How I Found My Ideal Reader, My Agent

When I finished the final draft of the manuscript that became my debut novel If, Then (Random House, 2019), I had a lot of pie in the sky aspirations. I wanted a fantastic agent, a talented editor at an imprint I admired, and also something that felt crazy to even say out loud, readers.  It seemed like such a leap to think that thousands of people I’d never met could end up reading a book I wrote, and that had only been read by a handful of people.

These people could have my book on their bedside table or on their bookshelf; they could check it out from the library, or borrow it from a friend.  Some of these readers could even be my ideal reader. You know the kind of reader I mean—that hypothetical person whose tastes and interests match up magically with your own, who just gets what you’re trying to do. The kind of reader who would follow you from one book to the next, who doesn’t need to know what your new book is about because she wants to read anything by you.  

As it turned out all of my pie in the sky aspirations actually came true after I signed with my agent Brettne Bloom of The Book Group and she sold both my first novel If, Then and my second novel In the Quick (out March 2, 2021) to Andrea Walker, an Executive Editor at Random House.  But let me tell you a little more about how I got there—and how I found my ideal reader sooner than I expected.

When I started querying agents I didn’t know a whole lot about the process beyond what I’d gleaned from web sites and the comments shared in a Facebook group I belonged to for aspiring women novelists. But I had watched my longtime critique group partner Lindsey Lee Johnson go through the process the year prior. She had succeeded in signing with an amazing agent, who found Lindsey in her slush pile, and had sold her book The Most Dangerous Place on Earth (Random House, 2017) almost immediately after. That was some great inspiration but it honestly didn’t make the querying process any less daunting.  

One of the first agencies I researched was The Book Group. I think I originally found them by googling the words “Lily King’s agency,” and came upon an article that described how four established agents and friends, Julie Barer, Faye Bender, Brettne Bloom, and Elisabeth Weed, formed the agency in 2015. I loved the idea of a small, woman-owned agency where the agents worked together to promote their authors, and I put them at the top of my list of dream agencies.

I went through several drafts of my query letter (the letter you write to agents to ask them to consider you as a client), grateful that its format was similar to an academic job letter (I’d written tons of those), and emailed it to ten agents, which resulted in six requests for the full manuscript of my novel. That’s a pretty great return, as those of you querying right now know, and I think the letter’s main strength was that it was efficient and had a very clear hook. Here it is:

Dear ____,  

I’m seeking representation for my novel IF, THEN, a character-driven drama set in a speculative landscape, in the vein of Tom Perrotta’s THE LEFTOVERS.  I’m reaching out to you because ______.

In my novel the multiverse exists, and it’s intruding into the lives of four neighbors in the Cascade mountain town of Clearing, Oregon.  

When Ginny, a talented surgeon who has more passion for her job than for her husband, has a bizarre waking dream of a beautiful woman in her bed, she thinks it’s a side effect of medication. But she isn’t the only one seeing flashes of an alternate reality. Her husband Mark, a wildlife biologist who feels ignored by his wife and son, sees a disturbing vision of an impending natural disaster. Samara, a young woman who moved back home following her mother’s death, catches a glimpse of her mom, alive and well. And Cass, a gifted scholar struggling with new motherhood, sees herself pregnant with a second child—just as she’s on the brink of a groundbreaking philosophical discovery.

Then a momentous event threatens them all, and it becomes clear the visions were not what they seemed.

This book grew from the life-altering experience of becoming a parent, and was enriched by the beauty and wildness of Oregon. I have been an Editorial Assistant at powerHouse Books, an Associate Producer at HBO, and a Lecturer in English at the University of Tennessee and Oregon State University. I hold a B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pittsburgh. IF, THEN recently won a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, and was workshopped at Tin House and Squaw Valley summer workshops.  

The novel is complete at 75,000 words. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.  

Sincerely, 

Kate Hope Day

After I sent the manuscript to the agents who had requested it, I took my friend Lindsey’s advice to start on my second novel right away—if only to give myself something to do besides obsessively checking my inbox. Of course, I was still counting down the days until I could follow up with the agents who had the full manuscript.  

