I HAVE AN AGENT! Now what?

Inside the seven-year, in-progress journey to try and publish a novel.

The first query letter I ever sent was in 2016. I was thirty-four and had just learned what this term, “query letter,” meant a few months earlier. For the unacquainted, it is an email you send to a literary agent, summarizing your book to see if they are interested in reading it, with the goal of ultimately representing you to publishers. One needs a literary agent to sell a book to most major publishers, and, in fiction, your novel has to be fully written and polished before you can “query.” The whole process is chock-full of rules and etiquette—you must begin each letter with Dear [Agent Name], for example—which one must follow closely, especially if, like me, you’re starting from scratch and going in cold.

It was for my first novel, which I originally called MAN MADE (did you know you have to capitalize book titles in queries?), a coming of age story about a woman in tech who discovers herself through a deep friendship with an older woman writer. It was, in many ways, a fictionalized version of my own life, as, I would learn, most people’s first novels are. The main character was named Molly, having always felt that that name (ie. that American Girl doll) was my true self personified. 

That novel got me into writing. I wrote scenes privately for years, not knowing what they would become, but needing to articulate certain feelings so often that I eventually tied these passages together into something that could be called a story. I had no idea how to write a novel. I had recently graduated business school and, as an engineering undergrad, had mostly taken classes with numbers, not words. I wrote in secret, ashamed to admit that I thought I was talented enough to spend time putting thoughts to paper. When I finally shared my writing process with a guy I was dating at the time, he laughed and said “I don’t think that’s how writing a book works.”

I’m generally uninterested in this thing called plot, and drawn mostly to the internal landscape of characters, just kind of hanging out in someone’s head. Which is the kind of book I attempted to write. An excerpt of it was what got me into my first writing class, at Catapult the year before I started querying, then my first writing workshop, at Tin House earlier that year. I chipped away at this novel for four years in total, and sent letters to about 50 agents. 

The shocking thing about query letters is that most agents do actually read them (eventually), and—at least for fiction—no matter who you are or what your social media following is, if they like your sample pages, they’ll mostly respond. I had no connections to agents whatsoever, but scoured the internet to understand the process, and gathered a list the good old fashioned way—by stalking people on Twitter. I put together a spreadsheet of names and emails and started sending somewhat recklessly at first, having very little clue what I was getting into. I treated it like an experiment; if agents didn’t reply, I went back and edited the novel and then tried again. Over time, many agents did reply asking for more pages (a good sign!) but ultimately they all wanted more plot and I didn’t get an agent for the book.

But I did get an agent eventually—for nonfiction. She had read some of my essays, and then read the novel but wondered, since it was so close to my actual life, why I didn’t just write an essay collection instead? Sure! At that point I’d do whatever it took. We pitched that essay collection to publishers in 2018. It got rejected one sad email with kind feedback but ultimately bad news after the next. So I modified it! I wrote another essay collection (a proposal; in non-fiction you mercifully don’t need the full manuscript) based on the feedback. And pitched it again to the publishers who said they would be open to a revision! Still, nothing. Shortly after, my agent left the agency and that collection, its revision, and my first novel, lay lifeless in the “writing” folder on my computer.

At the very end of that year, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. I had broken my foot at a holiday party, dancing with my good friend Janak, and couldn’t walk for months. I was also winding down my consulting work and figuring out what to do next. I’d saved some money and was depressed as fuck about not being able to leave my house, so I decided to write a book with a goddamn PLOT. I knew almost nothing about what I would write, except for one thing: there would be a murder.

An idea for a story had been settling in my head, one of these start-to-end visions that doesn’t come often. So in those first three months trapped in my apartment (which would turn into a year trapped in my apartment since I re-broke the same foot a month after it healed, and then another year trapped in my apartment since this was 2019 and 2020 was around the corner), I wrote the whole book in a kind of fever dream. The first scene was inspired by me dancing with my friend Janak. 

