Today I wanted to do a post about “The Call”. You know, that call. The one that you’re hoping for after all the pain and nerve-wracking waiting of querying.
For me, it happened one Tuesday morning. Tuesday is, in my opinion, the worst day of the week, but despite that I often seem to get good publishing news on Tuesdays. It was only ten days since I’d submitted my full, so I wasn’t expecting anything yet. But I opened my inbox to an email with the subject line “Phone Call”. I might have dropped my phone. I was so excited I replied “yes!” before even checking if I could even do the time that she’d suggested – luckily I could!
But once I was able to breathe again, I saw that the phone call wasn’t to be until the next Tuesday (yep, Tuesday strikes again!). It might not seem like a big deal that I had to wait a week, but I’m the kind of person who overthinks everything, so a week’s wait felt like an eternity.
I spent the following week alternating between researching what sort of things to expect from the phone call, scouring twitter, and preparing myself for disappointment. I kept telling myself that just because an agent wanted to speak on the phone didn’t necessarily mean anything.
In fact, it was most likely that she thought my manuscript was so terrible she felt that email would not be enough to convey her horror.
Luckily, there are so many resources available online to help with finding what to expect and preparing questions to ask during the phone call and to distract myself during the week.
As you can probably tell from the title of this post, it’s going to be in two parts so that it isn’t ridiculously long. In this first half I’m mainly going to focus on the preparation side, so first I wanted to mention something I didn’t think about too much until I started reading blog posts about the call which is: you might have to answer questions too.
For someone who doesn’t really like to be put on the spot (who does!?), I definitely wanted to have some answers prepared. I had several different word docs ready for before the phone call so I could refer to them in case I forgot how to speak English (which has been known to happen when I’m nervous…). For anyone who is getting ready for a call of their own, here are some of the questions I prepared answers to:
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What are you working on next?
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Who are some of your favourite authors within [your genre]?
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What has your path to publishing been? Have you been published/self-published before? Have you been agented before?
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How long does it usually take you to write a draft?
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How do you workshop your work? Do you have a critique group?
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What kind of support are you looking for from an agent?
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What’s your day job? What does your writing schedule normally look like?
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What are some of your career goals and expectations?
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Does your vision for this book match the agent’s vision?
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How open to editing/revisions are you?
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How do you feel about social media and self-marketing?
I should clarify: I definitely didn’t have to answer all these questions during the phone call. I just wanted to be over-prepared in case I ended up grilled in an FBI-level investigation (you never know…).
Plus, thinking of answers for these helped me to shape more what I was looking for in an agent, which helped me make my decision when I did get an offer.
The other thing that I made sure to do was look through any interviews I could find with the agent, to see if any questions I might have had already been answered, or if there was anything else I could learn from them. This was really helpful to get to know the agent a bit more, and definitely helped with my worries!
In the next part of this post I’m going to talk about how my call went, and some (okay, a lot of) questions I had ready to ask!