Then something pretty great happened, although it didn’t feel great at the time. I received some incredibly kind and thoughtful personal rejections, with notes. Those of you who have been through the querying process will know how rare it is to get substantive feedback, and I’m grateful to the agents who took the time to do this for me. With those notes I revised the manuscript, and sent out another batch of queries.  

Did I still have The Book Group in the back of my mind?  I did! In fact, I had been following them on Twitter and Instagram through this process and had paid attention to the books they’d sold recently. In the Spring of 2018 I signed up to attend a conference in Northern California called Lit Camp, and was thrilled to learn that two agents from The Book Group would be in attendance, Brettne Bloom and Elisabeth Weed.

Elisabeth Weed attended my workshop on the day I was presenting an excerpt from a novel (what eventually became my second book, In the Quick). Afterwards I was able to talk with her briefly about If, Then. I swallowed my nerves and asked if I could send it to her, and she said yes.

A couple of months later I got an email from Brettne Bloom; Elisabeth had shared my novel with her and would I be interested in talking on the phone about it?  On the call Brettne was so smart and warm, and funny too. We had similar tastes in books. She had read my novel twice, and had such lovely, nuanced things to say about it.  It was easily the most thrilling phone conversation of my life.

It was about seven months between the time I sent out my first batch of queries to the time Brettne offered me representation. At that point I had twelve full manuscripts with other agents, and the protocol is to let those agents know you have an offer. Suddenly almost all of the agents who had my book were reading and were going to get back to me as soon as possible. I ended up with multiple offers from some truly amazing agents, all of whom represented writers I admired. This was easily one of the most stressful parts of the process, but of course it was an amazing problem to have. Ultimately I went with my gut and chose Brettne and The Book Group, and I’m so glad I did.   

One of the things that helped me make my decision was something Brettne said to me during one of our early phone calls. I asked her about whether she was interested in representing me for just this book, If, Then, or for my whole career, and without hesitation she told me that she wanted to represent anything I wrote. That she was interested in my brain and whatever ideas came out of it. 

Since signing with Brettne writing has gotten a lot less lonely. Not every agent gets involved in the editorial process of taking a manuscript from draft to final book, but I’m so grateful that mine does.  Aside from my weekly critique group, she’s my first reader, and I can count on her intelligence and her intuitive sense of what’s working and what isn’t.

She’s also in so many ways my ideal reader, exactly the kind of reader I hope will pick up the book in a bookstore, who is smart about the world and thoughtful about literature, and also opinionated about what she likes and doesn’t like. I’m working on my third novel right now and I often think of Brettne while I’m writing and imagine what she’ll think when the book is done, and that’s one of the most unexpected and rewarding parts of my path to publication.  

—

Kate Hope Day is the author of If, Then and In The Quick. She holds a BA from Bryn Mawr College and a PhD in English from the University of Pittsburgh. She was an associate producer at HBO. She lives in Oregon with her husband and their two children.

Find out more about Kate on her website https://www.katehopeday.com/

IN THE QUICK

A young, ambitious female astronaut’s life is upended by a fiery love affair that threatens the rescue of a lost crew in this brilliantly imagined novel in the tradition of Station Eleven and The Martian.

June is a brilliant but difficult girl with a gift for mechanical invention, who leaves home to begin a grueling astronaut training program. Younger by two years than her classmates at the Peter Reed School for Space Preparation, she flourishes in her classes but struggles to make friends and find true intellectual peers. Six years later, she has gained a coveted post as an engineer on a space station—and a hard-won sense of belonging—but is haunted by the mystery of Inquiry, a revolutionary spacecraft powered by her beloved late uncle’s fuel cells. The spacecraft went missing when June was twelve years old, and while the rest of the world has forgotten them, June alone has evidence that makes her believe the crew is still alive.

She seeks out James, her uncle’s former protégée, also brilliant, also difficult, who has been trying to discover why Inquiry’s fuel cells failed. James and June forge an intense intellectual bond that becomes an electric attraction. But the love that develops between them as they work to solve the fuel cell’s fatal flaw threatens to destroy everything they’ve worked so hard to create–and any chance of bringing the Inquiry crew home alive.

Both a gripping narrative of one woman’s persistence and a charged love story, In the Quick is an exploration of the strengths and limits of human ability in the face of hardship, and the costs of human ingenuity.

BUY HERE

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips