Welcome, my fellow authors, to a long overdue post.
Throughout the months that I spent querying, I grew obsessed with reading HIGMA posts (Elle, if you’re reading this, it’s partially your fault) and I know I would like to tell my story one day. However, most of the HIGMAs I read were from a different time (I sound like I’m 60 but trust me, the industry was vastly different pre-covid), so my perception was heavily skewed. Lots of wrong expectations were set, lots were broken down, but I will get to that very soon.
A few notes before I start: There will be a few screenshots of DMs and emails that I will block out (a) the name I used for my query, and (b) my book title and characters. No agent will be named except for mine <3
The mandatory “I have been writing stories since I was a child” story
was actually not that different from other authors. I didn’t remember exactly when I started writing stories, but I remembered these rites of passage:
Writing in Vietnamese, resulting in my parents reading them and teasing me about them
Learning to write stories in English just so I could cut my parents off my fantasy world
Writing on notebooks where everyone could pick up and read and then wondering why everyone was in my business
Writing on Word Doc, putting on a password, and then forgetting that password forever
Writing was fun. In summer 2010, 2 years before the world was supposed to end, I would wake up and work on my novel every day during summer break. My hand was clammy, my fingers crampy, and my back was completely wet. I had a lot of impossible dream careers, but I didn’t know I could be all of them by being a novelist. It’s funny that I could remember a specific time in my life where writing was my whole life, but I couldn’t remember the last time I put my pen down and 12 years went by.
All the rumours are true, your first book may not be THE book, but it will be A book.
The first book I queried, now forever known as #VietMythWIP was written around February 2023, 12 years after I wrote any full-length project, right before I had to drop everything to hand in my Master of Law thesis. You understand this, life got in the way. I had to finish high school, I had to go to university, I had to immigrate. It was years before I returned to writing.
As a lover of Vietnamese mythology, I was fascinated with how most of our folklore and mythology centered around real historical figures. I wondered, at which point history becomes a myth, and decided to write something inspired by a historical figure in Vietnamese history. I got to around 53k when I had to pause to write my thesis (a cockblock, I know), but I assured you, within those 4-month hiatus, I did not stop thinking about #VietMythWIP.
That was how much I loved it. It was not the first book I wrote, not even the second one, but it was the first one I wrote with my country as the source of this fantastical world. When I got back to writing in summer 2023, I had the rest of the story planned out. The next 50k came easily. And then the first draft was done and off to alpha readers. I sat back and began building my social media presence. That was when I posted for the first time on Tiktok (spoiler: I flopped), met a few good friends and got introduced to the next big milestone of my querying journey—pitch events.
If you are interested in reading about my embarrassing experience in pitch events for the first time, read about my first #DVPit and #PitDark here. Once I moved back to being more active on Twitter, I attended so many pitch events and I got a few likes on my pitches. I sent them off with hope clinging tightly to me. I ended the year 2023 with at least 8 full requests pending.
About 4 months after the first query, on Christmas’ Eve, I received a message on QueryTracker from an agent that had my full. She said she was enjoying the book and asked if I planned a sequel or a series with it. We messaged back and forth during that day. She spoke about it so positively that for once I was so hopeful. I was spending it at my friend’s place since we both didn’t go home for Christmas, and she filmed me getting all excited. All my writing friends thought she would offer. Someone called me a unicorn!
And then a few days after Christmas, the rejection came.
Not only was the premature ‘unicorn’ claim a huge L, the rejection was a knife in my chest. I downplayed and rationalized my feelings a lot, but I could remember the sting. That time was exceptionally hard for me. By then, it had been 5 years since I last saw any of my family members in person, there was some VISA issue so I couldn’t leave the country, I didn’t have a break after graduation. I remembered feeling overwhelmingly lonely and… frankly, embarrassed.
I couldn’t physically bring myself to send another query or be hopeful for the next full. The desperation pushed me to message the agent on Instagram for a R&R opportunity, in which she kindly said she turned it down because the book did not fit her list for being too dark. But she assured me there was nothing wrong with it and encouraged me to fight on.
But how?
After New Year’s Eve, full rejections began to trickle in. It was the toughest time of my querying journey. But because I didn’t know when to give up, I told myself I must send 100 queries or got 100 rejections before that happened. I would at least give myself that before actually considering giving up. So I did that. I sent my 100th query and I waited.
But while waiting I know I need to start working on the next best thing. I cannot let this be the end.
Query stats:
I started querying on September 3rd, the last query I sent for this was March 18th.
Full Request: 10 (of which 8 rejections)
Partial request: 2 (of which 2 rejections)
Outstanding: 24
Query rejection: 65
When you’re just a regular horse in a field of unicorns, it’s time to make a horn for yourself.
