How I Landed a Literary Agent … TWICE!
- At August 18, 2023
- By Rebecca
- In News
- 1
Anyone who’s been in this industry for even a short time can tell you one undeniable truth – children’s publishing is a seriously competitive biz. The odds of being picked up off the slush pile are something like 1-in-one-hundred (personally, I suspect it’s less).
This article is going to cover how I went from being aspiring writer to published author, highlighting one of the most important parts of my journey – signing with a literary agent. I’ll detail what steps I took to go from endless “No’s” to that coveted “Yes”, as well as some of the key advantages to having an agent in Australia.
So here we go!
My journey into the creative world started over 20 years ago. I studied animation at uni, but my real love was children’s writing. During uni I did a short course on writing for children and spent the next 10 years working on a middle grade fantasy novel while working in various admin and retail jobs. I don’t remember exactly how many rejections I received for my middle grade novel, so I’ll just say I received all of them. I ended up self-publishing the manuscript in 2011 (after a scary experience with a vanity press), as well as the book’s sequel, followed by another stand-alone novel and a picture book.
Self-publishing taught me a LOT about the publication business in general, as well as marketing, sales, and the importance of a fanbase. I spent most weekends at markets and book fairs selling a handful of copies at a time. It was a SLOG.
And while it worked okay when I was single, it certainly wouldn’t fit in with my 3-kids-plus-2-jobs life now. What I really wanted was traditional publication – I could do all the creative stuff, and someone else could do the selling.
In 2018/2019 I landed two contracts with traditional publishers to illustrate picture books. These weren’t contracts I sought out – rather, both publishers approached me after seeing my work online, and asked if I’d be interested in working with them (to this day I still don’t have a proper illustration portfolio!). Around this time, I was also working on a new idea for a chapter book that I felt was something of a winner. It had commercial appeal, was super cute, and was based on one of my favourite things – mermaids. While on maternity leave I re-worked the manuscript into what I thought was reasonable shape and sent it off to a few publishers. Cue chirping crickets, because that’s the sound of the responses I got – zero!
On the back end of (another) rejection I received an email from prolific children’s author Aleesah Darlison offering writing mentorships. I snapped one up and dove into that mentorship like my life depended on it! And holy mermaid fins, was it a game changer! What I thought was my best work was WAY off track. Having a mentor really helped steer me in the right direction and bring out the best of the concept. Although I was pitching MerTales as a chapter book for 6-9 year olds, Aleesah noted my writing was still geared towards middle grade. The themes, sentence structure, and voice were all too mature for a newly independent reader taking on chapter books for the first time. To help strengthen my skills I decided to enrol in a course specifically for writing chapter books through the ACW. I poured over dozens of titles aimed at a similar target audience and took notes on what I felt worked, and why. I counted page numbers and identified themes, and re-wrote my manuscript multiple times.
When I sent my revisions to Aleesah, she told me I was much closer to the mark. I finally understood what my audience wanted; simplicity, humour, sweetness, and a good story (I like to think I always got that last one right, at least!).
Not long after my mentorship with Aleesah wrapped up, I was awarded an illustration mentorship through the Australian Society of Authors. This one I undertook with Marjorie Crosby-Fairall, also prolifically published, and we worked on the illustrations for MerTales. Again, another game changer for me. We concentrated on compositions as well as some different rendering techniques. See below for some of Marjorie’s reworking of my compostions:
Although we chewed up the mentorship hours WAY too fast, one of the best things Marjorie did for me was to encourage me to continue my learning through online courses like SVS Learn. This was probably also the point I realised it’s not about studying something once and then just knowing what to do – creative arts, including writing, are a never-ending process of skill building, learning, experimenting and adjusting.
So after two bouts of insanely prosperous mentoring with two very talented creators, I had a beautiful little submissions pack all ready to send out to prospective publishers. And if you’re thinking, ‘Bec, this is supposed to be an article on AGENTS, not MENTORS, and you haven’t even gotten to the bit about agents yet’ … well, there’s a reason for that!
