Things my agent said to me

and how I know I made the right choice when I picked her.

Not that I had a whole lot of options. Despite already being a bestselling author several times over, a finalist for five awards, and having been featured in the New York Times Book Review, the first half of this year was marked by repeated brutal rejection.

After breaking things off with my last agent early this year, I went on the search for a new one. Usually, authors who have the kind of career I have don’t need to do much to land a new agent. They just need to send an email saying, “Hey, I’m looking for a new agent. Are you interested?” That’s typically all it takes, since an author whose career doesn’t need to be built from the ground up is a pretty nice deal for an agent. We’re already profitable, already established, and already a proven “sure thing.”

In my case, I not only had the established bestseller career, but I also had a completed manuscript about a hot topic with a big, sexy hook. The hook is so big and sexy and my career is so thoroughly established and bestsellery that I was getting full requests within hours of sending my query letters—an unheard-of occurrence in the maddening world of querying—and I got a lot of full requests.

“This will be great,” I thought. “I’ll have a new agent in no time.”

Things did not turn out that way.

All those full requests turned into rejections. Some of them, I understood and appreciated—“I just didn’t connect with this manuscript the way I’d hoped to,” and “I loved this manuscript, but I really have no idea how I’d sell it, so I’m not the right agent for the job.” Fair enough. Those rejections didn’t bother me; they were honest and sensible and I, too, wanted it to be the right match this time with an agent who actually felt invested in my career, saw my potential, and was capable of putting together an effective sub plan. Most of all, I wanted what I didn’t have the last time: an agent who was going to stand up for my interests if things went wrong with a publisher, rather than siding with the publisher and tanking my career because she didn’t want to rock the boat with a big editor.

The rejections that got to me were the ones that gushed effusively over my work and my manuscript, and then turned into a rejection anyway with no reason at all. I got a lot of those rejections. A lot. And all of them said the same thing: “I’m sure so many other agents are going to want to represent you.”

No, zero other agents wanted to represent me, in fact.

A mandala from Meow Wolf in Santa Fe

I couldn’t understand it. I had agents comparing me favorably to Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro and then closing their adulations with, “I’m sure so many other agents will want to represent you, but I don’t.”

Really? You don’t? You don’t want to represent (your words, not mine) the next Ishiguro? You don’t want to represent someone who can write (your words, not mine) as well as Winterson AND already has a track as a BESTSELLER? Pardon my French, but what the fuck??

The same thing was happening that has happened all along in my career: nothing was going the way it was supposed to go. Nothing was working out for me the way it works out for other writers. I was, as ever before, the outcast who couldn’t get a fucking break no matter how many times I tried and no matter how good I proved myself to be.

Things got pretty bad. Despite my careful daily efforts, this nonstop firehose of inexplicable rejections eroded my hold on my mental health. I was back in the grim place I’d been for all of 2022: having to find reasons to stay alive every day.

Then I got one offer. Well… the way that offer came about was, as with literally everything else in my career, as far away from the usual, standard, expected process as you can possibly imagine. Despite the absolute shellacking my mental health had taken to get to that offer, I look back on that entire day now and I laugh, because damn it, it is funny. I was in a pit of despair, but the circumstances were actually quite humorous and I’m looking forward to telling the whole story when I can. I’ve promised to keep certain details private for the time being, but as soon as I’ve got the green light to tell the story, I will, and it’ll make you laugh.

But as soon as I got that offer—literally the moment I heard the words—EVERYTHING made sense. Of course all those other agents rejected me. I was never meant to work with any of them. All of them would have been the wrong match, and this was the right match, the partnership the universe had been shoving me towards, sometimes quite aggressively, for a decade. All those agents who called me a genius, and exceptional, and among the best writers they’d had the pleasure of reading, and yet still turned me down with no freaking explanation… they probably didn’t know why they turned me down, either. But now I knew why. And god, I was grateful.

I did get one other offer of representation. A few more agents still had the full and hadn’t yet gotten around to rejecting me. As is expected, I notified them that I had an offer, and though I assumed all of them would just reject me (most did; one didn’t bother to respond at all…) one of them scrambled and said, yes, let’s have a call, I’d like to talk to you about this book.

We did have a lovely call. I considered his offer and his thoughts on my manuscript and my career very carefully. Even understanding that bigger forces were—and had always been—steam-rolling me in one particular direction for many years, I still weighed my two options with meticulous care. This other agent who offered is a Big Deal in the publishing world. I had to really ask myself which of my two options was going to be the smarter choice.

In the end, though, I took the unusual road. That has always been the path that has led me to success. I have every confidence that it will lead me to where I’m meant to be now.

The latter half of 2024 feels a little less treacherous to me. I’ve got the right partner on my side now. I’d be lying if I said I don’t have certain anxieties about the future of my career—I think that’s the case for most writers, all of us who haven’t been blessed with big success right out of the gate or those of us who didn’t eventually land on big success. And that’s most of us. Most writers aren’t spending a hundred weeks on the NYT Bestseller list with their debut and getting set up for de facto success and big, fat advances for the rest of their lives. Most of us aren’t getting picked up by Reese Witherspoon and guaranteeing seven-figure deals for the rest of our lives. Most of us are left having certain anxieties. It comes with the territory.

I had a talk recently with my agent to strategize about getting this manuscript and another I’m finishing on sub—when is the right time to go out with it? Which imprints should we approach? What do I need to do in the meantime to optimize my strengths?

She said a few things that made a lot of sense and put me in a good frame of mind to spend the next five months as wisely as possible.

“Stay calm. Keep writing. Focus on what you’re making and don’t let the rest of it get to you.”

“If you see the hogs at your door, send them away.” (I’ll be honest; I still don’t know exactly what this means. I think it was a regional aphorism, but I’m pretty sure I got the gist of it.)

And most of all, the thing she said that made me damn sure I’d made the right choice and that this partnership is destined for truly great things:

“Believe it has already happened.”

Believe you’ve already achieved what you want to achieve. Inhabit a reality where the career you want has already flourished. Know that you are already there, even if nobody else is aware of it yet.

Did she know that she was telling me to do magic? Maybe. Maybe not. But when she said those words, I knew I’d finally found a partner in this business who sees the world more or less the same way I see it. We might use different words to express our processes and our frameworks, but they are fundamentally the same.

And now we’re both believing that it has already happened. There’s nothing the two of us won’t be able to accomplish together.