Draft Zero to Writing Hero Chapter I: The Grand Beginning

[Image: My Hermes Baby typewriter with text "Draft Zero to Writing Hero"]

Hi fronds! Welcome to the grand tale about my writing journey! I wanted to write about this in all its roller-coaster ups and downs because I had a lot of trouble finding this information when I was getting started in 2016. This is definitely going to span several posts, but I hope my story will help someone else with their own path to publishing.

Chapter I: The Grand Beginning

The first manuscript I queried, a YA fantasy, I wrote from about fall 2013 to fall 2016. As soon as I was done, I thought, "great, ready to go! Let's publish this sucker."

[GIF: Liz Lemon, "Let's do this."]

Well, as we all know, not so fast.

After several hours of Google searches on "Okay, I finished my manuscript, now what?", I found out that I needed a query letter, a synopsis, and the most important thing: agents to query.

Okay, so...agents, wya?

[GIF: Goofy with binoculars, "Where U B?"]

After doing a little more reading on Reddit, I decided to use QueryTracker to find agents to query. I signed up for a free account and set about going through every. single. page. of agents with an interest in YA fantasy. I'm a completionist - I will look at every single recipe in a 1000-recipe cookbook to be sure I didn't miss anything, it's kind of a problem - so there was no way around looking at every agent. Besides, how could I possibly pass up an agent if they could turn out to be The One?

For each agent, I opened a new tab with their QueryTracker page, then linked to their agency's website. When I had about 20 tabs open, I looked more critically at the info about the agent I found on QueryTracker. So as an example, let's say I was researching my now-agent Christa Heschke at McIntosh & Otis. I went to the Agents page on the McIntosh & Otis website, then looked at Christa's bio page, browsed her Twitter, and searched through her wish lists on Publisher's Marketplace and Manuscript Wish List. Then, once I felt confident that this agent could be a good fit for my manuscript and my writing style, I added them to a spreadsheet I set up on Google Drive. I did this for each agent I was interested in at that agency, then moved on to the next one.

I set up this spreadsheet with the agent's name, the agency they work for, notes, and some other columns to fill in later: the date I sent my query package, when I expected a response, when I actually got a response, and what that response was:

[Image: Agent spreadsheet]

By the time I was done, I had looked at about 500 agents and made a spreadsheet that held over 100 names. I made special note of agents who I felt would be an especially good fit or were "dream" agents for me. I planned to query them first...once I had the rest of my query package ready to go.

Continued in Chapter II...