My good friend Maya (an amazing editor if you’re looking), did an editorial read for me. She’s great at her job for many reasons but one of them is because she meets you where you’re at, connecting with what you’re trying to do, not trying to make it into something it’s not. So many times with writing, you hit a wall, your brain can only go so far, and you need someone to blow oxygen into your brain to help you go further. Maya did that for me over and over through the writing of this novel. As did my friends Rumana and Ryan, who read the whole thing multiple times like the angels they are.

But midway through 2019, I got funding for my company Chorus, which felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I completely forgot about the book. Every time I considered going back to it, I thought it was cheesy and dumb and why the hell did I put a murder in a novel? Why the hell was I—someone who clearly knew close to nothing about any of this—even trying to write a novel? I didn’t look at it—physically could not look at it for THREE WHOLE YEARS—embarrassed for myself. I focused on my startup instead.

Chorus launched in Dec of 2019. Then shit got bad. 2020 was one of the hardest years of my life, not that I completely realized it at the time, but looking back I had never been more unstable. I spent 2021 trying to get my feet back on the ground. Finally, by mid-2022, I was ready to re-engage with writing. I was working on a new novel-ish project but wasn’t finding the groove, I still felt too close to the material. So I went back and read my murder novel from 2019. And holy shit—I actually, weirdly, liked it.

There is nothing more valuable in editing than time away from a project and when I came back to the book I saw it’s flaws clearly, and I saw it’s potential, too. I spent the second half of 2022 revamping what is now lovingly referred to as the murd-nov. It, like my first novel, is a later in life coming of age story, inspired by female friendship, exploring themes of women in tech and online dating. But this time, it had a goddamn plot!

I started querying for the new novel at the end of 2022 and the feedback was good, even very good, but it still wasn’t good enough. Multiple agents said they loved the writing but didn’t know how to place it in the market; it wasn’t necessarily suspense, or thriller, or neatly literary, it was a mix. 

Dear Agent Name, THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT! I wanted to write. It’s a subtle everyday mystery, NOT a straightforward whodunit. One agent even asked me to rewrite the whole thing as a more sinister thriller, and I was so desperate that I rented a cabin in the woods for a week to re-imagine the book and then spent almost two months writing a thriller version of it when I really should have been looking for a job. As I tore it apart, it was clear I was slowly ruining the novel that I was actually pretty proud of by trying to put in cheap twists and turns for shock and awe. When I finally sent the revision to the agent, who I’d had multiple exchanges with about the new direction, she ignored me. (After multiple follow-ups she rejected me with a single-sentence reply.) 

It’s fucking hard to get a novel published. An agent gets you the chance to try to submit your novel to publishers. That’s it. There is a very strong chance that all the publishers will say no and then you’re back to square one. But it is something! It’s better than not being able to submit to publishers at all! And so, I kept re-writing and editing, and submitting to more agents.

The thing that everyone tells you is that it only takes one. The whole industry is insanely subjective and cautious, and so many of the books that do end up selling had dozens of rejections before getting there. I craved stories about people’s failure before they finally saw success, devoured them to keep me going.

In mid-April, I got an email from an agent whose silence I had assumed meant rejection. I had cold-emailed about thirty agents from the spreadsheet by that point. My novel “blew her away,” she said. She loved how human it was. She loved that it wasn’t a typical thriller, it was an everyday story. YES. YES. YES.  I texted my close circle of writer friends, the only people who could understand how huge this was.

It’s hard for people in real life, outside this weird world of literary etiquette to comprehend the significance of this step. That’s why you need writing friends. And Twitter. Twitter, god bless it’s dying soul, is full of talented, aspiring writers tirelessly trying to make a shred of progress in this unforgiving world of creative writing. The tweet about my agent was a million times more popular than anything I’ve ever shared on the site.

And so now I have someone to actually help me maybe try to get my novel published. Who knows what will happen in the next few months, but I can’t look ahead that far. I got here. And, in this strange world of literary fiction, that is something.