On December 26th, 2023, I posted a silly tweet and coined the term #MartialArtsWIP for my next project. It was still at the very beginning of its life when I made the moodboard and announced it to the writing community. I still remember just a few nights before, I was struggling with coming up with a good enough plot and trying out the snowflake method with my friends. I just finished my rough synopsis for the book when I received this message from an agent:
I gasped.
But before getting my hopes up again (I learned my lessons, see?), I carefully informed her that it’s at the very beginning of the first draft so I would need more time. Still, I started off drafting with a high now. I have an agent’s interest! This could only be the hint of an awesome journey.
This book was my magnum opus. I had never felt such a thrill until I wrote this book. There were days when I wrote a whole chapter in one go, and there were tougher days, of course, but #MartialArtsWIP continued to inch toward the finishing line. I had the plot in center focus and my grip on the main characters was tight. I had one goal and that was to deliver this story in the best form possible.
Around the time when I almost finished the first draft, many pitch events popped up on Twitter/X, so I decided to shoot my shots and introduce the WIP to the world properly, with a good moodboard and a good pitch. I prize myself as a visual person, so when I thought of the moodboard for this WIP, I wanted to try something different. I couldn’t capture the essence of the book well with the nine-grid picture, so I decided to make a poster. While writing this book, I thought a lot about Wong Kar-wai’s films, thus a poster would be a fitting way to represent it.
Now you see why I had to mention #VietMythWIP before. I tested the water by making this poster in February 2024 and it gained traction quickly. I got a few full requests after this, and I knew I had something special on my hand. When I was ready to pitch #MartialArtsWIP, I made a moodboard that will now be remembered as The Poster™.
On the day after #LuckyPit, I woke up to 100+ likes and 90+ replies. My account was small, I never expected such interactions. In total, I received 16 agent likes (!!!) and so much love from the community. For the first time, I had evidence that I had something good here and I physically couldn’t wait to start querying the book.
This chart shows my progress for the first draft. Overall, I set a target of 1,000 words a day. I flatlined a lot of times, but I also went over the goal a lot of times. I was proud of my achievement. Finishing a draft in 4 months was a beast I would never tempt again, but this was just to show you how passionate I was about this project. After a month of editing and getting my query package to its best form, I re-entered the trenches with the second book. At this point, I still got a few full requests for the first book, but they had all gone silent after a few months.
Agent’s likes on pitch event:
#QuestPit: 5
#LuckyPit: 16
#ISWGPit: 3
#PitDark: 5
#SEAsianPit: 4
The day after #QuestPit, I received a DM.
Frankie, if you’re reading this, I googled you for two hours to make sure this was not a scam. (It’s funny looking back now I sounded so formal in the DM with her. Back then, she didn’t know how crazy I was. Who would’ve thought that a year later, I would be sending her memes of all my crash outs? But that’s the story for another day.)
The day I got the email,
I was getting signs. This is now just a funny story but I kid you not, the universe is listening.
That morning, I woke up at 5 a.m. Still sleepy, I opened Discord (a very reasonable thing to do) and scrolled through the writing server. Someone sent a picture of a hand, but somehow I saw a tiger. I thought, weird but okay, before I turned off my phone and went back to sleep. Only once I got up again did I realize it was a picture of a hand. Strangely enough, on that day I got neck pain. I know, my body is a temple—ancient and crumbling—but somehow sleeping wrong within 3 hours of me going back to sleep was a punishment. I dug out the tiger balm my mum packed for me and rubbed it in.
At this point, you must have seen what I’m getting at. Me too. I remembered thinking this must have been a sign. So I wrote my silly manifestation, sending it toward the Tiger God.
At 3 p.m. on that same day, I received the email that changed my life.
As how any other normal person would react, I freaked out.
I waited for one full week before getting on the call. I did not know what to expect, where to put my hands, if it was a R&R call or an offer call. The agent was so lovely and she was gushing about the book (which inflates my ego). And after that, I sat back and it hit me for the first time—I am vague.
The first thing I did was to nudge other agents (I was at the office so I couldn’t jump up and scream and punch the air). And for the first 5 days or so, nothing else came. Occasional polite step-asides were thrown into the mix, along with rejections due to the timing. I was content with one offer.
And that was when the next one came in.
And the next one…
And now I was overwhelmed.
I must give massive thanks to all the offering agents for being so kind and as in love with the book as I was. They really brought the game and the standard up for me. I struggled to decide because they were all so lovely. I chatted with their clients, hearing how they raved about each of them made me realize I couldn’t choose wrong here. But I was still nervous. I wanted to listen to my gut feelings but my gut decided to shut up for once.
And as if this wasn’t bad enough, I got another offer on the eve of my deadline.
