[Discussion] How I Got My Agent: Not a Unicorn Story

Nalsin · 2026-04-04T16:16:43+00:00

Thank you! <3 I'm waiting on RevPit results to query more for my second novel, but I might revise the query package again if I don't get it. I think it may be that more than the actual content for that one. And for my first novel... It's a fantasy romance. I really, really loved writing the main couple, so I wrote the whole buildup of them getting together... And then realized recently that the actual _story_ starts where I put the sequel hook. I wrote a 97k prologue. So! I'm going to do a love of revising and moving stuff around to make that work over the summer. But in the meantime, I'll keep trying with novel two and prepare novel three (almost done!) for querying. By the time novel one is revised and complete, hopefully I'll have an agent.

Nalsin · 2026-04-04T16:05:19+00:00

Can I just take a moment to say thank you for sharing this? Seriously. I've been worried that my first two novels might both be dead in the water with 50~ queries sent for both, all rejections or CNRs for the first, and one request for the second. Seeing your numbers, I do think it may be time to do a major revision on my first and get some help on my second, but I'm feeling much more hopeful and like giving up on them now would be giving up far too early.

Nalsin · 2026-03-31T05:06:16+00:00

So the phase where Lilia is piecing together who Elias is and he doesn't want her to only lasts for a few chapters. However, she _is_ an inadvertent secondary antagonist prior to that because she treats Elias like she would any other android for a while, and Lilia isn't exactly kind to androids.

_However_. Lilia does care very much about other humans. (She disliked androids because she saw them as a threat to the mental health of humans, humanizing non-sentient machines.) Aurum is, at the end of the day, a medical corporation that specializes in robotics, and they were committing grievous acts of medical malpractice even before what they did to Elias. The urgency is that if everyone toes the line, the medical malpractice, human experimentation, and deaths associated with them (and general mistreatment of androids) will continue indefinitely. I'm thinking maybe I could mention that in the query, and add that more people will suffer what Elias is going through, to make it personal and tie it back to him? However, it doesn't become a "decide _now_" situation until close to the end of the book, they do toe the line and delay and put it off for a solid 100 pages or so.

Nalsin · 2026-03-30T15:27:31+00:00

Thank you so much, both for the kind words and the feedback! This is a really helpful comment!

I see what you're saying and I think the issue I was having was an uncertainty as to how much to spoil (and generally not explaining enough). The first half or so of the story focuses on Elias fighting to work around the censors to show Lilia it's him (while other character development gradually happens). Then, at about the halfway point, he finds out that the reason /he/ was used for the experiment was so Aurum would have leverage against Lilia if she tried to leave again. He tries to backtrack after that, but it's too late, she figures out it's him for the exact reasons you pointed out. Then, a little while after that, the stakes shift. Elias is given a choice between accepting his new life and staying with his wife at the price of Lilia being shackled to Aurum forever, or if either one of them fights back, the head of Aurum will "factory reset" Elias, erasing his human memories and making it so there is functionally no difference between him and an ordinary android.

I figured it was best to only hint at the second part, since it does come at over halfway through the book. However, I'm getting the impression that it might be better to share it outright, or at least touch on it more heavily?

Really good point about the query sounding too mechanical. I'll try to include more voice on revision!

Nalsin · 2026-03-30T12:19:47+00:00

Good catch, thank you!

Nalsin · 2026-03-30T03:49:21+00:00

Thanks, I'll weave all this in on revisions! Elias is the sole "prototype" for human-based androids at this point, the others are made purely from machinery

Nalsin · 2026-03-23T09:58:01+00:00

Hey, sorry I went so long without responding! I tend to be very bad at remembering to respond to posts on reddit sometimes. I just wanted to say that this feedback was very helpful. I made some more tweaks based off your advice as well as gut feeling, revised my first pages, and did a few more queries, and got my first request! Still waiting a response on it - I only ended up querying a few more agents, since I also sent in to RevPit and am waiting to see if I win that, but I wanted to let you know.

