“Getting an agent is the hardest part of publishing.”

Boy, that is a real confidence booster. 💀

Ever since I was a kid, my dream has been to be an author someday. Before that, I wanted to be a garbage man. Y’know, the people who collect trash from you every week. I feel like the two aren’t that dissimilar.

Some of my favorite memories revolve around that dream. During the holidays, my mom used to take me to the Books-A-Million in the city an hour away and let me loose. I’d stalk the shelves, listening to holiday music, carefully picking out my selection of books that would be waiting for me to unwrap come Christmas Day.

I always knew that’s where I wanted to be memorialized. Like, if I could choose somewhere to live, it would be a bookstore. Big, or small, warm or a little chilly. And if I could not live there, a piece of me had to.

So, it was bound to be a book.

ANYWAY, WHO EVEN ARE YOU? (NOBODY YET, BUT SOMEDAY SOON.)

Hey! Hi. I’m your new bestie, Taylor.

I started writing when I was about ten years old after someone gave me an Edgar Allan Poe anthology and I fell in love with words. You can probably find my poetry on the internet somewhere.

I started writing my first “book” when I was 14 in math class in purple pen scrawl. It was my most prized possession—a post-apocalyptic thriller starring look-a-likes of me and my best friends.

But honestly, writing books didn’t go anywhere for me until years later. I only finished that book in 2018, and then rewrote it in 2019. I loved that book. I still do! But it was garbage and part of me knew that.

Then, I thought up a better idea. The book that would make me a published author.

SPOILER ALERT: IT DIDN’T. (MY FIRST TIME IN THE TRENCHES.)

Let’s talk about Book 1. Or, affectionately, The Book That Didn’t Make It Out. This is the first book I ever queried, though it’s the second book I shelved.

I dreamed up Book 1 in the winter of 2020 and finished it at the beginning of 2021. It was my heart book. A dark, sexy thriller-meets-contemporary-fantasy featuring murderous sapphics, a star-crossed love story doomed to repeat itself, and big social commentary on issues very close to me. It was beautiful.

Then I quit writing.

No, really, I did. In 2021 I quit writing, decided to get into fanfiction, and figure out what I wanted from life.

Why would you quit writing after you just wrote your dream book?

A combination of things. A bad critique partner, a traumatic experience, and a period of illness. But most of all, the belief that I could not write something good enough for anyone—not even myself.

I spent a whole two years trying to heal, in more ways than one. But I had a secret weapon!

My best friend, C, and I met probably the day I decided to quit writing. (Okay, you probably know who she is if you interact with me on Twitter, but we’re gonna call her C anyway.)

It was C who got me back into writing. As she was writing her books, she continually pestered me. Even though I wasn’t ready, she knew how unhappy I was without writing.

I just couldn’t forget about Book 1. It was sitting in my documents, waiting for me to come back around. I knew it needed heavy revisions. I had grown—as a person and as a writer—since 2021.

I cracked it open in January 2023. I finished it in March.

And C, who was writing alongside me, already had a querying spreadsheet with my name—and Book 1—on it. She said, and this is a true quote:

I am nothing if not an organization queen. #Libra.

From April 2023 into June, I queried Book 1 to 72 agents. I participated in #APIpit, a Twitter pitch contest for AAPI authors, and garnered a good bit of interest. In total, Book 1 received 9 requests—and 0 offers.

Later that year, I would apply to Round Table Mentor. I was rejected from that, too.

Believe me, I cried. The day I decided I would shelve Book 1 for the foreseeable future, I listened to Mitski’s “Washing Machine Heart” on repeat and sobbed for four hours. Four. Hours. I couldn’t believe that I was putting my heart book away.

But if I’m good at anything, it’s moving forward.

BACK TO WHERE I STARTED. (IN THE BEST WAY POSSIBLE.)

So, where was I gonna go now that I was querying Book 1, failing at that, and had nothing to do?

Let’s rewind a bit. In the summer of 2021, at the height of my illness, I spun up another book. I was playing Monster Hunter: World, a video game where you sail to a new world and slay monsters to make the land more livable for humans. You destroy a whole ecosystem to make room for a human settlement.

It made me pause. “I don’t think we’re the good guys in this story,” I told my friend, who had played the entire game with me. “I don’t think we belong here.”

I immediately created a whole world in my head. I watched Princess Mononoke, one of my favorite Studio Ghibli films, and asked myself what it would look like on a larger scale. If it wasn’t just nature vs. industry, but religion vs. science. What if there was a love story woven in, not just hinted at?

I could create something that spoke to a larger social issue. I could write something beautiful again. Only I didn’t believe I could, so I stashed the idea away.

But while I was querying Book 1, I had nothing to do. Idle hands, idle minds, something like that. One of the biggest pieces of advice I give to querying writers is something I was given:

Write the next thing.

So here I was, with nothing but a rejection-filled inbox and no book to write. But I had a plot I’d drafted between 2021 and 2022 for this eco-fantasy I dreamed up on a whim. iPhone notes and voice memos and random discord messages I’d sent to myself of characters and scenes and dialogue.

