Querying With One Manuscript, Going on Submission With Another
Debut author Rona Wang reveals how she landed an agent with one query and manuscript, but then ultimately published a different one.
I started querying agents at age 15. Since I’m not Christopher Paolini, it went about as well as you might expect. Seriously, in the section reserved for the author bio, I think I wrote that I was a high school sophomore. Ugh. At least I got a few kindly-worded rejections.
Four years later, I had drafted something new, a middle-grade contemporary fantasy manuscript in the vein of Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl, which were books I had adored when growing up, books that had provided me with a beacon of light during the ups and downs that come with being a kid. Luckily, querying agents went better this time around.
Penny Moore from Aevitas Creative Entertainment was my top choice because she represented several authors I admired. I cold-queried her through the Aevitas submission form and she requested a full manuscript not even two hours later. The next day, she wanted to set up a phone call, in which she told me she had read my book in one sitting and offered representation. I was stunned with disbelief. And on my birthday, I signed with her! It was truly the best birthday gift I could’ve asked for.
After we had finalized the contract and made the requisite social media announcements, Penny sent me a few notes for my manuscript. She loved the characters and the magic, but she thought the world-building could be strengthened, and the plot could be tightened. Her feedback was totally spot-on, by the way. So I worked on my revisions... but they weren’t quite coming together.
Okay, life got busy. I had school and internship applications. But life wasn’t that busy. While oodles and oodles of time would have certainly helped me, there were other obstacles too. I spent many hours staring at my blinking cursor, overwhelmed by the prospect of fixing my book. I wrote paragraphs then scrapped them. I didn’t know how to fix the inconsistencies my agent had pointed out, at least not without ripping out the spine of the story. Worst of all, I could feel my motivation slipping away. This was the book I would’ve loved to read at age 12, but I wasn’t 12 anymore. I no longer read middle-grade fantasy. Simply put, I was losing interest in this project.
For weeks, I dithered. Penny would nudge me with polite check-ins, wanting to know how the revisions were going. I didn’t know how to tell her that my enthusiasm had waned, so I simply said I was still working on things. But then the weeks turned into months and I had to talk to her. I wrote a very frank and apologetic email, saying that I wouldn’t feel good about going out on submission with this project, as it was no longer something I wanted to debut with. I was sorry that she had spent so much time on helping me with this book, only for it to not amount to anything. We hadn’t even gone on submission for it. Really, I felt like a failure.
Penny, to her credit, took it well. She responded saying it was completely fine to trunk a book if it was no longer something I felt emotionally invested in, and she looked forward to seeing anything else I was working on. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t been so anxious about disappointing her; agent-client relationships are all about open communication. I could’ve told her the truth a lot earlier and saved myself some stress.
A little less than a year later, I had finished the first draft of a young-adult contemporary romance. I felt much more passionate this time around, writing about a main character who was closer in age to me, and exploring themes like first love and tech ethics that I was currently experiencing in my own life. It was such a joy to write this book. I sent the manuscript to Penny, and she loved it. After some light revisions, we went out on submission, and You Had Me at Hello World found the loveliest home at Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers.
Looking back, I’m grateful for the extended journey. Although my first book didn’t make it to submission, it taught me so much about how to finish something, how to revise, and how to recognize when to let go. Sometimes, the story that doesn’t work out is what makes room for the one that does.
Check out Rona Wang's You Had Me at Hello World here:
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