what not to do

this one weird trick will not get you an agent or a book deal

Hi all!

When I started planning this week’s letter, I was thinking about the impending closure of my favorite neighborhood bar/taco place. I was considering writing something about the places we go to be regulars, and how for a certain subset of terminally online youth someone knowing your order is some kind of boundary violation, but something kind of wild happened last week and I just… need to talk about it!

A man showed up to our offices and tried to cold-pitch his book in person.

Mercifully, I wasn’t the only one here. Thankfully, the LDLA offices are towards the back of the space, so someone else (a man, also thankfully) was able to tactfully steer him away. I don’t know what the visitor said; I closed my office door the minute I figured out what was happening and slapped my big “fuck off, I’m working” headphones on, just in case he came my way and I had to wave him off. When I was sure the visitor was gone I walked up to my office-mate and we had a mutual moment of “what the heck??” and then he mouthed “He’s still out there!” meaning the guy was lingering in the elevator bay, where I’ll have to go when I leave today.

I’m sure this visitor thought—I’ll make myself stand out. I’ll take the initiative, and show that I’m willing to go to any lengths, and put myself out there. Agents will really appreciate my gumption. Except, for years—years!!—literary agents have been screaming from the rooftops that you should not do this.

Sure, it does make you stand out. In a bad way! It gets you put on a list of people we don’t want to work with. Those lists aren’t that long, because most people trying to secure representation don’t do uncomfortable stuff like this!

The main reason that agents don’t like randos turning up to query us in person is simply that it’s scary. This person today seemed fine, from what I could see—he left when asked, and didn’t get loud or belligerent. But what if next time the person didn’t leave when asked? What if one of us were here alone, and the person got violent? (I should also say that in all the years that I’ve been doing this, the few times this has happened, the person visiting unannounced has always been a guy.) In an office that’s 90% women, you can see how that kind of visit might be unnerving.

Let me just emphasize that I know the search for representation is incredibly frustrating. It can be opaque; it can take forever; it often ends in frustration, with a series of vague or non-responses. I’ve only been open to queries for three months and I’m basically three months behind. But one of the reasons the industry does things this way is that, with the sheer volume of material that we receive, an author following the procedure shows us at the very least that they can follow directions.

For example: I have my query process pretty clearly listed on the LDLA website. I take queries through Querymanager, and I answer every query I receive. Slowly, but I’ll respond to all of them. A nonzero number of authors have written to me—sometimes multiple times—to query me by email. If I receive a query to my professional email address that isn’t a former client or referred by someone I actually know I’m deleting it. Am I worried that I’m missing out on the Great American novel? Not particularly—right now I have over 500 unread queries, and I’m sure there are plenty of gems in there.

Newer readers of this newsletter might not remember why I called it A Faster No. I called it that because all these little tips and tricks, all these clever ways of “skipping the queue” just get an author to No faster. Emailing the personal address, sending a book to an agent’s house, sliding manuscripts under bathroom stalls—all these things have happened, to me in particular. This work doesn’t even get looked at, because all these tricks tell me is that the author thinks the rules don’t apply to them.

The best thing you can do to get yourself an agent is to write a good book. And the best way to get that book the attention of an agent is to follow their submission instructions on their website or on QueryManager. Please, don’t make it weird.

WHAT I’M READING

Summer has set in and with it, a truly punishing level of heat and humidity. And it’s only July! Hurray! This has meant that ever since finishing Long Live Evil a few weeks ago I’ve only been able to reread things or read Discworld. I’m in a Discworld book club, and we’re tackling them by subseries, starting with the witches—this month’s selection was Witches Abroad, the third witches book, and it was tremendous fun. After that I reread A Gentleman in Moscow, which continues to be just a lovely warm comforter of a book, and then I took the first two Wimsey/Vane novels to the beach (Strong Poison and Have His Carcase.) I’m almost done with Gaudy Night, but I can’t help but draw out the ending.

PUBLISHING QUESTION OF THE WEEK

Is “Summer Fridays” an agent thing too or only a NYC-publishing-houses thing? Followup question: Should I pause querying in the summer? I’ve seen several opinions about certain times of year being busier for agents, but those opinions don’t agree with each other, so I’m skeptical.

Summer Fridays is definitely a publishing thing in general! We have summer fridays at LDLA—thank goodness. In terms of pausing querying, I’d take a look at your list of who you’d like to query and check a few things about their submissions guidelines. First, does no response means no? If so, I might hold off until the fall—sometimes things might get overlooked and therefore passed on by default simply because they didn’t have a chance to look at it during the slow time. Second, are a large portion of the people you want to query going to be closing to queries at any point in the summer? If so, then yeah, hold off. Otherwise, it’s business as usual—just slower.

THIS WEEK IN HOCKEY

(Can you tell that this part was drafted weeks ago?) The hockey gods have spoken: Connor McDavid is a cursèd individual. Not only did the Edmonton Oilers eat it in Game 7 against the Florida Panthers, but the league awarded the team’s star McDavid the Conn Smythe trophy about it; as someone on Twitter said, imagine having to wade through a sea of plastic rats on the ice after the biggest professional disappointment of your career, and then they name you MVP. Imagine suffering the worst loss of your career on Florida ice. The pathos! The only Panther I am really familiar with is my wonderful old man Sergei Bobrovsky, the oldest goalie in the league (he’s probably not the oldest—and, in fact, he’s younger than I am) so I was delighted to see him get the W. Now we’re officially in the offseason, and Alexander Ovechkin has already taken up his favorite sport, which is shirtless beach frolicking. We love to see it.

HOUSEKEEPING

This newsletter is moving to Wednesdays; Fridays end up being either early days (because summer) or busy days (because behind on things) or both.

Do you have any questions about the publishing industry? Requests for advice? Thoughts on your recent reads? You can leave them as comments, replies to this email, or fill out this Google form to ask anonymously!

I am open to queries via QueryManager only, which can be found here. Here is my submissions page on the LDLA website, and here is a more detailed MSWL.

My first novel, Marrying In, is available for purchase on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, and is coming soon to iBooks. If you’ve read it, consider leaving a review—that helps me and the book in the long run!

You can find me on social media on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, the A Faster No Discord, and now TikTok. If you buy any of the books linked in this newsletter I receive a small commission at no cost to you.

This newsletter is a personal project, and the sentiments and opinions expressed here are my own and not those of my employer.