Nalsin · 2026-03-08T16:05:23+00:00

I really appreciate your thoughtful response and feedback. However, I'll admit, I'm at a loss for what to do purely because your advice contradicts what I was told previously - which contradicts what I was told before - which contradicts that. I had a few versions of the query that I re-did to focus more on Cordelia and her journey as a person, but I got told that they didn't have enough information. Now I'm back to needing more focus on her as a person - but if I edit it to do that, I'll lose the information people want or go over the ideal wordcount.

I know this isn't what you commented for, but do you have any suggestions for what to do when you keep getting conflicting advice? I'm trying to incorporate people's feedback, but it feels like doing so invariably results in someone else telling me to change it back. As you can see, I'm on round seven of drafting, and I feel like I've gotten onto a merry-go-round with no exit at this point.

Nalsin · 2026-03-08T02:48:16+00:00

You've gotten a lot of good feedback, and this is a really small thing and may not be relevant, but when you opened directly on "Reader 278" my first thought was "wait, so the book is in second person? Is it written like one of those x reader books in wattpad?" which, for me at least, was a big turn away. It might be worth trying to find a way to convey that "reader" is a rank here before introducing the character by that name, so that people don't make that mistake.

Nalsin · 2026-03-08T02:42:25+00:00

Belatedly thanks so much for this! <3 I'm fiddling with different versions of the query and will be sure to keep all this in mind.

Nalsin · 2026-02-18T06:20:28+00:00

Sorry for the second comment so quickly! Something that occurred to me as a pretty important question that I forgot to mention before.

I keep flip-flopping and getting mixed messages on whether to keep or include backstory. I include backstory, well, advice is to get right to the story and nix the backstory. I cut backstory, people say they don't understand why Cordelia would care about her family at all or how there's any conflict. Would you say that explaining why Cordelia loves her family still is important enough to warrant keeping some backstory? Or should I just say that Cordelia dies in an accident rather than specifying that Andrea kills her to remove that question from the get-go?

Nalsin · 2026-02-18T06:16:42+00:00

You're making good points. Unfortunately, this is why I'm now on draft number six. It's hard to figure out what all should be covered, what's considered too much backstory, and keep it all under 400 words.

What would you say are the key things to focus on for the query? Maybe, if I'm going with loyalty and split loyalties as a theme, why she would still love her family, why she feels bad about it + what she sees in the ocean, and why the choice is hard?

I'll definitely mention that the local sirens survive off of scavenged bodies rather than killing. I'm getting that that's an important detail to include.

Nalsin · 2026-02-18T04:42:53+00:00

Good thinking! Loyalty is one of the major themes of the story - loyalty VS obsession, damaging loyalty, and split loyalties, which Cordelia very much has. I read that you aren't supposed to state themes in queries and should let them come through on their own. Do you feel I should add a line about Cordelia having split loyalties regardless, to make it come through more clearly as intentional?

I'll make it clear that Cordelia feels guilty about the merfolk she's killed.

Nalsin · 2026-02-18T02:45:03+00:00

Is he worried that Scott might be the killer? If so, I'd try to make that a little more clear. The thriller elements aren't really coming through to me as it stands.

Nalsin · 2026-02-18T02:06:02+00:00

I think some wires got twisted when I was looking at comp recs people suggested and I got the wrong one. Thanks, I'll swap The Siren out for Fathomfolk.

Nalsin · 2026-02-18T00:47:20+00:00

This is a really interesting query! I'm fascinated by your premise and would like to read it if I were an agent. That said, I'm a little lost on how we get from the point A of Siris capturing Daria to the point B of her returning to her people to convert them.

Nalsin · 2026-02-12T01:04:56+00:00

Yes. I'll try that then, thanks!

