Becky Allen Books

YA fantasy writer. Not a morning person.

The Big, Exciting News

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So I have some news. Some pretty big news. Some pretty rad news. Some pretty big and rad news. Which is this: I’ve recently signed on as a client of literary agent Hannah Bowman, of Liza Dawson Associates Literary Agency.

Holy crap, wow.

This is something I have been working towards for a long, long time. As a kid, I scrawled stories in my school notes. I filled up floppy disk after floppy disk with stories.1 I read constantly and knew I wanted to someday be a writer and publish a book. Not that I knew how to do that. But a few years and a couple of trunked, mediocre manuscripts later, I did some research on what getting published actually entails, and finding an agent to work with — and who wants to work with you — is a huge step.

For friends and family who aren’t familiar with publishing, no, this news does not mean I have a book coming out, but it means I’ve written one and am hoping to see it published eventually. If you want to know more about what agents do and why they’re so vital for people who want to be traditionally published, check out What Do Literary Agents Do? by former agent Nathan Bransford. But the short version is: Hannah read my novel and loved it, she got everything I was trying to do with it, and I’m at least 93% more likely to eventually see it in print with her help than I would be without it.2

As for how it all happened, it was via the query process. For non-writers, that means sending a letter introducing myself, along with a three-paragraph-or-less synopsis of my novel, and hoping it would catch an agent’s interest.3 This process is one of the most frustrating things writers go through (boiling a novel down into a 250-word hook is not easy, figuring out who to contact involves a metric ton of research, the process is usually very slow, and many writers never find agents at all). It’s also something I’d been simultaneously looking forward to and dreading for years. It feels a lot like a right of passage, which for me marked the change from writing as a hobby (albeit one I’ve always taken very seriously) towards writing professionally, which, like I said above, is what I’ve always wanted to do.

Finishing a novel is a big step. Revising it, feeling confident that it’s actually pretty good, is another.4 Sending out queries is a huge one. And signing with an agent? That’s major. And I really, truly could not be more excited to work with Hannah.

  1. Okay, it wasn’t that hard to do that; we’re talking the five inch, ancient disks here.
  2. I arrived at that number by scientific calculation and did not pull it out of a hat.
  3. It isn’t a full synopsis, but it has to introduce the plot and characters, and because I write fantasy, also the world. Which is still quite a bit for three paragraphs — and three paragraphs is on the long side for a query.
  4. Also I have an awesome writing group who helped with this SO MUCH.

One response to “The Big, Exciting News”

  1. Matthew Avatar

    Wooh, that’s awesome! Congratulations!!!

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