Skip to main content

Jay Is REPRESENTED. eeee!

I couldn't blog about this until I got the all clear from my AGENT, but on Friday I accepted an offer of representation from Ted Malawer, of Firebrand Literary. The website is being revamped right now, but this is my AGENCY.

Let the squeeing begin!

Okay, let the squeeing stop now--there's only so much of that I can listen to.

For any of you six readers who aren't already represented by an agent, and who want to be, this is how it happened:

1. I wrote a book.
2. I rewrote the book seven squillion times.
3. I wrote a query letter.
4. I rewrote the query letter EIGHT squillion times.
5. I looked at about a billion blogs and websites and books trying to decide which agents to send my query letter to.
6. I bought #9 and #10 envelopes...
7. ...and then ended up doing most of my querying online.
8. After submitting to agents, I waited and tried not to check my email every 10 minutes...
9. ...and failed.
10. I sent out partials, and fulls, and more queries, until finally...
11. Agent Ted called me!

Obvs, there are some details missing there that are just boring to everyone who isn't me, but the point is this--it's possible. I don't know anyone special (I mean, I know a couple of authors and they are awesome, but Agent Ted is not their agent, and they didn't introduce me to him or give him my name). I don't have a "platform" (unless you count this blog, which, please). I'm not famous. All I did was write a book and a query letter.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Well, you already know how I feel about this but let me add one thing you may be a bit modest about . . .

You didn't just write "a" book. You wrote a very good and fun-to-read book.

Congratulations on the representation. You earned it. I hope everything continues to fall into place.
Katie Alender said…
Congratulations, Jay! Hopefully this is just the first celebration of many to come in your future.

Popular posts from this blog

On Mary Sue

I recently read a Very Popular Book in a Very Popular Series, which I was going to talk about here until I read the second book in the series and realized--OH NO--that the main character of the book is a total Mary Sue. sigh. For those of you who didn't spend time in the fanfic world, a Mary Sue is a character who everyone else loves. She's a stand-in for the author (fanfic is written mostly by women, which is why "Mary Sue," although there are some Gary Stus out there as well).She's beautiful (but not too beautiful), she's funny, she's self-deprecating, she's smart, and all the other characters will fall head over heels in love with her and think she's awesome. (An example, if I wrote Friday Night Lights fanfiction, Mary Sue would move to town and become Riggins' girlfriend, and Jason Street would have a crush on her, and Lyla Garrity would like her and even Tyra would must us some grudging respect, and their lives would all be better for k...

Jay Is Not On Vacation

Despite my absence from this blog, I am not dead and/or on a beach somewhere. I wish I were (on a beach, not dead), but I am not. I would sing a song about how busy I am with work (true), and how busy I am with teaching (also true), and how busy I am with working on the new projects (true dat), and how busy I am with life in general (double true), but the real reason why I haven't been posting here is because I've been querying. For some reason, querying has made me especially leery of posting here. I've seen posts from agent blogs that talk about how they don't want to know that the author they're considering representing has been rejected by everyone else in the world. Likewise, I don't think it's good form for me to post about the responses I've received when the agents haven't given me permission to do so, although some writers do it. I know I wouldn't want to see my query letter posted on someone's blog and commented on, although som...

Why Are The Characters Friends?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of books where the main character and her best friend don't get along. This is confusing to me. Why is the main character friends with someone she dislikes, or is afraid of, or actually hates? I get that it happens--I've seen Mean Girls . I've read Queen Bees and Wannabes . Heck, I'm old enough to have been the prime audience for Heathers . But in order for this fractured best friend relationship to be convincing, it has to be set up. In both Heathers and Mean Girls , there's a reason why the protagonist is friends with a bunch of b*tches--she chose to be. She knows that they're jerks. In fact, she can feel herself becoming a jerk right along with them. It's part of the character arc, the point of the story, that being friends with these girls is not who she really is. But the relationships I've been seeing lately don't make that kind of sense. The protagonist doesn't have a reason to be friends with...