The Road to a Book Deal, Part 1: How I got my agent
WARNING: This is like 2500 words.
It’s officially been a year since this happened.
Back in the day, before I signed with a world-class agent (agents plural, really, but more on that later), I used to love reading authors’ “how I got my agent” and “how I got my book deal” posts. It was fun, and it allowed me to daydream, but mostly, it was a good reminder that every single author’s journey looks different. When you’re mired in algorithms that prioritize success stories, it’s easy to feel like you’re always behind. While the positivity amongst creators can lead to new friendships and a stronger community, it can also lead to doomscrolling and depression, especially if you’re not where you want to be in your career.
Now that I’m a year out from announcing my book deal, I decided it’s time that I share my own story, which is full of its own ups and downs. Hopefully, there are some authors out there who will feel comforted or at least find it interesting. So, without further ado, here’s…
How I got my agent!
Let me spoil the ending—my agent is Mister Peter Knapp of Park & Fine Literary and Media, and he is the fucking best. I would duel on his behalf. All his clients are obsessed with him, and we’ll admit it. And yes, we know he looks like a much younger Cillian Murphy. (Pete, if you’re reading this, you’re never allowed to bring this up.) I also get to work closely with the amazing Stuti Telidevara, who is basically my second agent. She revised my book like crazy, and she and Pete worked together to sell my duology last year. And, in early 2024, Danielle Barthel joined their team. She works on strategy with Pete and Stuti and manages the publication process for all their clients. I got an offer of representation from Pete, but I ended up at an incredible agency that offers team-based support. Saying “I lucked out” doesn’t begin to cover it.
But how did I get here? It was a long road, so let’s play it back.
I’ve been writing YA since before I was a YA. Technically, I began writing my first YA book at age 12, after I decided I didn’t want to write about people my age anymore. I wanted them to be older. Wiser. Cooler. Then I myself became older, wiser, and cooler. Then I turned 20, and things started going downhill*, but that’s not the story you’re here for!
Even when I wasn’t a teenager anymore, I kept writing YA, because it was YA books—especially anything by Libba Bray, John Green, and Sarah Dessen—that stuck with me the most. The high stakes involved in coming-of-age, the immediacy of the emotion, the rapid-fire change that happens in the lives of every single teenager alive—it’s endlessly compelling, and it offers so many possibilities for storytelling. (I do write adult books too, but respectfully, those books are secret.)
Even though I kept writing, I didn’t want to study creative writing in college. Instead, I studied government (this was my university’s version of political science) and Spanish language and literature. This was a personal preference, and I don’t regret it. Some people major in creative writing because it forces them to practice, but I had a million interests, and I was hungry to learn everything I could while I was in school. Writing, I decided, was something I would study outside of the classroom.
And I did! I kept writing, though it was slow-going. I listened to lots of podcasts, read blog posts, and watched YouTube videos (shout-out to Brandon Sanderson’s novel-writing lectures). After I graduated, I decided to take a year to really focus on writing. I had never finished a book by that point—I guess that’s what happens when you don’t major in creative writing- and at the time, my family had a little cabin in northern Michigan. So I Walden’d it, a la Phoebe Bridgers. I parked myself by Lake Huron, got a part-time job at a hunting club (yes, really), and wrote my first COMPLETED novel—a high fantasy YA novel that was, of course, the first in a trilogy.
And it sucked.
There were good things about it, I guess. I’m still planning to rewrite that book one day, since it’s the book of my heart. But I wasn’t a good writer yet, and the story had potential that I wasn’t able to tap, which I now realize is a common struggle for younger writers.
So I put the book in a drawer. I never queried it, never revised it. I just moved on.
Because another story had taken root in my brain. This was a dystopian fantasy set in London in the 2070s, and it was sort of about vampires, sort of about escaping a cult. I called it THE TOWER. I put my head down and focused on this story, and suddenly, I had a brand-new book in front of me. Completed!
And it also sucked.
But this time, I didn’t put it in a drawer. In the midst of a cross-country move, in which I traded camo jackets for sunglasses and moved into a small apartment in Los Angeles, I revised the shit out of this book. I got a day job with excellent work/life balance, and I used my lunch breaks and evenings to keep working on THE TOWER. It was the best thing I’d ever written, but I knew it wasn’t ready to query. So I did what every other YA writer did in the late 2010s: I submitted the book to Pitchwars and Author Mentor Match.
When I got full requests for each program, I was over the moon. It felt like getting full requests from an agent, and it was the external validation that I needed. This was going to be my MOMENT.
Except it wasn’t. Because, after a few more weeks, I found out that I didn’t get into either program.
Y’all, I was so sad. This was the first real rejection I’d faced for a book, and it was hard to accept. But I wasn’t ready to give up on THE TOWER. Thanks to my day job, I could afford to hire an editor to give me developmental notes. I revised for so long that I was able to submit to Pitchwars and Author Mentor Match AGAIN the following year, but history repeated itself, and I was rejected from both.
And I still didn’t want to query THE TOWER. It just wasn’t ready.
Was this a case of perfectionism holding me back? Maybe. But it was the right choice. THE TOWER had potential, but it wasn’t living up to my own standards for my writing. Books will never be perfect, but if I was going to query a novel, I wanted to feel like I had done everything I could to make it the strongest version of itself. And with THE TOWER, I saw its issues. I had ideas for how to fix them. But in the three years I’d worked on the book, I fell out of love with it. It was the first book I’d ever seriously revised, and it had taught me so much. But I was kind of…over it.
Into the drawer it went.
