I am super thrilled, excited and happy ( plus any other adjective that can illustrate my joy) to announce that after what seems like freaking eons (6 years of querying, 5books, 4 mentorship contests) I finally got an AGENT!!!!! The awesome Tricia Lawrence of Erin Murphy Literary Agency signed me on after reading my MG dark fantasy novel Azel & The Jinni Familiar.
And this is how it all began ( cue flashback music )
So, on a particularly stressful Monday, I was in a cab on my way to teach my student & I was checking my email on my phone. I got an email from an agent saying that she wanted a chat. I gasped so loud the cab driver who'd been nodding off snapped awake ( a good thing I guess :) I told myself it could be a R&R and tried to be as chill as possible and of course promptly lost all sleep and sanity till the call ( which was the next day, thank God for that coz any longer & my dark circles would give the pandas a run for their money). The lovely agent offered me rep!
Yay :) And that was the start of a very exciting & nail-biting 2 weeks! I had a number of fulls & partials out on Azel & immediately informed all the agents about the news.
Tricia was not the offering agent but when she heard that I had an offer, she read Azel super fast and set up a call with me. I couldn't believe my eyes when she sent me that email . I legit re-read it a few times. At this point I have to say that the offering agent was an amazing person and it was HARD to decline the offer. It was equally hard to decline the other offers ( honestly agents are SO NICE!) But I felt in my gut that Tricia was the right match for me plus she was my dream agent! So how could I say no?
The funniest thing is that the actual query I sent Tricia was not on Azel. I had queried her in 2016 (Yup, you read that right!) on an old book which I shelved. She contacted me about a month back asking to read the full on that book ( the old one). I was in a quandary. To say I wanted to query Tricia on Azel was an understatement of this Millennium. She was my dream agent. EMLA was not open to unsolicited subs or she would've been the first person I queried when it came to Azel. But I wasn't sure if she would be willing to read Azel ( Azel & my old book were very different in tone although subject matter was a little similar). I took a chance, explained my situation, pasted the query on Azel & the first 5 pages in the body of the email, attached my full and sent it. And the rest is history!
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