OMG I have an agent…now what?

Receiving an offer of representation from an agent was one of the most incredible moments of my life.

Because it was then that it properly hit me: my crazy dream of becoming a published author might actually come true.

If you haven’t been following my journey to getting published, you might like to catch up on how and why I wrote my debut novel, The Guilty Wife, and how I found my agent.

All of a sudden, I was signing on the dotted line. Then, of course, I was celebrating with plenty of champagne and happy tears.

I finally had an agent…

…now what?

What happens once you have an agent?

It’s a bit of a mysterious part of the process, because – from my extremely limited knowledge – different agents work in different ways. Some will work on loads of edits with their author before sending a manuscript out on submission to publishers. Others will look for a deal fairly quickly and will wait for an editor’s feedback before making big changes.

So I can’t really tell you what’s normal, as such, but I can share my own experience, which will hopefully offer a glimpse into what working with an agent might look like.

Initial edits

In early October 2016, after finalising all of my paperwork, I received an email from my very own agent (!!!) Ariella, outlining her initial editorial notes.

We’d already discussed most of these when we met for the first time (one of my big questions in that meeting was the changes she envisioned me making), so even though some of the notes required massive edits, they didn’t come as a surprise.

This was pretty key, and I’d advise anyone considering signing with an agent to ask about the changes they see you making before accepting any offer of representation.

It’s important to know where your agent sees your story going, and it’s imperative that you understand why you’ll be making these edits. If I hadn’t seen these changes coming – like entirely removing a character I was quite fond of, or totally changing who the killer was – I might have questioned my choice of an agent and/or had a total meltdown.

But I understood why Ariella had suggested these changes, I’d had some time to mentally process them after our initial chat and, most importantly, I agreed with her and trusted her vision.

So I deleted, and I rewrote, and I restructured, and it was honestly an incredible feeling.

After working on my manuscript alone for years, I now had someone else’s input – and not just anyone’s – this feedback was coming from a professional who knew what she was talking about!

Although this was inherently more challenging than working on it alone, it was a relief to have another person’s perspective and objectivity, which meant I genuinely enjoyed this part of the process. I’m pretty sure I even told people how much I liked editing.

Ha! Poor, unsuspecting me. As it turned out, this was just the beginning.

Another round of edits

I sent my next draft back to Ariella in early November, a month or so after starting. I was lucky that I didn’t have a lot of client work then, so I was able to edit almost full time.

Within a week or so I received my next round of notes – this time more extensive than the first lot.

Some of them were – if I’m being honest – kind of painful to read.

It surprises loads of people when I say that during my editing process, the killer changed a number of times. But, if memory serves, there were three different killers at various points throughout my manuscript’s evolution. Which just gives you an idea of how unfinished my original manuscript was, and how extensive these edits really were!

But again, knowing that Ariella was 100% behind my manuscript, and that she had confidence that I could do it, made all the difference. Without knowing that, I might have been tempted to give up – especially if I’d known that things were about to get MUCH more intense.

I submitted these edits just before Christmas, another month after receiving my agent’s notes.

I had a proper break over Christmas and New Year, and then at the end of January I had a call with Ariella where she told me there was still a lot of editing to do (slightly heartbreaking news), but that she’d like to submit to publishers before the London Book Fair, which was just over a month away.

The final push

You guessed it…more edits!

I had almost a month to submit these, and I got them in to Ariella on February 16th, with a week to go before she wanted to send it out.

The next week was a blur of stress and tears and total self-doubt. We were editing in a cycle, so I’d make edits to the first 100 pages or so, then send them to Ariella, then work on the next 100 while she read my changes and made new notes.

It felt like an endless loop, and I was convinced I was stuck in some kind of hellish Groundhog Day of eternal edits, in which I’d never get it right. Some of the edits were simple and took a few seconds. Others had ripple effects that meant I had to go through and change entire threads throughout the book.

The freak-out

I remember walking from my room (where my desk was) to the living room of our house where my husband and housemate were watching TV, announcing ‘I can’t do this’, and bursting into floods of tears. I wasn’t getting much sleep, and the emotion associated with knowing how much hinged on me getting this right was overwhelming.

At the same time though, I was totally mad at myself for feeling that way. I had been given a huge opportunity, and just a few months before I would have killed (OK, not literally) to be in the position I now found myself in.

I had to focus on the end goal – sending my manuscript in the best possible shape to publishers – and remind myself that I have an agent who really, truly believes in me, and who was probably just as stressed as I was about having to pull all my edits together so quickly. I doubt that week was much fun for her, either.

I can’t overstate the importance of knowing that your agent’s got your back, because it’s in times like this that you need to trust them completely, defer to their expertise, and be able to put your feelings aside as much as possible and work together to whip your manuscript into the best possible shape.

In the end, I forced myself to calm down, to be grateful, and to just push till the end. And of course my housemate and my husband were incredibly encouraging and helpful.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it was tough. Worth it, of course. But challenging and humbling and intense!

Preparing for submission

The final 24 hour push was insane.

I was spending the weekend with friends in the Cotswolds, where we arrived on the Wednesday night. When we got to the house, I pulled my laptop out, worked till the early hours of the morning, crashed, woke up a few hours later, worked through the morning, waved my friends off as they went shopping, barely noticed time passing, and finally, finally, on the Thursday afternoon, Ariella emailed me to say that my manuscript was ready to submit to publishers.

*cue tears of relief*

It was February 23, 2017, which was around 5 months – and countless edits – after signing with Ariella.

She was sending it as an exclusive to an editor over the weekend, and as we didn’t expect to hear anything until at least the Monday, I went upstairs, had a shower, and collapsed into bed.

Of course, this isn’t where my story ends…but the next step – getting a publishing deal – deserves its own blog post, so you’ll just have to stay tuned…

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