💚 how i got my agent

January '25 Newsletter 0.2

Hello beloveds, here I am today with the ever in demand HIGMA update!

For those just tuning in (I know there are some of you), accounts of “how I got my agent” (HIGMA) from authors who made it out of the querying trenches successfully are hungrily sought after by others seeking to achieve the same goal. I was one of those people until recently, always scrounging around the web to find what I could about the success stories of others.

What were their stats? How many times did they get rejected? What did their winning letter look like?

Fear not friends, I’ll be including all of that. But there’s a little more to my story, which isn’t as straightforward as it appears to be.

The boiled down version is that I got my agent with the third book I queried, a saga that began in August 2023, really kicked off in October with a pitch like, and concluded with an offer of rep in December 2024.

To be quite honest, I attribute my win to a lot of patience, perseverance, and an impeccable bit of unforeseeably lucky timing.

For a simple beginning, here are my stats:

111 queries sent
80 rejections
10 requests
1 offer

But there is more to those numbers than meets the eye, so let’s rewind a little, and I’ll tell you all about it.

I started querying my weird theater book in late August, 2023. Specifically August 20th. As a side anecdote, I recommend keeping some sort of log to track who you’ve queried and when. For me it was a document on Writer, my favorite free online word processor with an aesthetic that makes it appear as though you’re hacking and sounds like a typewriter. But I digress.

By the end of September, I’d sent out 16 queries. I was set on querying as widely as I could, while also being practical about my desires and limitations. My primary genre is fantasy, but I also love sci-fi and found it more difficult to query agents who would rep the former, but were not interested in the latter. Even though The Great Glavenisean Theater is a fantasy novel, I still wanted to keep my doors open for future works. But that said, I took some chances over the incoming months, flinging TGGT around wherever I thought it might possibly stick.

Now. October 11th, 2023. This is, without a doubt, the most significant date on the timeline. It’s the day I was on my lunchbreak at my detested job at Men’s Wearhouse, taking refuge (true to form) in the nearby local Barnes & Noble, and I realized that there was a pitch event occurring—DVpit.

Originally a pitch event hosted on Twitter that has gone on an indefinite hiatus since the end of 2023, DVpit was “a pitch event created to showcase pitches from unagented, marginalized voices that have been historically underrepresented in publishing.” While it was around, DVpit was perhaps the biggest pitch event in the online community.

For the unaware (hi hello dears 👋), Twitter pitch events have been a part of the writing community for about eight years, more or less. The premise is simple: on the day of the event, you gather with the hordes of other writers, fit the elevator pitch for your novel into a tweet, include the appropriate hashtags for genre and age category, throw it into the wind and hope for the best. Meanwhile, industry professionals, both agents and editors, will trawl through the event hashtag and peruse the goods. While comments and retweeting are encouraged by all participants, hitting the like button is reserved for agents and editors specifically. And if you get a like, that’s an open invitation to send a query. It’s a great way for agents who are closed to unsolicited queries to poke around and see if there’s anything that might interest them in the meantime.

Well, my agent is one of those agents who was closed to queries at the time of DVpit. And on October 11th, 2023, she liked my pitch.

As someone who has been an advocate for cold querying ever since I started with my first book in 2010, and has always felt the practicality of landing an agent from a pitch event is debatable, I now wrestle a little bit with feeling like a hypocrite. So many success stories feel like reiterations again and again of the same miraculous event; writers who got 35 full requests within their first three months of querying, writers who signed with an agent in six weeks, writers who had a pitch blow up on twitter and had multiple agents asking for their hand. These stories of big numbers and short timelines feel like unicorns—how likely is it that such a scenario could happen to you or me?

At this point, on the other side of the trenches, I’d say it’s as likely as anything.

My offer started with a pitch like. But it didn’t come until fifteen months after DVpit ended.

Folks. Querying can take a long time. A long, long time.

But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves yet. Back to October 2023.

At that time, DVpit had decided to switch platforms and migrate from Twitter to Discord. A different sort of beast, one of the hopes was that by using Discord, pitches could all be on the same playing field, instead of being at the mercy of the popularity algorithm on Twitter, where some large accounts would continuously outshine others due to the amount of engagement they got, boosted by their own social circles.

