How I Got My Agent doesn't...acronym very well, which makes it hard to write a good post title. I like acronyms. Anyway, I am delighted to announce that I’m now agented by the amazing Saint Gibson!
I only started querying in late April, and while Saint was quite in my first “test” batch, they were one of the first queries I sent out after I finalized my query package. They’ve actually been a dream agent of mine for quite a while, particularly for this book! (In fact, I think if you dig a bit you’ll find that sometime last year I responded to one of their MSWL tweets being one of those “oh I have a perfect book for you it’s just not quite done” people.) And then it was done, and I sent it off, and I got a partial request on June 1st!
According to the review I put up on Query Tracker, they requested my full on the 3rd, and they were in fact still my ONLY full request at the time I got the offer! I queried a pretty small group of agents in total, since agents who like far-future secondary world sci-fi are scarce on the ground, and DARK ORBIT needed someone who was also onboard with all the sad-creepy-grotesque cosmic horror elements. When Saint wrote back on the 14th with The Email about The Call, I had acquired a couple more rejections, bringing me up to a total of 8 rejections, 12 outstanding queries, and one full.
Anyway, I was thrilled, and with even better luck we were able to schedule The Call for the next morning. (Right before I ended up getting stuck in an airport for like eight hours. Story for another day.)
When I nudged those outstanding queries, I did end up getting two enthusiastic full requests almost immediately. Whether those would have been requests if I didn’t have an outstanding offer on my manuscript, I don’t know. Five agents answered within the same day, but the others trickled in quite late. My main deciding factor in ultimately choosing to sign with Saint was their enthusiasm about the project and the fact that they already had some preliminary plans for editors and imprints that they brought up on the call.
Obviously, I was extremely lucky. In addition to having a book that I knew was a good fit for an agent I liked, it turned out that Saint was also actively looking for a sci-fi manuscript they could feel good about representing.
I do think in the end my exacting approach to picking agents helped me, and with a few agents (including Saint and one of the agents who sent a full request post-nudge) I had prior knowledge of what works they liked and could emphasize elements of both my query letter and my author bio to match. Something that also helped me out overall is that I keep a dragon-hoard of first drafts in various genres, and I picked DARK ORBIT to work on revising and querying because I saw that the market was favorable towards horror. The awareness that I could just switch to working on a new project if this one fell through also definitely helped keep me even-keeled while querying.
Anyway, thank you for reading this far. Hopefully I’ll have many more updates about my wonderful, tangly cataclysm of a cosmic horror novel in the future! ...And hopefully I'll start actually using this website at some point in the future.
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