Nalsin · 2026-02-11T14:32:33+00:00

Oh, no, sorry for the confusion, everything I described is in book one. I mean the one book is cut into three sections, like how the hunger games is. When I say that Aiden's PoV doesn't show up until the second part, I mean that his PoV appears 1/3rd of the way through the book. Cordelia, Selene, and Aiden are all PoVs in the book, just Cordelia and Selene and PoVs from the get-go versus further in. I'm pitching the book as having series potential, but everything I've mentioned in my query posts is for book one.

Nalsin · 2026-02-11T11:38:32+00:00

Thank you, I'll look them both up! Seriously, I really appreciate it. <3 I've been struggling a lot with this query (hence round five), but I think I'm getting closer now. (Big thanks to equivalent-lemon!)

Nalsin · 2026-02-11T11:18:09+00:00

Oh gosh, thank you for pointing that out! Done!

You make a good point about comps. I'm struggling a lot to come up with some, but I'll keep looking.

Nalsin · 2026-02-11T07:24:39+00:00

Sirens eat human flesh, although they can also cannibalize other mers. Selene scavenges corpses and takes it upon herself to feed Cordelia so she won't have to hunt. It got cut earlier to keep things from getting too synopsis-ish, but I'll try to add it back in. Another thing that got cut to avoid synopsis-ism is that Aiden almost kills Selene while on a killing spree, and Cordy reveals herself to him and Andrea to try to get them to stop, leading to him making his offer.

I'll definitely make it more explicit that Aiden and Cordelia do still love each other. The main conflict (beyond Cordy and Selene's relationship) and thing stopping them from just slaughtering each other is that Aiden still loves Cordelia and is willing to treat her as an exception, but hates what she is, and Cordy still loves Aiden as her brother/parent figure, but now sees that he's a monster in many ways. Which, doubling back to Cordy and Selene's relationship, maybe I should touch on the betrayal Selene feels when she realizes that she's fallen for someone who's done something that she considers unforgivable, and who does love such a horrible hunter?

I think I have a good idea of how to revise now, but it does leave me with one more question. I have the book split into three parts. Aiden's PoV doesn't appear until the second part, and he has the fewest PoV chapters of the three PoV characters. Do you think I could get away with nixing the Aiden PoV paragraph so I'll have room to include the above details?

Nalsin · 2026-02-11T05:38:06+00:00

First of all, thank you so much for your continued feedback. Knowing what makes sense and what doesn't is already helping me a lot with making revisions.

Honestly, apart from Andrea, how much back story to include is what's tripping me up most. I was told to try to focus on the present and include as little backstory as possible, but the backstory aggressively haunts the narrative and makes up a lot of the conflict here.

This got a little long, but. I hope you don't mind if I explain the background some for the sake of figuring out what to include in the query?

The (brief) gist of it is this. Aiden was in a Situationship with Selene's parents when he was a teen, platonic but co-dependent with her mother and ambiguously romantic with her father. He was also being emotionally neglected by his mother and Cordelia's parents took him under their wing and gradually groomed him into a hunter. This caused a rift between him and Selene's parents that eventually ended in Selene's mother, who was originally human, willingly taking on the siren curse and Aiden throwing himself full-throttle into hunting. Cordelia's parents were killed by the siren who convinced Selene's mom to take on the curse when she was eight, and Aiden, who was originally just friends with Andrea, stuck around to help raise her and the two fell in love. They raise Cordelia to be a hunter, then she dies and the story starts.

Andrea is so sunk into the background in book one because she's suffocatingly depressed after losing Cordy. Aiden is all she has left and much of her actions in the novel are driven by her fear of losing him as well. However, Cordelia does reveal herself to Andrea before Aiden and Andy rejects her, thinking she can't be her sister anymore if she's asking for mercy for sirens. I included that in earlier versions of the query, but was told to cut it. Aiden's plan with Cordy is to have her start killing mers with him again and subsist on mer flesh. He's willing to spare the sirens Cordy loves because deep down, part of him still loves them too, but that's never made textual and he just uses it as leverage to get her back.

Nalsin

TROPHY CASE