I had the fortune of being very familiar with Discord, as it’s where I find writing communities and shoot the shit with friends, so when I found out the event was happening while huddled in the Barnes & Noble cafe, I joined the DVpit server, quickly buffed and squeezed my elevator pitch into a post, doublechecked the hashtags, added an aesthetic moodboard I already had on hand from my tumblr, and hit send.

Thus my hat was thrown into the ring.

I didn’t expect anything to come of it—which I stand by being a healthy mindset for any pitch event you partake in (just have fun! meet new writers and learn about new stories!)—but by the end of the day I had three agent likes, all from prominent, reputable agencies.

One agent stated that a like from her was an invitation to send the full manuscript right away. The second requested the full the next day. The third requested a hefty 100 page partial about a week later.

I was, frankly, elated.

All the while I kept sending out letters, adding names to my lists, researching new agencies. I was not going to bank on a success from those likes, no matter how adrenalizing they were, and I knew that agents can take months upon months to read and reply to a full. I was prepared to wait, but I wasn’t going to not keep busy in the meantime.

By early December, my stats looked like this:

59 queries sent
26 rejections
6 requests (including 2 rejections)

At that time, my personal life was falling apart, but I had thrown myself into the querying process headfirst, and so I kept sending them out. If I couldn’t do anything else right, at least I knew how to have endurance and patience in the trenches. On January 4th, 2024, two days after my 28th birthday, one of the very first queries I sent back in August turned into a full request, from the assistant of the president of one of the agencies I was most interested in.

By that time, I hadn’t heard back from any of the agents who expressed interest during DVpit. But that was fine, I wasn’t biting my nails yet, and in less than two weeks, I got a reply from my most recent full. I pulled off the side of the road at the sight of the email notification, practically vibrating in my seat. The assistant told me that they had decided not to move ahead with The Great Glavenisean Theater due to several detailed reasons, but would be open to taking another look if I decided to revise and resubmit.

I was ecstatic.

Eager to dig right into revisions, I spent the next few months rehashing the TGGT, specifically the first hundred pages. During that time, I had the absolute pleasure of meeting Saint Gibson at the launch of her sapphic dark academia novel, An Education in Malice. When I went up to get my copy signed, I took my thirty seconds to ask her a question—based on her prior experience as an agent herself, did she have any advice on how to approach an R&R? After a moment of reflection, they said that first of all, it was important that I feel good about the suggestions for the revision (which I did), that they didn’t go against what I felt was right for the book. And secondly, they advised me that there is absolutely no need to rush during this process. The offer of an R&R would not be running away from me, and there was no need to put undue pressure on myself, regardless of how much I wanted to get it out as soon as possible.

Saint, if by some chance you ever read this, you were absolutely lovely to speak to. Thank you so much.

I submitted the revised manuscript at the tail end of May and received a response three months later. The revisions did not end up proving to be enough to move forward with that agent, but I was still tremendously grateful for all the feedback I was given, both before and after I turned it in. It was a highlight of my querying experience, and I felt positive that the changes, while not enough, still enhanced the manuscript. I understood why it had been a pass, and I agreed with quite a lot of the feedback; it was all floating along through my mind.

At the same time as I submitted the R&R, I also approached the agents who had requested from DVpit. I resubmitted one full, as well as the 100 page partial request. A few more requests came in during the summer as well, spawned from queries I sent after a couple more agent likes from QuestPit and QueerPit. I sent a few nudges as well, hoping to garner some movement from the agents who’d had my material the longest, and got assurances that I was still under consideration.

Then, September 8th, 2024. Nearly a year since DVpit. I received an email at 11 o’clock at night. Looking at the subject line, I saw that it was a reply from the agent with my 100 page partial. At this point, I was prepared for rejections, forbidding myself from getting my hopes up even about agents who I believed could be a really good potential fit, like this one.

For this was an agent who came from an agency I’d held in high regard for years, an agent who was willing to represent a wide spectrum of sci-fi and fantasy, who mentioned two of my favorite books in the details of her manuscript wishlist (Ava Reid’s The Wolf and the Woodsman and Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth), who was interested in specific narrative devices and tropes that I also adore, as a reader and a creator.

The email was a full request.

