Here's how I connected with my agent

(It wasn't through the slush pile. It was by stepping out of my comfort zone)

If I hadn’t posted in a private Facebook group on a cold evening this past January, I never would have connected with my agent.

And I almost didn’t post: my request felt a bit forward and assuming. I feared I was out-of-my-league.

Here’s some backstory:

I wrote my book before I knew a single thing about publishing.

In many ways, I’m happy about this: my memories of drafting my manuscript were almost euphoric. I was undistracted (or as undistracted a mother of two toddlers during the pandemic could have been). I was totally immersed in the writing, and the writing felt like art.

Still, when I “finished” my book I hardly knew what to do next.

So I did some research. I took some classes. I hired people to help me.

I began querying my memoir manuscript with agents during Fall 2021. When I sent my first query, I didn’t have a single byline (though I was trying – I spent hours searching for relevant outlets and editors’ email addresses. For months, it felt like my pitches went into a void. It took me months to get a single response, but once I got a yes, I started getting even more. In the past year and a half, I’ve gone from zero bylines to 37).

Though I wasn’t having success pitching editors short pieces, I was receiving manuscript requests from agents. My pitches weren’t working – but my query letter was! (thanks, Courtney Maum, who whipped my query letter into shape and told me how crucial it was to start getting bylines).

During my first round of querying agents (I reached out to 22 total), I received 4 manuscript requests. But weeks later, I’d receive rejections that all began to sound very similar: interesting story, great writing, but the narrative jumps around too much.

After receiving this feedback multiple times, I realized I needed more help. During Winter 2022, I hired a developmental editor to work with me specifically on structure. She was incredible. After she cut 26k words from my 87k manuscript, she asked me to flesh out other components of my narrative. After these revisions, I felt confident in the manuscript.

So, in Spring 2022, I started querying again. Again, I received a decent number of full and partial manuscript requests from agents. But again, when I started receiving rejection letters, they all began to sound the same: interesting story, great writing,

but I don’t know how I would sell this.

Getting critiqued for structure felt like something I could fix – but making my manuscript more sellable? I had no clue.

Luckily, around the time I was feeling completely confounded, I won a coaching call with the infamous David Hochman. I told him about my project and its history.

He gave it to me straight:

There’s something wrong with your manuscript. Stop querying. You hear these stories of people who query 100 agents to get a yes – but that’s probably not going to happen. You’ve got to figure out what’s not selling.

So then we tried to figure it out together. I gave him details about my manuscript, the short pieces I’d been placing thus far, and he zeroed in on the issue:

You need to report it out.

It was nearly impossible to sell a straight memoir, I learned – but memoir plus? There was a market for that. I needed both research and reporting, in addition to my own personal narrative.

I felt comfortable doing research – I worked in academia, after all.

But reporting? I wasn’t a journalist. What did I know about reporting? Who in the world would let me interview them?

So, I took some online classes. I read some books. I asked questions about transcriptions and recording devices and journalism best practices in private writing Facebook groups. I did this for several months.

And finally, one Friday night, I realized, I was researching journalism as a way to procrastinate. I’d done my homework – and now I actually needed to step out of my comfort zone and talk to other people.

So one chilly evening after I put my kids to bed, I pulled up Facebook. I opened a private purity culture support group I was a member of. I started crafting a post:

I’m working on a book project. I want to speak to women about their experiences in purity culture.

Within a day, I received at least a dozen eager responses.

And the first person who responded is now my agent (though she wasn’t a literary agent at the time).

I’ll share more about that in a future post.

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Thank you so much for reading. Tell me in the comments:

When has your writing project required that you step out of your comfort zone?