The reality is that signing with an agent is equally, if not more, difficult than signing with a publisher (in Australia, at least). What you submit truly has to be your BEST WORK. The common thread between agents and publishers is they both need to believe the same thing – that your book will sell. This isn’t to take the wondrously creative side of writing out of the equation, but it is essential to acknowledge that publishing is a business. Coming to grips with this early on in your journey is a BIG time saver.
If you’re submitting work and it’s not being picked up, it might be time to ask yourself some big questions:
- If my book had been written by someone else, would I buy it? Would I recommend it to others?
- Is my idea truly original? Am I leaning too much on current popular tropes and themes?
- Would this idea translate well into other media? When I’m brainstorming concepts, I often ask; would this make a good movie/TV series/video game/line of merchandise? The odds of a book – even a published one – going down any of these paths is slim, but I find it’s a useful way to judge the commercial appeal of an idea.
- Am I submitting enough? You may need to write a dozen books (or more!) before you create one that sells. Publishing is a marathon, not a sprint.
The professional guidance I received from my mentors was paramount to signing with my first agent, who could not wait to represent the book. MerTales was sold within weeks.
Woah, back up here Bec – how did you sign with the agent?
Well, like publishers, many agents open their books to new clients only periodically, meaning they’re closed the rest of the time. But there’s a loophole! I submitted work to my agent via a manuscript assessment at a large writing conference – the CYA Conference, in fact, for which I’ve been a volunteer for many years (ever seen the little leaping crocodile in the logo? That’s my illustration). Yes, you have to pay for assessments, and there are no guarantees of agent representation or publication. Keep in mind the name of the game is ‘assessment’ – it’s not a pitch. That said, if the agent/editor/publisher sees enough potential in the work, they can sometimes make an offer.
Most conferences offer some kind of assessment program, so they’re definitely worth checking out.
Having an agent was a brilliant experience. Justine became my mentor, editor and advisor as I navigated the tricky world of traditional publishing offers and contracts. Having an agent gets you out of the slush pile and onto the desks of editors and publishers. And not just that, but the RIGHT editors and publishers. When it was time to submit, Justine knew who was most likely to be interested, and had direct contact details for each editor. There was no waiting around for select submission days of the week (or year!) – because submissions via agents are not unsolicited. Things also tended to move much quicker – responses were received within days or weeks, not months (or longer – I once received a rejection 18 months after I’d submitted the manuscript). This isn’t a rant against publishers – they are flooded with manuscripts to read, keeping in mind their job entails SO much more than simply reading submissions. But for me, having an agent definitely helped shuffle me up the pile.
So that’s how I signed with my first agent. Onto the next one …
A year after MerTales was sold, my agent sadly left the industry. I was devastated – Justine was my lifeline! But before she bowed out (and very gracefully; there are honestly no hard feelings at all), she did introduce me to a few other agents. I was about to sign a contract on my next book series, which helped me land an absolute dream agent, Sarah. The concept was solid, with lots of lively concept art and the first two chapters mocked up as a sample book. Sarah could see I was serious about my career and willing to put in the time and effort it takes to make it work. I signed up, and she’s still my wonderful agent now.
So, to reiterate, here’s how I landed an agent:
- First, I selected my most commercially viable idea (i.e., what would be most likely to sell).
- Next, I engaged the help of two professional, established mentors who knew the biz inside and out.
- From those mentorships came The Work. I wrote, I studied, I analysed, I re-wrote. I drew so much I had to start wearing an armbrace.
- I took the advice of my mentors seriously. It’s not enough to be able to ‘cope’ with criticism – you will gain success so much quicker if you learn to seek it out!
- Finally, I used a writing conference to book a face-to-face assessment with an agent.
And the second time around:
- I had another, equally commercial idea ready to go.
- I could show I had established relationships with publishers.
- I could show I was active on social media and enthusiastic about promoting my own work.
