Some people have agents. I am not one of them. It’s not that I don’t like agents, or appreciate their worth, it’s just that I got an offer for Girlish directly from Skyhorse Publishing.
You see, I went with the “Wallpaper the Internet with Queries” technique when I was ready to place my book with a publisher. I started on Memorial Day weekend, 2016, and by September, I had an offer on my book, which I gleefully accepted.
I queried agents as well as publishers. Heck, I queried everybody. All I knew was that I wanted to get my book out into the world, and I wasn’t fussy about how that happened.
I don’t play the what-if game. I’ve been impressed with Skyhorse. I don’t have a bad thing to say about them, so I don’t spend any time wondering if I should have first pursued agents before direct-querying publishers. I’m just grateful that my book found a home as quickly as it did.
I do have one agent related story for you agent-seeking-hopefuls out there. An essay I wrote won a contest at American Literary Review, and an agent read it, followed the link to my website, and contacted me about future representation. Unfortunately, I don’t have a ready-to-query book to send her just yet, but I’m working on it. Hopefully she will remember me when the time comes, assuming, that is, that Skyhorse isn’t interested, as my contract gives them first right of refusal.
While I’ve never had an agent, I did have a bat for a minute last week. This is what I can tell you about bats:
- Bats don’t care for showers.
- Wet bats are unbelievably adorable.
- Freshly showered bats fly away very quickly when you aren’t looking.
We have a log cabin, and although we don’t believe in pesticides as a rule, once a year we have to pay someone to spray the logs for carpenter bees (which are the size of my head) and cluster flies that like to winter in our home. When the gentleman was spraying last week, he accidentally knocked down a bat that we didn’t know was living in our eaves. My very brave SigO donned gloves and washed it off, then set it on a log in the sun to dry. The bat showed us its very sharp and scary teeth, but didn’t try to bite, so perhaps it didn’t mind the shower as much as one might think. It did, however, leave as soon as was batly possible. I hope it comes back.
