After leaving my agent in December 2021 (read that story here), I jumped back into the Query Trenches in January, 2022 full of optimism and hope. I’d already had an agent, and the industry standards of pre-COVID seemed to imply getting another would be *easy,* especially with a much more sellable project. Memoir isn’t a genre that lends itself well to multiple projects, so for my new manuscript, I’d switched to fiction. Commercial Women’s Fiction with Sweet Romance elements, to be specific. At the time (and really still) most Women’s Fiction skewed towards Upmarket or Literary, but a few authors were writing in this space and I felt confident about my high-concept hook.

Imagine my excitement when my first query garnered a full request. “This is it!” I thought. “That didn’t take long, at all.”

Friends, she passed, and not only did she pass, but she called the project unmarketable. It was fatally flawed.

But hey, that was one agent, right? And this industry is so subjective, maybe someone else would see it differently.

For three months, the batches of queries went out and the rejections (or silences) rolled in. I had a total of three full requests (two agents and one editor) during that time, but I wasn’t too worried. The post-COVID industry was changing rapidly and a lot of COVID authors were querying their pandemic-written books. The market was saturated and low request rates were quickly becoming the norm. I had about an 8% request rate, which was right on target, as far as I could tell, for the new look of Publishing.

Luckily, when the second full pass rolled in with the same fatal flaw, it also came with extremely specific, actionable feedback, and I will always be grateful to this particular editor who took the time to explain why the project wasn’t marketable. She invited an R&R during their next open submission, and I immediately withdrew all outstanding queries to rewrite. (The agent that had the third full invited me to resubmit immediately upon completing the R&R, so I didn’t lose her interest, either.)

I took two months to rewrite the fatal flaw, as well as work on some other areas that I was steadily improving as I wrote more and more. After my stint in memoir, I’d found that CNF was a fantastic outlet for smaller works in this vein, so I was writing for litmags as well as, once again, “writing the next thing.” Nothing in writing is EVER wasted!

Once it was ready, I sent the full off to the waiting agent, jumped back into querying, and circled the date that the R&R could be resubmitted in the fall. But, before that date arrived, the editor left her position and that publishing company shut down their entire publishing arm. On the one hand, I had dodged a bullet. Authors with signed contracts were suddenly let go. On the other, at least they had a little more cachet for their query letters. Then, I saw an agent I’d queried offering to look at projects that had been burned by that situation, and with nothing to lose, I nudged her informing her of the R&R offer. (I was very clear that I wasn’t contracted.) She requested the full, as well!

Over the next year, I ended up getting six full requests from a combination of pitch events and cold querying. Thankfully, many of them were champagne rejections that were similar to those from my memoir: great writing, good concept and execution, just didn’t quite fall in love. And by now, I knew that meant I was on the right track, I just hadn’t found The Person to champion it, yet. But, I was also running out of potential agents and I’d been hard at work on The Next Thing, so as that was getting ready to query, I started wrapping up the last project. I had two fulls still out, but I’d basically been ghosted on both of them.

Then, in October, four months after I’d sent my last query and a month before I was planning to start querying the next project, I ran across an open call on Twitter for submissions to a small press: Wild Ink. What caught my eye was that it was an agent sharing the information, along with why she, as an agent and author, had gone with that particular press rather than anything larger. Their MSWL seemed like a good match, so I thought I’d give them a shot. It was literally the very last query I sent for this project.

Less than a week later, the Editor reached out to me asking if it would be okay for their sister publishing company, Conquest, to consider my work and, if so, to please send the full. At this point, I’d made my peace with this project never getting published, or maybe pursuing self-publication in the future (that’s another post for another day), so I was thrilled, but also wasn’t holding my breath. I sent the materials off and promptly forced myself to forget about the whole thing so I could focus on preparing my next manuscript for querying.

On December 13, as I was sitting in my car in the school pickup line and working on queries for my new project, an email popped up in my inbox. (Yes, it really can happen anywhere!) Already resigned, I took a moment to breathe deeply and remind myself my identity wasn’t tied to my productivity, my desirability as a writer, or my success in publishing. Then, I clicked it open.

I read it three times.

I called one of my best friends and read it out loud to her to make sure I hadn’t imagined it.

I texted my husband a screenshot and “Umm, so I think that just happened…”

Then, I hyperventilated. It was a request for a call. I knew what that meant with an agent because I’d been through the process, but I wasn’t sure it meant the same thing for a publisher. I was afraid to get my hopes up, but I was struck by something I’d read from Brene Brown a few years earlier: when we are afraid to hope for fear of disappointment, we also rob ourselves of the fullness of the joy when that hope proves itself. Basically, by numbing the hope, we numb the disappointment, but we also numb the joy. I didn’t want to risk numbing the joy, even to ease the disappointment if I was wrong. I sent a reply and set up the call.

Two days later, I had the most lovely conversation with Brittany McMunn at Conquest Publishing. She loved the premise of my project, she’d deeply connected with the characters, and they were interested in moving forward with me!

Because of the holidays, we agreed to just under a month for me to consider the offer, and I immediately emailed the remaining two fulls to inform them of the offer. I also reached out to several current authors to get their take. If you read my post about “How I Got (Then Left) My (First) Agent,” you know that one of the reasons I turned down the small press that offered on my memoir was because their own authors warned me away. Fortunately, all three authors I spoke to gave absolutely rave reviews! I also had the opportunity during this time to read an ARC of a forthcoming book Conquest would be publishing and the first few chapters of another one they’d just published, so I knew the editorial work was solid, as well.

Ultimately, I knew by then that I wanted to move forward with Conquest and wouldn’t be entertaining any offers that didn’t include signing their contract. On January 2, I informed them of my intention to sign and on January 4, 2024 my husband took me out for celebratory drinks and I signed the contract on the bar before sending it off to Brittany and lifting a glass with him.

Since then, I’ve had the warmest welcome into the Wild Ink/Conquest Family and I absolutely know I made the right choice! For some, choosing a small press might feel like “second best,” but I knew all along that I was open to that option (hence the reason I was sending the project to editors as well as agents). The biggest thing for me was finding the right home for the project, and since I have self-published and have the capacity to continue to do so, I wanted to find someone who would partner with me on the parts of publishing that I’m not as strong at. Conquest and Brittany are 100% that partnership I was looking for and I can’t wait for all of you to meet Abby, Gen, Scott, and Dylan in Summer, 2025!

Final Stats:

Round 1:

Queried 38 Agents/1 Editor

Fulls: 3 (8% Request Rate)

Round 2:

Queried 54 (I stopped tracking Agents vs/ Editors, but it was probably around 4 Editors)

Fulls: 5 (9% Request Rate)

Offers: 1

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