Back in October, I signed with my incredible literary agent—Rebecca Eskildsen at Writers House.
Weirdly enough, my querying process started with me giving up.
It was spring of 2022, and I’d completed a YA fantasy novel that just…wasn’t working.
I knew it wasn’t working. I really loved the concept and the characters (especially my stabby, scowly protagonist), but several things about the story didn’t feel quite right, and I’d gone through dozens of drafts without figuring out how to fix it.
My critique partners suggested that I put the book away and start working on a new one, because they were tired of watching me bang my head against the wall, and I knew that was a good idea. I did start drafting some new projects, but it was so hard to let go of the things that I loved about this particular novel.
Fast forward to May 5, which was the day of #APIPit. (If you haven’t seen that weird-looking jumble of letters before, it’s the hashtag for an annual Twitter pitch event, where writers pitch their books to agents within 280 characters, and agents “like” the pitches that they want to see in their inboxes.)
I’d always wanted to participate in a Twitter pitch event, and I decided there was nothing to lose. I had a complete manuscript on my hands, albeit a frustratingly broken one, and I figured I might as well give it a shot before I put it away for good.
This is the pitch I used:
Unexpectedly, the mysterious Twitter algorithms worked in my favor that day, and my pitch ended up getting liked by 10 agents.
I was both shocked and grateful—and a little dismayed, too, since that meant I had to send my broken book out into the world. (At that point, nobody had seen the manuscript except my critique group and, briefly, the inside of my garbage can.)
I sent queries to most of the agents who’d liked my Tweet, including Rebecca. When I started getting partial and full requests, I felt more confident that my query package was working, so I queried a few more agents aside from the ones I met through #APIPit.
In total, I sent out 16 queries over the course of a month. Those resulted in:
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