Querying Agents

3 Things I Wish I’d Done Differently

The summer of 2018, I was working on an early draft of this story about a Vegas trip gone wrong when I met Marian Thurm in her class at the Yale Writers’ Workshop.

Marian and I bonded over the course of our week in New Haven. During our one-on-one meeting, she asked if I were working on a book. At the time, I was three years into my novel, Lit by Burning, and I told her just as much. We talked about agents, the querying process, and publishing in general. At the end of our conversation, Marian told me to send her my novel when it was ready, that she would pass it on to her agent.

It took another year for me to finish my book. Even though I had professional copywriting experience, I struggled a lot when I sat down to write the query letter. I didn’t fully understand this in the moment, but my novel was an example of literary fiction with no plot. The book explored big ideas like race, class, and self-loathing. But it explored all of these ideas only within the context of my protagonist’s inner conflict. There was no external conflict to measure her character growth as she grappled with each of these themes. In general, the query letter was hard to write because I had no plot to summarize.

But at the time, I was 25, halfway through my MFA program, and I couldn’t see that I had written a plotless book. All I could see was the 368-page manuscript that I genuinely didn’t know what to do with anymore. So, I thought I might as well query.

The Blackmailer’s Guide to Love by Marian Thurm is available everywhere books are sold.

I emailed Marian for advice on the query letter, and she asked me to send over my query and manuscript. After I received her feedback, I edited the letter once more, and she sent everything to her agent. With my newly revised letter, I queried 13 other agents. One of the agents had solicited me based on my Twitter presence, and another I had met a few weeks prior at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop. I submitted to the other agents on my list because they represented authors whose books had a great impact on my own work. Out of those 14 agents, I received 11 manuscript requests, and one offer in December from Marian’s agent, Robin. The whole process took about 12 weeks.

Now that I have some distance from my time in the query trenches, here are three non-obvious things that worked well for me and three things I wish I had done differently.

What Worked

1. Summer Writing Workshops

Summer workshops provide an excellent opportunity to (1) be in community with other writers and (2) meet industry professionals like agents, editors, and established authors. Typically, when you meet an agent, it works like a speed dating event. Most workshops have writers submit a query letter to the agent, and the agent edits it during the fifteen-minute meeting, all the while explaining how to improve the pitch. Sometimes at the end of the meeting, the agent will request to see the manuscript when it’s complete. These events taught me the best practices of pitch writing. I’ve included a list of the workshops I’ve attended below:

• Tin House Summer Workshop

• Sewanee Writers’ Conference

• Mendocino Coast Writers Conference 

• Yale Writers Workshop

Most of these workshops are best suited to literary fiction writers. Tin House, Sewanee, and Mendocino offer scholarships for their programs. Scholarship recipients typically still have to pay out-of-pocket for their transportation to and from the conference.

If taking a week off work to fly across the country to a workshop doesn’t make sense with your life, that is completely okay! Attending workshops definitely did not make or break my querying experience. I’ve included a free online resource for pitch writing in the next point.

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2. Screenwriting Pitch Methods

Nearly 80% of the agents I queried requested to read my full manuscript. I originally trained to be a screenwriter in undergrad, and I owe a lot of my query success to the pitch techniques I learned in college. If you’re looking for a place to learn pitch writing techniques, I recommend starting with this Studio Binder Video. The video focuses specifically on pitches for television shows, but the concepts translate well to novel writing.

3. Active Twitter Presence

I received my first agent solicitation in June 2019. The agent called out this particular tweet as the one that prompted them to reach out. That same week I had also tweeted about:

• My Korean Folklore Research

• My #1000DaysOfSummer Word Count

  • Check out

    CRAFT TALK
    by
    Jami Attenberg
    if you haven’t already!

• My Novel Progress

Last month, I read Show Your Work by Austin Kleon, and this book perfectly describes the philosophy that I’ve always had about social media. I’ve been actively documenting my novel writing on Twitter and Instagram since 2017. Two years later, an agent asked to read my novel when it was ready because she had stumbled across the public record of my work on Twitter. If you’re nervous or shy about showing your work online, I highly recommend reading Kleon’s book and becoming a documentarian of your process. It could get you noticed in your field.

What I’d Do Differently

1. Not Query in September

There are a lot of theories about “good” and “bad” times to query agents or submit a book to editors. Some agents and editors have debunked these theories as myths. Some agree that maybe it’s a good idea to give the Fourth of July a wide berth. Let me tell you about my experience querying in September. 

First, a quick caveat: I queried pre-pandemic in 2019, so take all of this with a grain of salt. It’s also important to note that it typically takes eight to twelve weeks to hear back from agents. Of course it’s possible to hear back sooner or later, but this is the timeline that many agents mention on their websites. Always default to the submission guidelines on the agent’s website.

I queried in late September. Eight weeks after September 25th is the week of Thanksgiving. Twelve weeks after is the week before Christmas. You probably see where I’m going with this. When you get an offer of representation, it’s industry standard to give all other agents with your manuscript two weeks to read and make a decision. Robin gave me an offer on December 11th, and most of publishing closes down until the new year on the Friday before Christmas, December 18th in this case.

This means that the other agents with my manuscript had one week (five business days) to read my book and make a decision during one of the busiest times of the year. In the end, everything worked out well for me. Robin, Beth, and Gen at Writers House have been a perfect match for my work. But I could see a writer in a similar situation feeling forced to make a rushed decision. My advice, take it or leave it, is to query the very first week of September, or wait until October.

2. Write a Query Letter Before Starting the First Draft

If you’re a discovery writer and your process is working, feel free to skip to the end of this post. In my first Twitter thread, I talked about why I stopped being a discovery writer. 

I left out an important detail in the thread. My novel, Lit by Burning, eventually died on sub because it didn’t have a plot. At this point in my writing life, I had yet to realize that external plot (what the character wants to win, stop, escape, or retrieve) was my biggest writing weakness. I thought that good prose could make up for anything. But now with all my experience as a professional writer, I know it absolutely cannot. Since external plot was my greatest weakness, I was not able to “discover” a strong plot in any of the six distinct drafts I had written before going on sub. But if I had attempted writing a query letter during the conceptual stage of the process, I would have seen the problem and saved myself six years of work and months of heartache.

Now, this pre-draft query will obviously not be the same letter you query with once the book is complete and polished. I think of this pitch letter as a living document to guide me through my first draft. I’m not bound to anything it says. It just helps me ensure that my story has a strong, overarching plot.

3. Use a Story Structure Outline

For the same reasons I wish I had written the pitch before I started writing the book, I also wish I had written a plot-driven outline. Concrete, plot-driven outlines are exactly how I conceptualize narratives for my company’s games. I have to outline because my boss doesn’t have time to read pages and pages of writing in order to approve a narrative. Adding an outlining step to my personal writing practice has tremendously improved my writing life. For more details on the outline strategies I use, check out my first craft lesson available for free on Substack.

Recap

Kat’s Querying Tips

• Attend Summer Workshops (if possible!)

• Learn screenwriting pitch techniques

• Share your work online

• Avoid querying in September

• Write a query letter early in the process

• Outline with a concrete story structure

That’s all for this week. What are your querying dos and don’ts? What pitch techniques do you use? What’s the best advice you’ve received for querying? Share your tips in the comments below.

Next week’s free letter is about revision and maintaining a healthy relationship with your work. On Sunday, 11/27, the next craft lesson covers the most important tool in my writing tool box. If you—like me—struggle with developing external or internal conflict, this lesson is a must-read.

Subscribe today for access to my craft lessons. Classroom handouts and activities are available for Founding Members.

See you next week,

Kat