I sat back and considered my options. I’m a fantasy writer at heart, but after THE TOWER, I was over writing dark fantasy (though I wasn’t and will never be over reading it!). Instead, I wanted to write something more lighthearted. I wanted my characters to laugh and do stupid shit. The word “cozy” wasn’t really being used in publishing at the time, but what I wanted was to write something cozy-adjacent. I thought back to all the fantasy stories I was obsessed with growing up—CHARMED, TWILIGHT, PRACTICAL MAGIC. Then there were manga and anime like ALICE 19TH, CARDCAPTOR SAKURA, SAILOR MOON, and every single Hayao Miyazaki movie ever made.
Sensing a pattern? So did I. The proverbial apple had fallen, and I decided to write contemporary fantasy. I wanted to create a saga set in a small town. Something witchy and supernatural, with threads of darkness made even darker when contrasted with moments of humor and lightness. And I wanted to set the book in my home state of Indiana, where I devoured the stories that now make up my creative DNA.
An idea took root: a girl who comes between two rival families that have a history of magic.
I didn’t really outline; I just dove in. I got halfway through the first draft, then I scrapped the whole thing and wrote it again. And again.
Each draft felt much stronger than the last, thanks mostly to my beta readers and the fact that I took serious time off between drafts so I could look at them with fresh eyes. I also settled on a title: THE GLITTERING EDGE (TGE for short). I thought it communicated the whimsy of the world I’d created, while also hinting at its darker themes around grief, identity, and secrets.
By draft four, I finally felt ready to query for the first time.
The book was imperfect, and that was fine. I’d reached a point where I’d fixed as much as I could, and I needed feedback from the publishing industry itself before I could make more changes. I’d already been working on the book for a year, and I didn’t want to spend more time on it if there wasn’t any market interest. That might sound crass, but the goal was to be published, after all. And the best way to find out if there was any interest was to send a tiny little batch of queries.
I picked seven agents. All these agents were excellent and reputable, but none of them were “dream agents”—which we’re not SUPPOSED to have, but we all have them anyway. I wanted to save the dream agents for when I was confident that the book was going to get some responses, and I wanted to send these test queries first. I prepared the emails, held my breath, and hit send.
The next day, I had my first full request.
To say I was giddy was an understatement. I’d had a feeling about this agent—her MSWL was SO aligned with everything I loved. I was beyond thrilled. Sweet summer child that I was, I started to wonder…would this be the one? Maybe I’d never have to send another query again! Lol!
Very soon after, I got her response. She rejected the manuscript, but she gave me the best possible gift—a long edit letter. I was agog, because I agreed with ALL her notes, and I suddenly had a roadmap for how to address TGE’s issues. The agent also said that if I revised the book, I could resubmit it to her (so this was technically an R&R, not a full-out rejection).
I was reinvigorated. I dove back into THE GLITTERING EDGE, creating a detailed revision plan using Susan Dennerd’s blog series on revising your manuscript. I tore TGE apart. I sewed her back together. She was shiny, and she wasn’t perfect, but she looked good (*pats self on back*).
A few months after that R&R, I was ready to query widely. I prepared those personalized query emails, and I hit send.
And I got a good number of full requests—from dream agents! Literally almost ALL my top picks requested the full manuscript. It was wild, y’all. I was like…how am I emailing these people I’ve thought about querying for years? Is this real life?
Of course, rejections came in, too. Soooo many rejections. Even the agent who gave me the R&R rejected the book, but she left publishing a few months later, so she might’ve been on her way out.
I still credit her for what happened next.
About two-and-a-half months into querying, I got an email from one of those dream agents who had the full manuscript. And he asked if I wouldn’t mind getting on the phone with him.
Reader, I lost my damn mind. Then I collected myself, sent him a (mostly) even-keeled email, and we set up a call.
During the call, this agent’s enthusiasm was beyond what I had anticipated. But it wasn’t just his enthusiasm—it was his professionalism. He was so knowledgeable about publishing, he had very firm opinions about strategy, and, best of all, he wanted to revise THE GLITTERING EDGE. From the start, I had wanted an editorial agent, so I was thrilled. This agent was also building an amazing team that would work closely with his clients, so signing with him would be a package deal. There are so many pieces of the editorial and publishing process, and I felt more confident signing with an agent who had a team of people supporting his clients.
Just like that, I had an offer from an incredible agent. I had two weeks to get responses from the other agents I’d queried, but (I feel like it’s okay to admit this almost three years later) I had already made up my mind.
And actually, I didn’t end up with any other offers. I was conflicted about this at first, because I was constantly reading about authors who had multiple offers from literary agents. Did this mean my book wasn’t terribly strong after all? Would it even sell?
Except I was focusing on the wrong thing. I’ve seen authors get multiple agent offers, and they have a rollercoaster of an experience anyway. The number of yeses isn’t the important thing—it just has to be the right yes, from the right partner.
And I got the right yes.
Soon after, I signed with Pete, and I started working closely with him and Stuti. To date, this was the biggest moment of my career as a writer—I would argue it was even bigger than actually selling my books. Because partnering with the right agent is key to everything that comes afterwards.
Next week, I’ll delve into the steps we took to get THE GLITTERING EDGE submission ready—steps that led to a multi-house auction and a six-figure book deal.
P.S. Here are some stats for anyone who likes numbers:
Length of TGE (query version): 88,900 words
Total queries sent: 45
Total requests: 9 (20%)
Months spent querying: 3.5
R&Rs: 1
Total offers of rep: 1
*This is a joke, btw. Life is way better now than it was in my teens. You couldn’t pay me to go back, but you CAN pay me to write about it!