By now I have whipped out everything. I did my pros/cons table, my notepad, my spreadsheet, I read through all the contracts, I had follow-up calls. I dreaded the day I had to turn people down. Somehow, my instinct spoke again (thanks god, where have you been all this time) and I made my decision. But before we get to that, let’s take a step back for some Frequently Asked Questions:
1. What are the steps after you received The Email™ and got on The Call™?
I shit you not, this was the step-by-step occurrence of events.
Resist the temptation to reply to the email with the phrase “Lmao you’re kidding.”
Screenshot it to your best friends and ask them to read it for you because what if you suddenly lost the ability to understand English.
Wait for half an hour so you’d look chill.
Reply to the email and schedule the call.
Compile a list of questions!! (This is actually super important. Me and my ordered spreadsheet go hand-in-hand).
Breathe and go on that call.
Nudge (now I actually didn’t nudge beforehand because in my mind, I had not had an offer yet and I didn’t want to jump the gun. Remember, in publishing, a call could mean nothing. Also, you should always check the vibe and question how professional the agent/the agency is before you nudge. You would NOT want to nudge with a bad first offer. I nudged because I liked my first-offer agent too!)
Become obsessive with legalese. I like to think of myself as a practical person. Despite my rose tinted glasses amped to the max, I’m about to enter a contractual relationship with someone. Contracts matter. Lucky for me, I have legal friends from university, so we sat down and analyzed every contract I received. I also consulted my friends who are further along with publishing than I am for a second pair of eyes. I ended up sending a list of contract-related questions to the offering agents. You can never be too careful.
Sign the paper and get the corresponding confirmation.
Email the other agents thanking them for their time and interest and telling them you have made a decision.
2. You got more than one offer, is it still normal to crash out? Don’t you feel pretentious?
The thing with publishing is that you don’t survive certain stages, you just get more armor for the next one. I say I got multiple offers now, but back then I was stressed. I was stressed because suddenly there were so many people believing in me and idk, I never got this far. All your feelings are valid whether you got one or you got multiple. When you put your words, and what is pretty much an extension of yourself, out there, most of the time, what you get back is self-doubt. I know I finally had my time, but I didn’t forget that first close-call. It’s one of the things that stays with you forever.
I’m very lucky to have the few writing friends that I still talk to from my querying days until today. I turn to them very often because sometimes the only way out is through and we are all going through it (ha ha).
3. So, how do you make a decision?
And to that, I will rephrase the question with: If all agencies don’t have a glaring red flag and every agent is capable and professional, who makes you feel most comfortable yapping with?
Because here’s the thing, kids (Edit: I did not know why I said this), publishing brings out vulnerable feelings in you. I think of myself as a smart, rational, and levelheaded person and yet I know the turmoil I went through with querying was not the full extent of what I could feel in publishing. I was heartbroken once, and somehow I knew it would be worse on sub. I need someone who is not only professional and with me on the same wavelength, but also must understand the story, can, and will support me through the many ups and downs that publishing has planned for us. Gut feelings are important, sorry to all the fellow left-brained folks.
I officially signed a week later (what’s with me and waiting a week honestly (but also, I had this mindset that I waited this long, I can wait more)) and now I am represented by the one and only Francesca Ali at WME Books UK.
Query stats:
I started querying on April 30. I received The Call™ on June 18th and the formal offer on June 27th
Full requests: 7 (of which 2 rejections and 1 referral)
Partial requests: 2 (of which 1 rejection and 1 referral)
Query rejections: 15
Full requests after nudge: 4
Rejection after nudge: 5
Offer: 4
Looking back on my timeline, I will admit it was relatively short if you look at this book independently. But nothing happens independently. Without my first failure, I wouldn’t have kickstarted my second project. ‘Unicorn,’ like many pop-up terms, has no specific guideline or definition (and if we’re really honest, unicornism doesn’t just happen to POC and marginalized authors, but we’re not ready to have that discussion yet). You can call me a unicorn, you can also say I wasn’t one. There is actually no difference. This book may have been picked up, but it didn’t happen independently from other projects, it didn’t happen independently from previous heartbreaks.
This HIGMA is not a sob story. If anything, it’s a success one. But success, while seems very flashy to passerby, is sometimes a very battered experience known only by those who had gone through it. This is me looking back on those tearful days where I couldn’t even get my full request to above 10. This is me saying I went through it, you can too.
If you’ve come here wanting to know the secret trick to surviving the querying trenches, here’s a TLDR: lean into your community. It’s no surprise that querying is the easiest time to make friends. I wouldn’t have made it without putting my stuff out there and relying on the writing community to push my tweets forward. Find your niche, it’s hard, I know. For me, it was to make my moodboard stand out and to find the stamina to write the next book. Publishing is tough, but we can horse through it.
(Thank you, I’ve reached the last pun quota for today).
It really has been a long long time. 2023 felt like a lifetime ago and I am so proud of you 🥹
All these months later, I'm still so so proud of everything you overcame and achieved to get here :')