How I Got My Agent
I queried Rachel Beck at Liza Dawson Associates in September of 2021 and went on submission with her in the fall of 2022! SO much can happen in a year. It’s tempting to tie it all up in a neat little bow (just one year later, it all worked out perfectly!), but the truth is, there were so many moments along the way where it felt like nothing was going to happen.
Rachel was one of the first agents I queried. I did a ton of agent research on QueryTracker and Manuscript Wishlist, and she seemed like a perfect fit. Especially because she specifically said that she was looking for “Light-hearted millennial fiction... A beach read, but with plenty of heart that might make you go from laughing to crying in an instant. Books that address the struggles of your twenties and early thirties, such as dating woes, career fulfillment/advancement, and deciding whether to have kids or not.” That sounded a whole lot like Dear Dotty.
On November 12, 2021, she requested the partial. I was over the moon.
In January of 2022, she asked for the full manuscript! That sent me floating out near the Milky Way.
In the meantime, I continued to query other agents and ultimately submitted more than 100 queries. I got into a good habit of sending a new one out every time I got a rejection and always tried to keep between 15-20 active queries going at a time.
I ended up getting more than 20 requests, mostly for fulls, which was very encouraging. At least I knew my letter was doing its job. But, if you’re doing the math, that also means I racked up close to 80 passes, too. You have to get incredibly comfortable with rejection when you’re querying. The first few stung, but eventually, I started greeting each pass like a grizzled old woman chain-smoking cigarettes in the corner of a bar. I’d experienced too much to let a few dozen no’s get me down.
That’s not to say that the waiting wasn’t torture (it was) or that I didn’t refresh my inbox at least 100 times a day for months on end (I did).
In May of 2022, I got an offer that I was really excited about. “The Call” went well, and I knew that I’d be in great hands, but I asked for two weeks to inform the other agents who had my manuscript to give them a chance to counter. That shook a few more rejections loose, prompted a couple of agents who had my partial to request a full, and ultimately, yielded two additional offers. One of which was from Rachel!
She told me she loved my book and the characters and really hoped that I hadn’t signed with anyone yet. We booked a call for the Tuesday after Memorial Day.
That weekend, I was involved in a freak Jenga accident that left me with five stitches across the bridge of my nose (a funny story for another time), and then my husband caught Covid. I didn’t mention any of this to Rachel when we talked because I wanted to seem like a normal, not even remotely unhinged writer (even though I'm not normal and can sometimes be a little unhinged).
Rachel couldn’t have been kinder, and I could tell she really got my book and understood what I wanted to accomplish. She told me she laughed out loud reading it and that she could picture the cover in her mind. I knew she was the right agent for me.
I officially signed with Rachel in June of 2022, and I haven’t looked back. Not only is Rachel a lovely person, she’s a great editor and a fantastic agent. She eventually took my book to auction and got me a two-book deal with a Big Five Publisher. She literally made my (literary) dreams come true!
