I am thrilled to announce that I’m now represented by Emily Keyes at the Keyes Agency LLC!
If you’ve ever been in the agent querying trenches, then you know it can often be a long, slow, demoralizing slog. This is the third novel I’ve completed and queried. A lot of folks find it helpful to hear how the process has gone for others, so here’s how it went down for me.
Novel #1: Back in the early 2000s, young naive me wrote a crappy epic fantasy novel, basically a rewrite of a crappy epic fantasy novella I had written as a teenager. Young naive me of course thought it was brilliant. That novel was the first one I ever queried, back when the querying landscape was waaaaay different. Many of the queries I sent were by email, but some had to (gasp) be printed out and sent via snail mail.
Anyway, I sent 50 queries and got 4 partial requests, all of which resulted in rejection. Rightly so, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I made some attempts to fix the novel after attending the Odyssey Writing Workshop and realizing why it wasn’t working, but it was fundamentally flawed and so mostly I ended up breaking it further. Eventually I trunked it. Wise move.
Novel #2: I spent several years primarily focused on short stories. But there was this one story that kept getting “this reads more like the start of a novel” responses. After sitting on the back burner for a while, it eventually became Novel #2, a steampunk/fantasy novel called The Ashdowners, which I started querying in 2020. Yeah, during Covid lockdown. Good times. I sent 123 queries and got 4 full requests—three of the agents ultimately passed, one never responded. So that felt awesome. 😕 For added brain exploding fun, I got personal feedback from two agents, and it was completely contradictory: “I enjoyed the protagonist and the romance but the setting is working against you” followed by “The setting is cool and exciting but the romance immediately lost me.”
Novel #3: I started Novel #3, Keepers of the Barren Earth, in February 2021, and I started querying it in May 2024. In total, 83 queries and 3 full requests. Of the fulls, one agent passed but said it was a very close call for them, and one said they enjoyed the worldbuilding but didn’t think the story was big enough. Luckily, one good offer is all you need, and I got that with Emily. After the phone call in which she offered rep, I felt that even if no one else offered, I’d be perfectly happy to sign with her. And now I have! I’m excited that she’s excited, and I’m looking forward to digging into revisions on the novel before it finally goes on submission to publishers.
Barbara A. Barnett 
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