I am (or, at least I was) the Magical Unicorn. In 2015, our family was invited to participate in a documentary tracking a litter of puppies from birth through Guide Dog Training. As long-time Puppy Raisers, we leapt at the opportunity and after two years of filming, the movie premiered internationally in January, 2018. 

Meanwhile, I had been writing a memoir about overcoming trauma and the role that raising Guide Dog Puppies played in my recovery. In September, 2018, the film was shown at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), which coincided with the Pacific Northwest Writers Association (PNWA) Conference. Prior to this, I had soft-launched my querying journey with just a few agents, but was still finalizing my query pack. During the Pitch event at PNWA, I had five agents and two editors request fulls. It probably didn’t hurt that I pitched with my newest puppy in tow and mentioned I’d be leaving early that afternoon to attend the SIFF premiere.

Within a week, I had an offer from an editor. At that point, approximately seven agents and one other editor had materials, so I reached out to all of them to let them know I had an editor offer. Two passed immediately due to their workloads, and ultimately one other agent and the other editor passed, as well. The remaining four agents all offered. After getting to do “The Call” several times, I chose the agent I felt most closely matched my vision and excitement for the project.

In retrospect, all four of them would have been fantastic advocates for this project. Two had slightly different visions than I had, which was fine, but it made it easy to go in a different direction. Of the remaining two, one was from a larger, well-established agency while the other was from a smaller, boutique agency. There were pro’s and con’s to both, and I think it’s really important to remember at this point in the journey that when you have a number of “good” choices, it can be hard not to get caught up in the fear of choosing the “right” versus the “wrong” agent. For me, it helped to frame it in terms of “All of these options are good options, so which one feels most right to me?”

After choosing my agent and responding to everyone, I waited. And waited. And waited. Unbeknownst to me, the agent I’d chosen was in the process of purchasing the agency from her predecessor, which was fantastic news for her, but as you all know, Publishing can be glacially slow and nothing can be announced until it is finalized, so I found myself in this strange limbo without a contract and unsure what came next for a couple weeks. Finally, she was able to tell me the news and I immediately signed a contract. She also recommended passing on the editor offer that triggered all my agent offers. It was a small press at a time when small presses were still establishing themselves as a viable form of traditional publishing, and I agreed, especially after reaching out to some of that press’ previous authors and hearing some pretty critical feedback.

For the next year and a half, we went through several rounds of revisions, and let me tell you, I learned SO MUCH from that process! The mechanics of revisions aside (and I learned so much there, too), the most important lessons I learned were about how to accept and process feedback without spiraling into imposter syndrome, depression, and despair. This is a skill that has helped me immensely in the years since!

So, after all of that, we were finally ready, and we went On Sub in February, 2020…

Yep.

I had one month On Sub before COVID hit and the entire Publishing World shut down.

For the next year and a half, I held out hope that the industry would recover and my project would sell. We were getting good feedback about voice and the scope of the project, but lots of “just didn’t quite connect as much as I’d like to.” At the time, I was devastated, thinking I’d somehow failed as a writer, wondering if it was all just a waste of time, and taking every criticism to heart (while simultaneously ignoring every good thing any editor offered). In retrospect, I wish I’d celebrated those champagne rejections more, because as I’ve learned more about the industry and the verbiage of rejection, the subtext of these responses wasn’t that I was a terrible writer. It was the opposite! I was merely experiencing the reality of Publishing as a highly subjective industry. This has been another amazing lesson that I’ve been able to take forward into my current experiences.

Ultimately, the industry took longer to recover than anyone had ever expected, and by the Fall of 2021, I was feeling the weight of needing to move on from the constant rejection of being On Sub. My agent was also running out of editors that might be interested in the project (remember, being memoir, it didn’t have as wide a field of potential markets as other genres might). In December, 2021, we wrapped up the project, withdrew the remaining open submissions, and she and I parted ways in what was probably the most lovely, uplifting, and positive goodbye call I could ever imagine. 

Luckily, as all of this was going on, I was also following the advice to “write the next thing,” so in January, 2022, I jumped back into the querying trenches with a new project, but that’s another story, altogether!

Final Stats:

Queried: 33 Agents/2 Editors

Fulls: 5ish? (~15% Response Rate)

Offers: 4 Agents/1 Editor