Agent and Publication Success Stories, Please!

I think I remember posting a question exactly like this when we first started writing, so I'll do my best to answer honestly.

My sister and I started writing together in August 2008. We were completely clueless. And I mean, had-even-heard-of-a-query-letter-kind-of-clueless. We just had an idea for a book, figured we'd write it and get on Oprah. Good plan, right? Anyways, we finished the book and started sending out queries in October 2008. I'm guessing you can imagine how that went.

Luckily we found some experienced writers and a few agents who saw promise in our work, so we got lots of feedback. And eventually we figured out what we were doing wrong. We shelved the first book and wrote another in January 2009. In March 2009 we signed with our agent and we just sold our debut YA novel The Haunting of Pemberly Brown last week.

You can read all about it on our blog here. And if you decide to stop by please enter our contest. We're giving away a Kindle to celebrate!

Hi cc09!

I wrote Three Days to Dead in the summer/fall of 2007 and finished sometime in October. Spent the rest of the year editing. I posted the first chapter in the Share Your Work forum and got two awesome betas out of it. I queried nine agents in late February '08, and by May I had two partials and two fulls out. Was offered representation the day after Memorial Day. We went on submission in July '08 and got very fast responses. Five weeks later we had three rejections and three offers.

It was the seventh book I've written, and the third I've queried. So while it seems very fast, it was on the coattails of many years of trying.

For those non-Americans out there Chaos, when's Memorial Day? (Just so I have the timescale correct in my head).

Well, let's see. I have an Epic story with 2, er, well, 3 books, lol. After writing a Southern Literary Fiction that was too Christian for Secular and too Secular for Christian, I wrote The Guardians, a YA UF, in November and December of last year. I began querying in late January. What I didn't know if I was querying a draft, a very bad draft. Luckily, the concept and the query had legs, and I got a lot of requests. Here's what happened from late January to mid October. I rewrote the opening five times, at least. I went from 67K to 80K. I changed the POV from 1st, to 3rd, and back to 1st. I had one agent close call but boss passed cause "good angels don't sell", another close call in July where the assistant loved it, she'd be reading it over the weekend...and I never heard back.

BUT, all that with TG, and it wasn't the book that landed me the agent.

In June, I wrote, Don't Hate the Player...Hate the Game, YA Contemp. I had betas and critters read as I went. First requests came in July, first partial rejects came in August, more requests came in....

Then in mid September, an agent read it, loved it, wanted synops and first chapters of my other works while she had another person in the office read it. THEN, she passed with a revise and resubmit.

And then out of nowhere on Oct. 17 after my bruised and battered little writer's soul couldn't take much more, I got my first offer...then on Wednesday, I got my second, and on Friday, I got my third.

SOOOO, it can happen! *Cue the Journey music* DON'T STOP BELIEVING!!!"

Wrote first book in 6 weeks, queried and got one full request. Passed. (Ok, ok, yes it was not my best work! LOL) Wrote second book in about 8 weeks, queried, got 5 partial to full requests in one week (4 the same day I queried, the week before Thanksgiving incidentally) got an exclusive full request the same day (Wednesday) from my now agent, whom I had to tell sorry, its already out. He emailed right back and said he would get back to me by weeks end and not to sign with anyone else without talking to him first. Emailed Friday, wanted to call Monday. Offered on Monday. (Yes, 5 days from query to offer! I am coming up on my year anniversary with him) 4 months of revisions and we went on sub. Hit the market JUST as the publishing industry started imploding, LOL, book 1 went nowhere, wrote book 2 and 3. Am now editing book 2 in hopes of getting it out there towards the beginning of the year.

scarletpeaches said:

For those non-Americans out there Chaos, when's Memorial Day? (Just so I have the timescale correct in my head).

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Sorry, sp. It's the last weekend in May, so it was May 27th.

I wrote my book back in 2005. It was the 5th one I'd written, and the 4th one was racking up rejections all over town. I forget how long it took to write it - something like 2 or 3 months, but I revised it for even longer. And then when it was clean, I queried about ten agents (I think?) and had an agent within the month.

(And before you think that sounds awesome, I queried book #4 for uh, well over a year, dozens of agents, and got nothing but rejections. And I still haven't sold it.)

After I signed with my agent, my book took over a year to sell. But it sold! And it's taken almost 3 years from offer to publication date from that point (32 months to be exact). And in the meantime, I've written seven or eight more novels (that probably won't see the light of day).

So, writing and revising = 6 months (or so)
Agent to sale = 1 year and some change
Sale to publication date = 32 months

I spent years writing and rewriting a manuscript until it was basically four different stories, during which I sent out many, many queries. Finally, I got so frustrated, I wrote something else in a different genre which took about 2 months, sent out six queries, and got an agent. If I hadn't spent all those years figuring out what I was doing wrong, I couldn't have written it in such a short amount of time. Here's my timeline for that book:

Agent offers rep: Sept 2008
Book goes out on submission in late January 2009
Offer to revise and resubmit to editor comes in two weeks later.
After resubmitting, contract offered in April, 2009
Publication date is scheduled for August, 2010

ChaosTitan said:

Sorry, sp. It's the last weekend in May, so it was May 27th.

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Still flippin' quick so I'll say !

I wrote my second novel while I was on mat. leave...it took me about a year...writing and editing included and then I started learning everything there was to know about querying...the hard way!

I got a lot of interest...6 or so requests for fulls, many, many requests for partials...and then one small publisher offered some really amazing advice and I realized that there was no way I was going to get a contract with my novel in the rough state it was in. So I did another major revision and got more rejections. By that point (about a year of querying) I had almost given up on this story. And then I found out about a new agent who was looking for clients and I thought, what the hell, and sent her the ms. The next day she asked for the full, which of course I sent.

At the same time, I had finished another novel (book four) and was querying it. Almost right away I got 5 partial requests.

So, I kind of forgot, or at least put aside my excitment about the full request.

And then two weeks later I got an email from the agent with book number two asking what my plans for a series were. I told her and two days later she emailed me back asking if we could chat on the phone. Well, I didn't know what to think that this point...I had faced so much rejection that I was tainted and did not want too get my hopes up only to have them crushed once again. So the phone call came and with it an offer of rep.

In all it took about 4 weeks from query to offer.

Now we're working on edits and hopefully my ms will start making the rounds at pubs.