Hello again. Gonna attempt to make this blog a twice-a-week habit. Should be easy enough with the lessons from querying series. There are plenty to share.

Today, we shall discuss the very first thing I learned from the very first literary agent I ever pitched, which was at the DFW Writer’s Convention (aka DFWCon) in 2018, before the world went nuts. Since that point, I’ve heard this same advice from agents a zillion times, so you can take this one as written in stone (with a few exceptions mentioned toward the end).

When pitching/querying a novel, especially a debut novel, you must have a standalone story. It must have a beginning, middle, and end. The goals of the protagonist and threats of the antagonist must be resolved. In short:

You shouldn’t pitch/query the first book of a planned trilogy, or first volume of an open-ended series.

Here’s why:

Publishers are far less likely to be interested in an open-ended work of an unproven author. It’s simple risk/reward math to them. They don’t know if your story will sell. And if you don’t have an established track record of productivity, they don’t know they can count on you to produce sequels in the timeframe they want. Subsequently, agents are far less likely to be interested in representing said work.

“But Matt, I’ve already written the whole trilogy. Won’t that save them a lot of time?” Time, perhaps. But publishers think with their checkbooks first. They don’t want to buy three books when they don’t know if the first book will sell or not.

In addition, as a traditional publishing hopeful wanting to be productive with your writing time, you don’t to spend time writing sequels to books that don’t go anywhere with a publisher or agent. Write three entirely different stories and query them all. Yes, querying sucks at your soul, but your odds are better (very, very low x3 > practically nil x1).

If you plan to self-publish said series if you don’t get anywhere with an agent, then the advice is generally reversed. You want to have a series of books queued up for planned release at Amazon or wherever, as that tends to boost your sales. Lining up multiple books takes advantage of the “You may like…” and “Other readers purchased…” marketing algorithms online booksellers employ. And you want to take advantage of those, because they are time-limited. My focus (at the moment) remains with traditional publishing, so we’ll leave the advice on self-publishing at that for now.

Back to writing standalone stories vs. a series. It is entirely fine and, in some genres encouraged, to leave elements in your worldbuilding and subplots that can turn a standalone novel into the first of a larger story. If you do happen to have a successful debut novel, your publisher will most definitely be interested in your follow-on stories with a now-established audience.

Exceptions? Of course. If you have a million followers somewhere. If you’re a celebrity or known politician. If you write like Amanda Gorman. If you check all the boxes of a publisher’s flavor-of-the-month acquisitions binge. If you happen to query the exactly right agent at the right time that happens to have a great relationship with exactly the right editor and that editor’s publishing house’s cards all line up for you at exactly the right time. Long odds to line up all of those ducks in a row.

Success in traditional publishing has long odds already. As writers we must do what we can to improve our chances. Don’t make it easy for an agent to say no to you in the slushpile phase.

“So Matt, what happened with that first pitch session?” It was a polite decline. She gave no further reason than I had admittedly written the first book of a trilogy. The quality of the plot or characters or worldbuilding didn’t matter. I didn’t pass that first hurdle. I learned that lesson quickly and altered my pitch to the other three agents I met at the conference that weekend. All three requested materials. When I got home, I spent a furious week fixing the story before submitting my queries to those agents. I adjusted the ending, tweaked the goals, the antagonist, and trimmed the various subplots that were intended to further the story into books 2 and 3. I never got any further with an agent than the initial requests for materials from those pitches, or from unsolicited queries (which usually provide zero actionable feedback), so it’s entirely possible I didn’t de-trilogy it enough.

That manuscript is now on the shelf, biding its time. I still love the story. It’s the one that got me into the passion of writing in the first place. It’ll get attention again some day. Now that I’ve completed two more manuscripts (both entirely different stories), I suspect the quality of the writing wasn’t where it needed to be to catch an agent’s eye. We’ll talk more about that in an upcoming post.

Keep writing! M