All this aside, it’s important to keep in mind that as hard as you may work, luck always play a part. You need to submit the right idea at the right time. I have heard many stories (and experienced this once myself, and painfully so) about work being rejected simply because it happened to be too similar to something else the publisher or agent had just signed. Or, maybe the no’s you are receiving are more like not yet’s. The industry may not be ready for your particular genre/idea/concept. Keep trying new things, put most of your effort into generating fresh ideas … and submit, submit, submit!
What are your thoughts on agents? Would love to hear in the comments.
Where Have I Been Lately?
- At May 14, 2022
- By Rebecca
- In News
- 5
Hello all! I have been stupendously remiss about keeping this mini-blog up to date so I thought I’d do a bit of a recap to get up to speed.
Late 2019
As mentioned in my last post for 2019, after the birth of our youngest son Joshua, I had been working on some new projects to send out to publishers and agents for consideration. Sad to day, everything I sent out was promptly rejected.
Bummer.
Far from ready to give up, I used the last bit of money from my advance for Super Nova to hire a mentor, highly-published children’s author Aleesah Darlison from Greenleaf Agency, to help me brush up a junior fiction concept I had been tinkering with for almost a decade. The key piece of feedback I received was that the manuscript was not targeting the right age group – it was more like a short middle grade story, rather than a chapter book. And by ‘manuscript’, I mean pretty much everything – the language, characterisation, themes, sentence structure etc. But the central idea (being mermaids with magical powers) was a winner, so I decided to persevere. I enrolled in a writing course with the Australian Writers’ Centre, Writing Chapter Books for 6-9 year olds, put together by Lesley Gibbes, and learnt a TONNE about the specifics of writing for this age group.
As part of the course, I also bought about a dozen books aimed at the same age group and analysed the heck out of them – word count, sentence length, complexity of language, chapter length, themes, style, voice (yes those last two are different), illustrations, you name it. Some of the titles I analysed included:
- Pearl the Magical Unicorn by Sally Odgers, illustrated by Adele K. Thomas
- The Rainbow Magic series (Scholastic)
- The Princess in Black by Shannon and Dean Hale, illustrated by LeUyen Pham
- Juliet, Nearly a Vet by Rebecca Johnson
- Clementine Rose by Jacqueline Harvey, illustrated by Anne Yi
- EJ10 Super Spy by Susannah McFarlane
- Hey Jack by Sally Rippin, illustrated by Stephanie Spartels
- My Little Pony series
- Mermaid Holidays by Delphine Davis, illustrated by Adele K. Thomas
I re-wrote the manuscript and was extremely relieved when Aleesah informed me it was a lot closer to the mark. We continued to work on some of the weaker areas, mainly clarity of story and making sure the main character, nine-year-old mermaid Pearl, wasn’t too passive and instead made the choices that drove the story forward to its conclusion. After about 3 re-writes, I had used up my mentorship hours and came out with a manuscript I was VERY happy with.
Aside from working on the manuscript itself, Aleesah’s mentorship included putting together a series proposal. What’s a series proposal? It’s a collection of documents outlining a book series, and includes:
- The over-arching concept (elevator pitch)
- Info on the target audience, themes and word count
- A paragraph on the setting
- Paragraphs on the main characters (in this instance, the four mermaids)
- A full one-page synopsis of the first story in the series
- Half-page outlines of other potential books in the series (usually three concepts)
This, together with the full manuscript of Book 1, would be pitched to publishers and agents – as long as it was within their guidelines, of course!
Then came the illustrations.
I never intended to illustrate these books, solely because I didn’t believe my art was good enough. But sometime in 2019 I happened to draw a mermaid using a Wacom graphics tablet, mostly on a whim, and it kind of came out pretty well:
I posted the drawing on social media and the response was amazing. People loved it! I started to think, maybe I could actually be the illustrator for these books. So I drew more mermaids, basing them on my best friends, and added them to the series proposal.