I did not allow myself to hope, but let me tell you, by then it was hard not to. I felt that if I had a fighting chance with any of my requests, any of my remaining queries, even the few recent ones I was still sending out, it would be with this particular agent. And if this venture in the trenches ended up with a rejection after, by that time, an entire calendar year of waiting on the result of one query, I knew it would be a blow I felt deeply, even with all my pragmatism.

After submitting the full, I spent day after day looking at all the agents I hadn’t heard from yet on QueryTracker, hunting for any update—other querying writers mentioning their own recent rejections or offers, anything to give me possible insight to the movement of the lines I was in. One day in November, I saw someone share a link to a recent interview with the very agent I was trying not to bet all my cards on. As I read it, I felt myself building more and more hope. She spoke about what caught her eye in a manuscript or query letter—“very unusual, inventive ideas and gorgeous prose.” She was drawn to weird, off the wall concepts, transportive writing that could be a feast for the senses, each word carefully chosen.

I allow myself to be prideful about a scant handful of things in my life. The quality of my writing is one of them.

And I thought to myself, TGGT is about a 1920s theater with a magical, interdimensional portal in the stage. That’s about as original a concept as you can find, among others.

What’s more, the agent also spoke about how hands-on she is throughout the editing process before submission; a quality that I appreciate tremendously. As I was sharing all of this with my mum, she made a suggestion: why not reach out? Send a simple nudge, not necessarily inquiring about a timetable, but just mentioning the interview and how it resonated with me?

I really can’t think of anyone in the world that I’m more grateful to than my mother. But that’s something to dwell on another time.

I sent the message along. I pushed my laptop aside and tried to stop religiously monitoring QueryTracker. I tried not to dwell on how much I felt this agent could be an amazing fit for me.

The day before Thanksgiving, I was out with my parents to see Wicked, having dinner in a Mexican restaurant before the movie. We were talking about this and that, and I grabbed my phone to show them something—whatever it was, you could not pay me to remember, because there was an email notification for a reply from QueryManager.

“Dear Catherine,

It was such a wonderful coincidence to get your latest message while I was literally in the middle of reading the final few chapters of your manuscript. Let me just say: thank you so much for sharing THE GREAT GLAVENISEAN THEATER with me! I was absolutely blown away; […]”

Let it be known, I started crying at the table. It was quite literally the reply every querying writer dreams of getting, and after fifteen months of querying TGGT, after years upon years writing and editing various manuscripts and sending dozens and dozens of letters, I had somehow achieved what seemed to be impossible.

By next Thursday, December 5th, after a video call that lasted almost two hours spent talking about my manuscript, edits, the services of the agency, and a fair bit of time spent swapping book recommendations, I had an official offer of representation from Shannon Lechon at Azantian Literary Agency. It was quite literally the most blissfully surreal moment of my life.

This letter is long enough as it is, so I’ll try to speed things along a little bit (I am, if anything, a chronic overwriter). I took my two weeks to send out my nudges to my outstanding queries, of which there were about a dozen that I hadn’t marked as CNR (closed, no response). I received a few step-asides and a full request that turned into a pass, but not before giving me a personalized reply full of such accolades that I wanted to print it out and frame it on my wall with my offer email. Jenna Satterthwaite, you are a jewel.

I got back to Shannon at the end of the two weeks with enthusiastic acceptance. On December 20th, I got to go public with the news. And today, January 13th, 2025, I officially signed the contract with ALA.

510 days from my first query letter with my strange little theater book, to dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s in an achievement I’d aspired toward for years, and barely dared to dream might come true.

If you are reading this—if you’ve gotten this far, bless you—and are currently in the querying trenches, I hope that you get to receive an email like I did some day. I hope you are able to say “my agent,” and experience the same beautiful, incredible unreality made real.

If there is anything I can bestow upon you, it is patience and perseverance. I hope my long-winded story can be some sort of hopeful beacon to you. No one querying journey is the same, never ever. Some are quick. Some are long. Mine was the latter, and even then it was unique. In the end, so much came down to sheer lucky timing and fortune. But you have to be diligent. You have to be prepared to wait. And you have to take care of yourself and protect your peace before anything else.

Until next time,

Catherine

PS: I promise I’ll share my query letter next time.