How I Got My Literary Agent: Jessica Arnold

“How I Got My Agent” is a recurring feature on the Guide to Literary Agents Blog, with this installment featuring Jessica Arnold, author of THE LOOKING GLASS. These columns are great ways for you to learn how to find a literary agent. Some tales are of long roads and many setbacks, while others are of good luck and quick signings.

Order Jessica Arnold's The Looking Glass today.

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

This Is Easy. Or Not.

The first time I tried my hand at querying agents, I was painfully ignorant. I had my freshly finished first novel in hand and getting it published seemed like the logical next step. So naturally I started Googling publishing houses. (Yes, I am yet another graduate of the Google school of publishing.) When I finally realized that—who knew?—most publishing houses didn’t accept submissions from ordinary folk like me, I Googled those magic words: how to get a literary agent. Judging from the two and a half million hits I got, I wasn’t the first one to ask. I spent hours looking at query critiques (thank you Miss Snark), successful queries, and query writing tips. Eventually I sat down and wrote one of my own. This isn’t too bad, I thought. Yes, I was naïve. It didn’t last long.

I could probably dig through the musty archives of my email inbox and figure out exactly how many rejections I received for that first book, but that’s a part of the past that I have no desire to reacquaint myself with. If I had to guess, I’d say that the total would be looking at one hundred in the rearview mirror. Eventually I made a decision that ranks high on my Best Choices list: I ditched the dud manuscript and decided to write something better. I like to think that I succeeded. But, because I’ve buried my first book in a dank, dark place on my external hard drive and sworn never to touch it again, I guess doing a real comparison would be impossible.

Take Two

The good thing about having already queried a project was that when I was ready to submit a new manuscript (I even had a snappy title—The Looking Glass), I’d already found my querying legs and had a good idea of how to go about things. That said, I made a few fatal errors that to this day are enough to make me want to move to a foreign country. For instance, pretty early on in my querying I realized that I’d been typing the name of my previous book in the email subject line. Oh the horror.

My first months of querying The Looking Glass were at best disheartening, although I actually received fewer offhand rejections than I had with my previous manuscript. However there were many agents who requested the manuscript, seemed enthusiastic, then politely declined several weeks later.

Then—it happened. I looked down one morning at work and realized I had missed a call. The area code—New York City. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. I listened to the voicemail and—yes, an agent wanted to speak to me. This was it. This was The Call. I called him back, only to find out that he was calling not to offer me representation, but rather to tell me exactly why he was not doing so. Lovely. Immediately afterwards I ran into the nearest restroom and nearly threw up.

The scarring Not-The-Call call effectively capped all enthusiasm I had for the manuscript. Signing it off as a lost cause, I sat back, brushed off the disappointment, and decided yet again that I would write something better.

(Literary agents share helpful advice for new writers.)

Things Never Happen Quite as You Expect

When manuscript number three was just starting its journey through query swampland, I received an unexpected email. Carrie Pestritto of Prospect Agency, the assistant to one of the agents who had shown interest in (but ultimately turned down) The Looking Glass, had now become an agent herself. She said she wanted to see the manuscript again if I didn’t already have representation. I was flattered, but honestly my gut reaction was something along the lines of “Yeah, whatever. . . . She’s not going to want that dud.” However there was also no way I was going to turn down an interested agent, and so I gritted my teeth, braced for another rejection, and sent the book over.

A few weeks later, I got a second email from Carrie saying she loved the book and wanted to offer me representation. It was a good day. It also happened to be my birthday, and you can’t ask for better than that. We talked on the phone a week later and Carrie was delightful and had great ideas for the book. I tried to be delightful too; the truth was I was just insanely nervous. In the end, I happily signed the contract and off we went skipping down the long, long yellow brick road of revisions, re-revisions, and submitting. Oh my—the original manuscript needed a lot of work. But I lucked out. Carrie was a dream to work with and remained enthusiastic about the project even when we were on round five of edits. And all the hard work paid off in the end—a two-book deal. I almost couldn’t believe it.

If there’s a moral in all this it is that getting an agent isn’t easy, but sometimes things work out better than you had hoped. If you’re slogging through the query swamp, stay hopeful. Stay stubborn. And carry on.

Click to continue.