In my first “how I got my agent” post, I mostly covered what happened after I got my first offer of representation. But what about before that? How did I meet my agent—cold querying, at a conference, through an online pitch event?
I did plenty of those things. If my spreadsheet serves me correctly, I sent around 65 queries, pitched a dozen agents at conferences, and entered a handful of online pitch events—and that’s just for my latest project, BLOOD FALLS LIKE NIGHT. But the agent I ended up signing with, Alex Land at Mad Woman Literary, actually came through a referral.
That’s the short answer, though I don’t think it does justice to the whole experience. Many things had to align for that one referral to happen, one of them being my career change, another a mystical potato.
We’ll get to that.
Meeting the right person at the right time
First, we need to go all the way back to 2023, the year after I left my engineering job. As a struggling freelancer, I no longer had the discretionary funds required to attend my usual writing conferences, so I applied to some scholarships.
Mendocino Coast Writers offered me a generous scholarship that covered not just conference tuition, but also travel expenses to the beautiful town of Mendocino on the northern California coast. There, I took a middle grade and YA workshop with Emily Lloyd-Jones, a writer (and now friend) whose work I admire.
Part of the class involved workshopping the first five pages of our novels, and Emily loved mine so much, she asked me to send her the whole manuscript because she wanted to see what happened. As if that weren’t encouraging enough, she then helped me do one last round of revision on the book (which was close to query-ready at that point), helped me polish my query letter, and even had some agents in mind for me to query.
I thought surely, after being cursed for years, this was it. The key that would unlock my query dreams.
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t. At least, not yet.
A serendipitous retreat
Despite Emily’s help, the query process dragged on…and on. My manuscript got a decent number of requests, but not as many as my previous project. Many agents rejected me; almost as many never responded, despite my follow-ups. The crickets were killing me, and I started to lose hope.
In spring 2025, I went on a writing retreat in Lake Tahoe with Emily and four other traditionally published YA writers. Their camaraderie helped me gain momentum on a new writing project, and they shared invaluable insights into the publishing industry. They also launched “Operation Get Rachel an Agent.”
Sensing my ever-growing cynicism, these lovely writers tried to lift my spirits, helped me brainstorm new agents to query, and even gave me referrals to a few—including Alex. But as much as I appreciated the gesture, I couldn’t muster much hope for any of the agents I queried at that retreat.
My expectations for Alex were particularly low because my book didn’t seem like a great fit for her manuscript wishlist. I only queried her at the insistence of one of the other writers, Rosiee Thor, who was sure Alex would like my book.
But after the retreat, my curse continued. I nudged Alex after a few months, but she never replied, which I interpreted as disinterest. In the fall, I decided to give up on querying and shelve that book.
The turning of the tides
When you spend years in and out of the query trenches, you get sick of hearing “It only takes one yes.” But, as I learned, it’s true.
A few months after I shelved BLOOD FALLS LIKE NIGHT, I got an offer from an agent I had cold queried. I knew I should notify the remaining agents, but I was reluctant. Some had been ignoring me for six, nine, twelve months. Why keep bothering them when they clearly weren’t interested?
Emily encouraged me to leave no stone unturned, and I’m glad I did. It’s amazing how quickly things start to happen when you have an offer in hand. Most of the agents—including a guy I had queried over a year ago—replied to either politely step aside or ask for the manuscript.
Alex was the first one to respond. Literally two minutes after I sent her my nudge, she replied to say she was excited to read the manuscript. It turns out she had been reading and enjoying it the whole time, she just hadn’t had a chance to finish it. Once I got an offer, she knocked it out in less than a week and came back with her own offer.
Which brings me to…
The mystical potato
At that writing retreat in Lake Tahoe, we made baked potatoes for dinner one night, and we each carved our deepest writing-related desire into the skin of our spud. Mine, of course, said “agent.”
Now, I’ve never been a religious or spiritual person. But when you carve your wish into a potato at a writing retreat and then end up signing with an agent you were referred to at said retreat… Well, it’s almost enough to make this heathen start believing in a higher power.
All this to say, you never know who or what will come along in your life and change its course. For me, several coincidences had to line up before I even queried Alex.
Of course, there’s no way to make these coincidences happen—but there is something you can do. Be open. Be ready. When opportunity knocks, answer the door.
And if you get a chance to partake in a bizarre-sounding root-vegetable ritual, for potato’s sake, don’t pass it up.