JR Creaden

I promised to do a “How I Got My Agent” post months ago, but between my upcoming debut and edits this is the first time I’ve had an opportunity to write down my reflections. I’ll try to keep this pithy and useful. First, the numbers…

This project (working title Memphis and the Shades) was my first completed middle grade, third completed fantasy, and my fifth completed novel (not counting #s of rewrites along the way). MATS was drafted in a couple stages over the course of two years plus (for reasons that aren’t relevant here), critiqued chapter by chapter by a handful of critique partners, edited, run through two rounds of betareaders (ten total) with a short edit pass between, then revised prior to querying.

From idea spark through writing and revising, this took me twenty-eight months. That’s on the longer side for me, but I had seasonal gaps of working on other projects exclusively.

My querying strategy started out very differently than it ended. For the first three months of querying (March 2023), I kept five queries active at a time, focused on agents I knew through acquaintances or had personally interacted with in some form. I had seven referrals from clients and three from clients in the same agency. None of those referrals garnered a request. (All my queries were “personalized,” though sometimes that meant deliberately not having a personalization line.)

At month four, I branched out to include agents with recent sales in my age/genre, keeping fifteen queries active at a time. This led me to a number of agents(cies) I wasn’t as familiar with, so I combed through a lot of “whisper lists” to check that I wasn’t submitting to people I’d be uncomfortable working with. I withdrew six queries after discovering agent names on some of these lists.

By month five, I’d received a few requests—3 partials and 3 fulls (though from slow responders) and —and I cast my net even wider. I was nearing one hundred passes (mostly forms) and had started to glimpse the end of the road for this manuscript. There were plenty of agents left who represented my age category but fewer and fewer who accepted fantasy, so it was getting tricky to personalize each submission.

By the end of that month, I had three more full requests, and I sent the rest of my queries within two weeks, received an offer email the next week and signed the month after. From nothing and silence and waiting to WHIRLWIND. That’s pretty much how publishing works though– Wait forever then move really fast.

My query is available on querytracker here. The agent I signed with wasn’t even on my radar before those first 100 passes, and she is hands-down everything I hoped for in an agent and agency. I couldn’t be more pleased!!!

Over six months, I sent 195 queries, received 10 full requests and 4 partial requests, collected 118 passes, 63 CNRs, and two offers. Those are the dry facts; here comes the story behind the numbers.

This project was, according to all my CPs and betas, my “most commercial” yet. I was assured by readers (mostly multi-book deal authors) that this project would be “snapped up.” My readers were wrong, obviously, as my 118 passes attest, but I refused to let it dampen my commitment.

My hopes however… those were pretty well trampled by month three. Months later I’m still amazed at how great my new agent is (and shocked I don’t have to look at querytracker anymore).

Having queried previously (three projects through 2014-2018, agented 2018-2022), I can honestly say this was a wholly different experience. In years prior, my request ratios were much higher, responses were faster, and CNRs far fewer. Moreover, with mentorship contests, pitch contests, and regular writing support hashtag communities, it felt like there was support for querying authors everywhere I looked. Despite the occasional flareup of bad actors, Twitter was a place I could expect to get good advice, weekly if not daily, from industry professionals, and there was a constant back and forth between new and career authors about their journeys. Most agents were giving regular updates about their slush and requests, and it felt like we were making progress as a community in fighting bigotry and injustice, within publishing and beyond.

Not so in 2023. I won’t try to pin down what happened, or what exactly changed, but querying felt colder, lonelier, sadder, and scarier. The support communities of the past—gone. Sure, there’s still the sunshine crowd of folks posting encouragement, though that feels empty without any corresponding “real” connections. This wasn’t only true for Twitter after its well-earned mass exodus; even the FB, Discord, and Slack communities that used to be so active seemed to empty out. The few that remained, at least in my opinion, stopped acting as community wells, shifting more toward announcement spaces and archives of former-usefulness.

How did I keep going after one hundred passes?

Sheer spite.

My mental health plummeted, my creative drive dried up, and the only way I managed to continue querying was through refusal to give up before exhausting every possibility. If I hadn’t changed my approach from “hopeful, ambitious querier” to “relentless, unemotional project submitter” I don’t think I’d have managed to reach the amazing agent I eventually signed with. I can’t imagine how to twist that into advice, because the process was so harrowing and personal, but I’ll end with this:

Prepare yourself to collect hundreds of Nos,

but don’t let those stop you achieving your Yes!

Also, know your limits and be ready to move on when you reach them.

Feel free to ask me if you have any questions, and if you know of any thriving writing communities welcome to career and beginning authors, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!