Update March 2025: Finished writing another book!

Sooooo I think Relic Thieves has had its shot at querying, and after further disinterest, I’m letting that project go. It’s hard because it was the first book I was proud of, but after finishing my current project, I’m even happier and more confident with the result. I truly believe in this new book, and although I’m still working on the final title, it’s my favorite thing I’ve written so far. My goal is to get feedback from beta readers this month and re-write the entire thing in side by side Google docs, tightening up the sentences and dialogue, eliminating anything unnecessary! Hopefully, I’ll be ready to query this project by this summer!

 

Update Jan 2025: Querying Relic Thieves

I’ve sent out 53 queries, and so far have 20 rejections, no requests. However, I’m not discouraged- I know this is a tough process, and I’m working on different projects to make sure I don’t get dragged down by this one project not turning out the way every author dreams about. Onward march, ladies!

 

Update July 2024: Querying Relic Thieves

After writing down every agency that reps Adult/New Adult Fantasy on Manuscript Wish List and Query tracker and finding a list of misc agencies, I sat down and made a huge Google sheets of every agency and notes about what they represent. Do they have a lot of agents with fantasy? Do they have book covers that look like I think mine should look? Is the website really current, and easy to navigate? Do their agents have good relationships with their clients?

In total, I visted about 230 agency websites. Out of those, about 120 were just not a good fit. Either they don’t list fantasy, or they only do childrens books, or nonfiction, or they only have one agent that said they like everything, but their book covers aren’t really in the fantasy genre. About 60 of the agencies looked really promising though.

So my next step was figuring out which of those agents, in what order, at their agency would be the best fit for my book. Since it’s New Adult and Fantasy with a touch of romance, that ruled out a lot of the agents who exclusively do YA. I went to each of those 60 websites again and looked at the agent’s bio, and their MSWL if they linked it, and chose the ones I thought would enjoy reading it the most to send it to first. Of course, I’m trying to learn what they like reading on a personal level from just a few sentences, but some agencies have a boutique benefit of saying “just send it to one of us, and we’ll forward it to one of our other agents if we think they’d like it”. 

I’ll be sending out queries in waves of 10 in a few weeks, and will try to update the blog here with the rejections. Nothing like some adversity to fuel me in the morning! Honestly, the agents are all really kind and encouraging with rejections, and this is the second time I’ll be querying a book. This is the third book I’ve written, and I feel more confident about it after waves of edits I didn’t put my other work through, and a lot of feedback on my queries. 

But also, every time I get a rejection, (and I know they mean it nicely), it’s one more person’s doubt I want to prove wrong!

And on that optimistic note, I’m going to keep preparing to send out my first 10 personalized queries!