I told myself, if you don’t write something, you’ll lose your momentum again. I have a little bit of ADHD. If I just distract myself with something, I’ll forget that I’m trying not to believe in myself.

It’s human nature, I think. Having hope. So if I busy myself with writing another book, I won’t have time to despair over something that’s not in my control anymore.

Yeah, I’m a control freak. I know.

(Yeah, yeah. And a perfectionist. Thank you, mom. Get all the ribs in now.)

In June 2023, I started drafting Book 2. In September, I finished, and sent it off to a few of my critique partners to read.

This book didn’t feel like me at all. There was something about it—maybe the melancholy of shelving my heart book, or maybe the close familiarity I now had with rejection. I constantly told C that I didn’t think I would query Book 2. It didn’t have the same heart as Book 1 did.

But the feedback came in, and it was… good. My crit partners liked the book. I was able to wrap up revisions and edits pretty quickly, finishing the book in January 2024.

Oh, and did I mention, I submitted Book 2 to the SmoochPit mentorship? Yeah, and I got rejected. From another mentorship. (To quote Chappell Roan: it’s fine, it’s cool.)

Once again, I told C that I wasn’t going to query Book 2. And once again, C came to me with a very pretty spreadsheet and said, “Don’t be dumb.”

Okay. I guess.

HOW I GOT MY AGENT. (FOR REAL THIS TIME.)

The beginning of 2024 was rocky for me, to say the least. I needed to feel something again, and that something was rejection.

Well, I thought it would be.

I drummed up 10 “quick response” agents and sent off my first batch of queries on January 23rd, 2024. I wanted a bunch of quick rejections, some feedback if I was lucky, and to see how it felt to put Book 2 out there.

3 days later, I received my first full request.

Uh, okay. Dope! I decided, that’s a sign. I’ll send off another 10 queries, really feel that sting of rejection that I need.

Same day, I received a partial request.

Well, it wasn’t going according to plan, but okay. I sent off another batch of queries. You can clearly see where this is going, so I’ll wrap this up real quick.

I was averaging a request every 3 days.

No, that is not normal. Yes, it continued like this.

One of the agents that I queried was someone who showed interest in Book 1—they requested a partial and ultimately rejected it. But because of their previous interest, I re-queried them again, hopeful they would like Book 2.

They requested the partial for Book 2. And then they requested the full.

Then, they sent an email asking for a call.

BY THE WAY, MY BEST FRIEND IS A WITCH. (BRIEF PAUSE.)

That agent tweeted about how they couldn’t wait to offer on a full they just finished.

C sent that tweet to me, and when I asked her not to get my hopes up, she said:

“I just know that’s you. That’s you.”

She also weirdly knows when bad things are happening to me. That’s on soul mate shit or something. Anyway.

HERE’S WHAT YOU CAME FOR. (STATS! AND OTHER THINGS, PROBABLY!)

After the call, I knew I wanted to sign with my agent. Pretty immediately. But I did my due diligence and nudged the other agents who had my manuscript and query.

I did receive multiple offers. So how did I choose?

Editorial vision and client references. Plus, intuition. I knew in my gut that my agent saw my book—and its potential—and could guide me to where I needed to go. Speaking with their clients just drove every point home for me.

I had other great offers. I also had requests to extend my deadline! But I chose based on my gut feeling. And my gut told me that Allegra Martschenko at Ladderbird Literary was the right choice.

(Every interaction with them has also solidified that, but that’s another blog for another day, and this is getting long and you’re getting tired of me already.)

So! Here are my final stats for Book 2.

Queries: 84

Partials: 3

Partial-to-Fulls: 2

Fulls: 20

I am so grateful and humbled to have numbers like these. Eight weeks of querying, including the two weeks I took to consider my offers, is fairly fast and I’m aware of that privilege! I do think some of my success is lent a little luck—the market, the state of publishing, etc.

A lot of it was hard work too, don’t get me wrong. But timing and luck is so necessary in the world of traditional publishing. Keep your head up.

Your time is coming.

THE END. (FOR NOW, AT LEAST.)

If I was a responsible person, I would say again that my biggest piece of advice is to write the next thing. And that’s true! Writing the next thing is what got me an agent. I cannot stress this enough.

But also: find your people. I am so lucky and so grateful and so so so blessed to be surrounded and supported by all my friends and cheerleaders.

I could not have done this alone, quite obviously. I think my thank-you thread on Twitter was proof of that. And I had way more people to thank afterward!

I’m gonna thank them here again! One more time. Gah, I love my people!

Biggest thanks to my best friends, my twitter circle, and my critique partners. Y’all rock forever.

Thanks to my agent, too! Weird that you chose me! Now you have to deal with me!

Whew, alright. Signing off now, finally.

Do all things with love,

Taylor 💖

STEAL MY QUERY LETTER. (NO, REALLY. I DON’T NEED IT ANYMORE.)