The oldest “Agents.xls” spreadsheet I can find on my computer is from 2018, but I think I first started dreaming about finding an agent long before that. I wrote my first novel-length manuscript when I was ten or eleven years old. I remember sitting at my childhood best friend’s kitchen table and outlining a story I still dabble in today.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, I suddenly had more time on my hands, like so many of us, and used that time to polish a few stories I’d been working on. By the end of 2021, I had two novels out with small publishers. But exciting as that was, and much as I love those works, I still felt far from my actual dream.
And, to be clear—I’m still far from it. Getting an agent is but one of many hurdles in a painfully long road. For many years, though, it felt like an insurmountable one.
In early 2022, I—somewhat inexplicably to those who know me—embarked on a journey to write romance novels. I wrote my first manuscript after having only read a few romances, then dove deep into the back catalogs of every romance publisher I could find. Since then, I’ve read probably two hundred contemporary romances, and learned a lot about what sells, what I like, and where those two factors overlap (a sadly small area, alas).
I submitted that first manuscript, in which a pair of climbing partners pretend to date in Silicon Valley, to a mentorship program and got hugely helpful advice from Emily Zipps and Emily Howard, then jumped into the querying game. While I sent off missive after missive, I kept writing. While I waited for full requests to come to nothing, I completed three more romances (and outlined three more besides). One of my writing friends has read them all with great enthusiasm, but I’ve made no formal editing efforts. I felt like I had to give FULL SEND / CLIMBING PARTNERS / THE BELAYSHIONSHIP (/ WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL IT, IT HAS NO TITLE) a fighting chance and not get too excited about anything else in the meantime.
And then came DVPit 2023.
Worth noting: all of these four romances have the same concept — everyone’s queer, everyone’s neurodivergent, and the politics is unabashedly left. I’ll work in an anticapitalist joke if it kills me. Autistic people will love and be loved and ADHD people will love and be loved and people who think they’re too much a mess to find a partner will find their perfect person. Disaster bisexuals will become slightly less disasters. Demisexual people will have sexual awakenings. There will be cats and Taylor Swift references and climate anxiety (and just regular anxiety).
DVPit aims to help “unagented, self-identified historically marginalized authors and illustrators” find representation. I’d sometimes struggled with whether my previous projects were worth pitching under the DVPit umbrella, because even if the goal is to uplift marginalized writers, my stories were not nearly as diverse as my real life. But my rom-coms were full of people like me, and I finally didn’t feel like an imposter pitching.
This was also the first DVPit after the demise of X, née Twitter, and so it was a Discord pitch competition. Basically, we’d all descend upon the same Discord server on DVPit day and post three 280-character descriptions of our projects, plus diversity tags and comp titles. We could post about as many projects as we wanted.
I’d never had any luck with Twitter pitch contests. I barely use Discord.
I pitched all three romcom projects that I’d never queried (or even revised), plus FULL SEND or whatever it’s called. It got no likes, but one of my projects—about estranged childhood best friends who reconnect after a giant earthquake—got agent likes and also interest from an editor. And one of those agents was Eric Smith.
Let me fangirl a little here. (Is that cool? Is that okay? I am trying so hard to be chill).
There are agents who maintain a distance from Writer Twitter (and now Discord), who have a simple website listing their clients and occasional written interviews with publishing-industry publications about what they’re looking for. I have absolutely nothing against them, but they’re hard to get to know.
Eric, though, is all over the internet, cheering people on. He’s the epitome of “Gate’s open, come on in!” energy. Where some agents say they want underrepresented voices in their inboxes but then sign the same familiar stories over and over, he’s out there doing the work to make underrepresented voices more represented. Where I’ve been told repeatedly that my autistic characters are hard to connect to, he connected.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I was excited about any agent likes, of course, but I was screaming-crying-throwing up excited about Eric’s interest. Unfortunately, the manuscript he was interested in was the least ready of my projects. Why couldn’t it have been one of my projects with tons of revising behind it already? Or at least one of my projects that literally anyone had read.
DISASTER ROMANTICS (to be given a better title someday soon) was, at this point, literally a first draft. It had no chapter breaks. It was littered with all the typos that come with writing a book in 2.5 weeks. Yes, I wrote it that quickly—and then never looked at it again.
I queried him, since he’d asked, and got the first 25 pages into a presentable state. I assumed I’d have at least a week or two to attack the rest of it.
But then he sent a full request five minutes later.
I panicked. I took two days off work and figured out chapter breaks, filled in the TODOs (including some critical oversights I’d forgotten about), and generally lost my mind. My partner took two days off, too, to read the whole thing and catch every typo I left. I thought it still needed major work and the pacing felt all off, but I was out of time. I sent the manuscript and told my main critique partner that at least this was forcing me to stop ignoring the manuscript.
I figured nothing would come of it.
And then got The Call two weeks later.
It was an absolute whirlwind. The manuscript went from almost an afterthought to my main focus for the foreseeable future, this plot that I thought was a total long shot that no one would understand found a champion, and I went from despairing at ever getting noticed to having an agent in a few wild weeks. Here’s the breakdown of my querying journey since 2022:
Total queries:
WINTER BURNING:
(Very) loose Snow White retelling in which the disaffected princess leads a revolution while falling in love/getting over a breakup with a fellow revolutionary. There are also witch hunts.
42 (in 2022)
- 42 queries
- 0 full requests
- 19 rejections
- 23 closed no response
FULL SEND:
A firmware engineer at a toxic startup and her climbing partner fake date after her coworkers misunderstand climbing partner for romantic partner.
6 in 2022, then the mentorship, then 195 in 2023
- 195 queries
- 7 full requests
- 35 closed no response
- 48 withdrawn (received offer for other project within 12 weeks of querying)
- 105 rejections
- 0 offers
DISASTER ROMANTICISM:
Estranged childhood friends fall in love as they struggle to survive after a sequence of disasters in rural California.
- 3 (2023)
- 3 queries
- 3 full requests
- 1 offer