Magic Ink

X-POSTED on Street Magic

Now that the initial OMG!!!one!! shock of signing with the fabulous Rachel Vater has worn off, I wanted to put up the promised post of how, exactly, this even came about. (And holy crap, did that sentence have a lot of commas or what?)

To start off, I know that in my initial "Squee!" post on Blogger I noted that it took me about 3 1/2 weeks to sign with an agent after my intial query went out. Don't be jealous. Really, don't be. Behind that 3 1/2 weeks was nearly 10 months of writing, re-writing, polishing query letters and researching agents and markets to prepare a sub list that was right for my book. Most writers who get rejected do not do this amount of prep work. They have an MS, they rewrite it (hopefully) and start a-querying. Then again, some writers with phenomenal books never land an agent or a deal. Publishing is, by its very nature, an industry of being in the right place at the right time with a great story. I happened to write an urban fantasy novel, which happens to be hothothot right now. I'll let you in on a secret, though:

I started writing the novel that got me an agent two years ago. The first draft was started in 2004. Was urban fantasy hot in 2004? Yes, but it had yet to explode in the way it's doing right now. Would the first incarnation of the book have gotten me signed? Hell no. It was awful. I was still feeling out the characters, worldbuilding, plotting. I started the MS three different times before draft #4 finally became a complete book. It took me six months to write the first draft. It was still awful.

I sat down and rewrote this monster for three months. Three months is a long time for re-writes, unless you set the book down and pick it up again later. We're talking 3 solid months of rewriting the plot, solidifying the worldbuilding and wrestling the damn thing into a form that made sense to the world at large.

Only when I was absolutely sure that I had a draft that would sell did I start querying. And it was so hard. There were so many moments during revisions when I wanted to declare the book finished, fire up my email and send out query letters. I loved my book, and I wanted everyone else to love it too. Fortunately, my fear of utter humiliation should an agent actually request to read my unpolished words kept my fingers off the SEND button.

Once I was prepared to query, with a complete MS, I turned to a member of my writing group who had already landed an agent. She did a critical read of my query letter and made me shorten it. A lot. Now, again, don't be jealous. There are many, many places on the web to get query help, and many of the helpers are editors or published writers themselves. I just happened to have a direct line, but if I hadn't, I would have simply used a public site like Evil Editor. I felt comfortable writing a synopsis by myself, but again, there are many places to get advice and help with synopsis-writing, which--to be fair--totally sucks. The damn synopsis took me about three days, and it was only a page and a half.

Anyway, now I was ready to start querying! I developed a sub list using Publisher's Marketplace and AgentQuery, as well as recommendations from friends who had queried before (I actually ended up querying Rachel because Holly told me to.) I sorted the list by agents who accepted fantasy and could be e-queried, leaving the snail queries for the second tier except for Ginger Clark, who's PM listing cracked me up so much I just HAD to query her in the first sweep. I sent out 12 queries in the first wave, and two more piecemeal (including Rachel's!) as I amassed rejection and/or got impatient waiting for reads. Staggering queries a bit is a VERY smart idea, because it not only gives you something to look forward to, you're not faced with that long wasteland of wait time once agents from Wave 1 have your MS and are reading it.

The intial wave of 11 garnered 7 requests for partials/fulls within 2 days. Email is good, cheap and fast, and I would ALWAYS e-query before spending money on snail mail, unless one of your dream agents only takes snail. In that case, send the snail query first, and wait about a week before firing off your e-queries so that hopefully the timeframe for most of the agents will be roughly the same.

I sent off the 7 requests the very next day, using mostly flat-rate Priority Mail envelopes. (If you're broke and need to get requested materials to agents fast, flat-rate Priority mail is your best friend. You can cram about 200 manuscript pages into a flat-rate envelope and it will cost $4.05 no matter what the weight.) Once the materials were in the mail, I waited. And waited. A week is a very long time when you're biting your nails for an agent's response.

My first rejection came in, a nice personal email with a critique after reading the full. My second rejection was via SASE, form from a partial. Third was based on the query--the agent didn't handle urban fantasy. Out of the 5 agents that still had the partial/full, 2 expressed enough interest to call me and discuss the MS. By this time, I'd gotten two more requests (one from Rachel!) and was still actively querying, sending one out every few days to keep my mind off of The Waiting.

Then, for a week, nothing. This, again, is characteristic of writing and the publishing industry--frantic periods of activity followed by long periods of radio silence. During this long week I found Rachel's blog and sent her a nice email asking if I could put the link on Blogger because I thought her query-letter posts were valuable for writers going through the process. I was polite and professional and non-stalkerish, and made sure to indicate I wanted to link her blog no matter how the manuscript review went.

The following Monday, Rachel called me and indicated she wanted to offer representation. After the shock wore off I Googled her other clients, read some of their journals, including Melissa Marr, and was convinced that she was the agent for me (really, I knew as soon as we started to talk about the book in our intial conversation that morning.)

But, and this is a huge 'but'--I did I the professional thing and notified all agents who were still reading of the offer. I got one other offer as a result of this, from a very good agent who wanted some fairly major revisions done on the MS. Then came the really hard thinking. If you get two offers from agents, the only thing you can really do is weigh how well your visions mesh, because no agent can guarantee multi-book deals and huge advances. However, I did look at Rachel's deals on PM, and satisfied that she could do right by my book and that our visions were extremely compatible, I called her the next morning and accepted her offer.

I'd be happy to expand on any of this, or hear any addendums/comments.

Posted by Luna on Wednesday, August 16 at 12:26 PM | Permalink