running head-first off the proverbial cliff

a year in review, of sorts

Believe it or not, the end-of-year newsletter is arriving in a timely manner! Please clap.

I usually give a song rec to listen to while reading, and because it’s my current holiday ear-worm (like every other basic on the internet, probably) have some Bleachers. Jack Antonoff, they’ll never make me hate you.

Now, onto the meat of things.

News and Updates - A Year in Review

The last four-ish months have been… weird. For a lot of reasons. For a lot of writing-related reasons that, for other reasons, I cannot talk about.

But before that, the year had something of a difficult start, in terms of trying to make more books: I had one book, a vaguely dystopian YA fantasy I’d been working on on and off since 2019, officially die after a year on submission; then another book that I deeply loved died a slow and painful death too. With that, I had to make a couple of decisions about how to move forward.

I did not speak about this publicly, but during the summer, I ended up parting ways with my long-time agents. To be clear: nothing bad happened! This kind of thing happens all the time! Mid-career separations are common, and I still respect everyone so much. This is honestly part of why I didn’t talk about it—when this kind of thing happens, the automatic assumption is that someone was wronged or harm was done, but in reality, it was a very polite and amicable break-up. Other writers have written about this more eloquently than I could (like this great thread from Dahlia Adler, who is a font of knowledge, which goes into it in great detail and provides other useful links).

I signed with my first agents when I was 21 (!!!) and writing YA contemporary fantasy. Now, at nearly 30, I am… not. I won’t be coy about it: they made me into the writer I am today. My agents edited me within an inch of my life, and without them, I would never have published my current list, or even gotten them to publishable quality in the first place. They were immensely supportive of my projects, even the passion-driven ones that had no logical hopes of succeeding in the market (looking at you, The Gathering Dark, you beloved fluke).

But part of being a different person now means I also want different things from my career—as most writers do, after 5(ish) books. I’m not moving back to the States, and it became more important to me to have a business partner who lives in my home market. My work has been well-received in the UK and I love participating in the wider SFFH community here, and I wanted to see more of a UK-focused strategy when it came to submission and marketing. From a purely logistical standpoint, questions were beginning to form in my brain about taxes and currency exchanges and payment structures and home territories and translation, and how that all worked when I was living permanently in a different country.

My writing is different, my goals are different, and my needs as an author are different, and so with that in mind, we decided it was time to go our separate ways.

So, with all of that going on, I prepared to enter the querying trenches over the summer. I am not going to lie: I was terrified, and probably a bit depressed about the whole thing, but I had a project that I absolutely loved. I’ve talked before about how THE SECOND DEATH OF LOCKE was my sweet tooth no stakes project to work on while My Throat an Open Grave was wrecking my emotions. Well, this project (which shall remain untitled for now because I am superstitious about these things) was the no stakes draft I poked in between working on Locke edits to deal with the angst of it going on sub in different markets.

The usual publishing advice is to query a fully written, edited, polished manuscript. I think this is lovely advice. Wonderful and helpful advice. I think that most people setting out querying, ESPECIALLY AS A DEBUT, should follow this advice. I decided to ignore it.

Depending on a few different factors, there can sometimes be some wiggle room when you’re querying mid-career. I won’t sugarcoat it: I have some privilege in this arena, since, as I mentioned above, I’m very involved in SFFH circles in the UK. I queried less than ten agents, and I had either met or personally known clients of nearly all of them. I legitimately trusted every agent on my query list. I was also coming into this with a backlist, and each of those backlist titles had rights that traveled with me after a certain period of time: when I signed with a new agent, there was a chance we could hit the ground running with my foreign rights for existing titles even if we couldn’t go on sub with a new project right away.

Let’s return to the above disclaimer: If you are about to query for the first time, do not do this.

Basically, I’m preparing you to yell through your screens at me when I say I queried a partial. And it was fine! I had 20k of the book polished and ready to go.

