How I got my agent, part one

I’ve written stories for as long as I can remember. I have even hand-typed tiny books that I sewed together with needle and thread so that my little sister had something to read when she visited Spain for the first time without us. I asked teachers if I could write stories instead of standard textbook presentations. I drew my own comics, painted my own characters, etc. So, writing has always been a large part of my life. At the age of sixteen, I queried my first book.

Back then, you still sent manuscripts via mail, so I scraped together enough money for postage and sent off my first book. It was full of spelling errors, plot holes, and tropes, but it taught me that I could finish and query my own work. It also taught me when to trunk it.

It was a few more years before I queried another project, not because I was afraid of rejection, but because after the first attempt, I realized my writing skills needed work. So, I wrote books to teach myself how to craft stories. Most of these stories were never queried and never will be, but each one made me a better writer. In the end, I think I counted fourteen trunk novels.

Around 2016, I began querying agents, and while waiting for responses, I was always writing something new. I got some partial requests and some fulls, but no offers. However, my new projects had a slightly better response rate, and each new project was marginally better than the previous work. In addition, I was getting personal responses - agents asking if I had something else, offering to re-query, etc.

A great help to my craft and mental stability was that I always had something new to query as a project cooled off. It helped me keep busy and taught me not to get too down when a full came back with a ‘no’ since I always had something else to send their way.

Reading through the agent replies also helped me understand whether it was time to move on or stick with a project for a while longer. Some agents suggested changes and that they would be happy to see more of my projects. Others suggested changes but wrote that I shouldn’t make any of them until I queried a few more agents since another might love it just as it was.

What did I learn? It’s as almost every agent says in their responses. It’s a subjective industry.