Around the same time I was extremely fortunate to be awarded an Illustration Mentorship Award from the ASA. I chose to work with Marjorie Crosby-Fairall, whose work I just adore:
I’ve always felt my weakest illustration skill is creating compositions, so I asked Marjorie to help with that as a key point of development. Her mentorship was utterly brilliant. I learnt so much, and Marjorie was also kind enough to direct me to further learning. I signed up to SVSLearn for about a year, doing their composition course and a few others as well. Definitely worth it! Under Marjorie’s guidance I put together a few pieces of sample art for my mermaid series, including a character sheet, one piece of colour art and two black and white layouts. This is one of them:
All up, working with both Aleesah and Marjorie, I spent about 6 months really polishing the series proposal and getting everything together. Which brings us to …
Early-Mid 2020
In early 2020 I sent the series proposal for the mermaid series (titled MerTales) to literary agent Justine Barker of Mayfair Literary Agency. My submission was not sent directly (Mayfair’s books were closed at the time), but rather by booking a manuscript assessment at the CYA Conference. Conferences are an EXCELLENT way to get your work in front of publishers and agents, especially those that never (or rarely) accept unsolicited manuscripts. Justine loved the concept, the writing and the artwork, and could see the potential for the series to be transferred to other media. It was probably the most exciting week of my life when she asked to represent MerTales and take me on as a client. It was a great match! (And of course I said yes!)
Mid-Late 2020
In just a few short weeks, Justine had sold the series to Albert Street Books, an imprint of Allen & Unwin, with the first book to be released mid-2021.
Then came the hard work! Over the next 6 months, we worked on both the manuscript and illustrations for Book 1. I also did the artwork for the front cover, which has to be done early for marketing purposes. The book shaped up really well and was SUCH a brilliant project to work on. I scaled down my hours in my web design business and was so happy to be living the life of my dreams, drawing mermaids and writing dad jokes all day!
2021: Year of the Mermaid
Following directly on from completing Book 1, 2021 was basically ‘The Year of the Mermaid’ for me. I wrote and illustrated Books 2, 3 and most of 4 during this year. It was a challenge, for sure, but the most rewarding one ever. In July 2021, the first MerTales book was released, titled The Best Friend Promise.
Sadly the timing of the release was greatly affected by COVID, with half of Australia – including the two largest cities – in lockdown right over the launch. I said YES to everything I could do to help give the book its best shot, and was really awed by the publicity and marketing team, who did amazing work in launching MerTales.
Unfortunately, the launch of Book 2 (The Daring Reef Rescue) landed right in the middle of more major lockdowns. It was disappointing, but I’m the kind of person who doesn’t stay knocked down for long. By this time I was finishing up the illustrations for Book 3 (The Great Treasure Hunt), which is my favourite book in the series. I felt I had hit my stride illustrating the MerTales characters and after drawing literally HUNDREDS of mermaids, I was feeling very confident about the artwork for this book!
A few months after the release of Book 1, Justine left the industry as a literary agent, and I was stupendously lucky to sign up with Sarah McKenzie. Even though I was elbows deep in MerTales, I was starting to think about what might come next, and started developing some new series concepts.
Meanwhile, in between writing and illustrating, I was developing some fun new skills in game development. Having almost 15 years experience in web dev, I had the bright idea to make a MerTales video game for mobiles. How hard could it be, right? (Famous last words much?) I undertook several online courses and made 3 or 4 different games. It was SO FUN. I honestly just loved it. But then as the deadlines for the remaining books began to creep up, I put the game dev aside and concentrated on the book series. A bird in the hand, as they say!
2022 Already?
In mid-Feb 2022, I finished the final artwork for The Mysterious Rainbow Thief. It was both elating and a bit sad. I was so proud to have written and illustrated four entire books in just over a year, and of course, SO super grateful to have had the opportunity. But I was also a little sad that I was leaving Cockleshell Cove behind. Well, almost …
With some extra time up my sleeve before my next project was to kick off (more on that later), I spent the next 10 weeks finishing up the MerTales game. To say it was intense is a HUGE understatement! I crafted every aspect of the game myself – the backgrounds, character art, animation, maze layouts, coding, all of it. The one thing I didn’t do was create the music. For that, I sourced music via audiojungle.net, purchasing mass reproduction licences for each track and sound effect. I also had to re-learn Premiere Pro after not touching it since uni (after 20 years, it’s basically a different program!), in order to make the marketing materials. Actually publishing the apps via the App Store and Google Play was another mammoth effort. I won’t go into it all too much in this blog, as I’m intending on writing a (very long!) post about the full process in the near future, but holy tamale it was epic.