It was a bit of a whirlwind. In the end, the deciding factors came down to agency structures, strategy on positioning this project with my existing backlist and forthcoming books, and general career aspirations. We also just clicked, which is nice, since I know myself and I am sometimes just a skinsuit full of vibrating bees and anxiety.

I signed with Maddy Belton at Madeleine Milburn Literary, TV & Film Agency. Maddy had such a clear vision for this project, even from just a partial, and was so enthusiastic about selling the rights for my backlist and forthcoming books.

She has absolutely knocked it out of the park so far, as has the rest of the team, and I will be spending part of the break working through her brilliant notes on the now-completed draft of the book I queried.

If you’re thinking of querying mid-career, here are my takeaways from my own process:

• For the query, do a forensic analysis of your career. Highlight your wins and do not sell yourself short.

• When you’re doing that forensic analysis, think of where you’d like to be. Not just money and deal caliber (though that is a thing, definitely) but genres you’d like to write in, books per year, etc.

• Think about what authors you look up to and make a list of whose careers you want to emulate. When I was making this list, I personally was thinking about longevity and flexibility, focusing on authors who’d been publishing for 8 years or more across multiple genres.

• Check your contractual language for what happens to your foreign rights and what comes with you vs. what stays with your last agency. If there needs to be a discussion, have that discussion—this is a business, after all. Ask the difficult questions.

• Make spreadsheets (this was my saving grace). Map out what rights you have available and what has already sold, what accolades and achievements you have, what projects you’re working on now, what your current publication schedule is like. Personally, I am incredibly strict on my own deadlines, so I could easily say when something would slot it in or when I’d have time to work on a new project. This was helpful for me when I was explaining my career to different agents, especially since I already have a few things under contract.

• Talk to people you trust. I cannot stress this enough.

• On that note, I personally ended up erring away from referrals (see the points in how I chose agents for some reasoning on that) but if you are going down that road, make sure you’re actually asking permission to do them. A referral means the other person is 100% saying they will vouch for you ahead of time, or that you can use their name on the body/email/whatever. This is not a time for name-dropping without checking first or approaching people you don’t know personally.

• Be honest about your expectations. When you get to the point of conversing with different people, it’s okay to say, “Actually, this person is talking about a strategy/edit plan/career version that I don’t think fits with what I want.”

• This probably says more about my self-esteem than anything… but be okay with dreaming, even if it’s just a little bit. For a long time, I packed up the dreams and focused on the reality of what it was to be a career author, especially a midlist one. I forced myself to be more ambitious. What is that big, huge, fairytale aspiration? Is there a way to get there?
  
  Part of my journey was realizing that I had put myself into a tiny box after so many years, and it was worth unpacking and re-evaluating what I wanted from my career. At the end of the day, I also had to confront that a big obstacle standing in my way was my own insecurity.

And that’s what happened! No drama, just a lot of spreadsheets and tough conversations and a whole lot of hope. And maybe a little bit of necromancy ;)

General Chatter

I usually do more chatter but tbh this has run on SO LONG. So let’s just leave it and say I’m super excited to announce some Locke-related stuff that has been cooking. Hopefully we can talk about it in the new year and you all can join me in screaming. Until then, just know that I am sitting on A MAP (!!!) as well as some other tasty artwork and a whole isle of secrets. At some point, I can stop teasing things and start announcing them, but alas. Our time has not yet come. I literally hate continual vaguaries but one of these things nearly made me black out at Comic Con, so I’m just sharing that angst around.

Recommendations

• Season 2 of The Empress is out on Netflix and I genuinely cannot wait to watch every single second of it over the holidays.

• HUNGERSTONE by Kat Dunn is coming in February! I loved every word of this visceral, bloody book.

• I had the delightful experience of following Veronica Roth around the UK last month, and I cannot yell enough about how much I loved When Among Crows. Veronica hinted that the cover for #2 is dropping soon, and I am so ready.

See y’all in the new year!