself, but maybe don’t take three years to do it.
7) Rejection is such a normal part of this process. I heard about someone making themselves a coffee-shop-style punch card where for every 5 rejections, they got themselves a treat. I endorse this idea, but I also endorse getting yourself a treat after every single “sorry, this isn’t the right fit for us.”
P.S. If you’re joining as a paid subscriber or considering becoming one after the free trial is over, this series will take you through the proposal and book selling process through the lens of my own experience (and a couple of friends’). You’ll read, and be able to ask me about:
The query letter
The issue of ARGUMENT
The author bio
Marketing plan strategies
Comps and audience
Chapter summaries and structure
Things that I never even thought about considering in the proposal until my agent told me otherwise
Taking the author picture (woof)
The money bits
… and more!