Which leads us to now!
On May 3rd 2022, MerTales Book 4: The Mysterious Book Thief was released into the world! And later this month, MerTales: Mermaid Rescue will be released on the App Store and Google Play. Watch the super cute trailer below!
You can learn more about MerTales: Mermaid Rescue on the MerTales website.
So what’s next?
A few weeks ago I was thrilled to sign another contract with Albert Street Books for a brand new junior fiction series! The first book will be released in June 2023. In between working on that, I’ll also be continuing on with some other works-in-progress and prepping them for submission, including a middle grade sci-fi novel and a third junior fiction series.
If you’d like to stay up to date with my writing progress and/or watch my super silly Grizzly Giggles videos, jump onto Instagram and find me at @rjtimmis
Thanks for reading!
Best Year EVER!
- At November 03, 2019
- By Rebecca
- In News
- 0
Well 2019 has been a roller coaster, and it’s not over yet!
On June 12 our family was completed when little Joshua Daniel Paul was born. He’s now almost 5 months old and the sweetest baby on the planet (some bias is to be expected, right?).
Lucky for me Joshua is a great sleeper, so I have been able to tinker away on a few creative projects during maternity leave. In August I wrote two short stories for the Buzz Words Magazine Short Story Competition. Both have made it to the long list so far, with the short list to be announced mid-November.
In September I entered three story ideas in the Just Kids Lit ‘Pitch It!’ Competition, one of which has made the long list, yay!
In October I signed my second illustration contract with a traditional publisher … more details to come!
And last week I was awarded an Illustration Mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors. How exciting!
I’ve also been brushing up some older manuscripts, drawing like a madwoman – check out some new artwork on my Portfolio page – and even submitting new work to publishers. Oh and of course, working steadily on the third David book: David and the Song of the Lyreshaw.
It’s truly been a great year, and 2020 is shaping up to be truly spectacular 🙂
WATCH THIS SPACE!
New Book Release: Super Nova
- At November 03, 2019
- By Rebecca
- In News
- 0
She’s here!
Super Nova is the debut picture book by Canberra writer Krys Saclier, and it’s a doozy! Without giving the ending away, I can say it’s a STELLAR book that’s just a little out of this world. I had incredible fun doing the illustrations for this book, which have been described as ‘bright’, ‘bold’ and ‘full of clever details’.
About the book:
Nova’s brother thinks she gets away with too much, until he finds out what she’s really planning. And it’s out of this world. Will he keep her secret?
Super Nova tells the story of the most powerful force in the universe – a little sister.
Order your copy or download the teacher notes from Ford Street Publishing.
Big Things Happening in 2019
- At March 12, 2019
- By Rebecca
- In News
- 0
There has been some conspicuous radio silence across my websites for the last 6 months, but for some rather large (and wonderful) reasons. Shortly after signing my first illustration contract with a traditional publisher in September last year, my husband and I were thrilled to discover we were expecting another baby. Talk about everything happening at once! Despite being over the moon I also found myself quite literally with my head over the loo – pregnancy hormones are evil, evil things. But luckily they have settled down now and I don’t feel quite so much like a brain-dead zombie (more like a fire-breathing dragon, thanks to all the heartburn … oh the joys of having children!).
In and around raising two boys with my husband, running my web design business, working on the third David book whenever I can, and growing larger and more beach-ball-esque by the day, I have been making steady progress on my contract work and am hoping to finish it up in the next few weeks. The story has been a delight to work on and I have learned so, so much under the guidance of my editor. I can’t wait to share all the details soon!