Part 4: Wait, Annabelle Got a Book Deal?
How I got and why I adore my agent. And the single most incredible restaurant of my life.
Welcome back to WAGaBoD?, where I take you deep down the rabbit hole of “The Mango Tree” and how this book came to fruition.
In Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series, I wrote about the years-long process that got me to a manuscript I didn’t hate. One I kinda, in fact, loved — in that nervous way you love a puppy or a gooey slab of baked Brie: excitedly but also with the knowledge that it will keep you up at night and likely ruin at least one piece of your furniture.
Now we’re at Part 4. Today, I’m talking agents.
If you follow me for the food and have no clue what a literary agent is or does, then God bless you and your surely blissful sleep. I was you, once. I too thought agents were people you found at banks and FBI bureaus, at open houses holding trays of cookies and pamphlets detailing the flood zone and square footage.
There is, I’ve learned, another kind of agent.
The literary kind.
Depending on who you ask on Twitter, a literary agent is something between a troll-ish, bridge-dwelling gatekeeper and God/Satan herself. Depending on who you ask on Twitter, one acquires an agent either by twirling in sync with the moon’s rotation on the third equatorial day of spring for the time it takes a goldfinch to lay an egg, or one writes The Perfect Book. Depending on who you ask on Twitter, there are no other options. So just pick one. Easy peasy, goldfinch squeezy!
Not every writer of books needs an agent. Many people choose to self-publish or publish with small/independent presses, none of which require the intermediary hands of these God-like-bridge-troll agent folks. However, if you want to be published by one of the “Big Five” (Penguin/Random House, Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan), then yes, you need an agent.
I’ve come to think of agents as filters. Editors don’t have time to read the hundreds of thousands of manuscripts from the hundreds of thousands of writers who hope to be published, so they rely on agents to skim the curds from the whey, the Brie from the raw cow’s milk.
This isn’t to say curds are better than wheys (Brie is a different story, and maybe I’ve run with that analogy for far longer than I should have). This is to say curds are more marketable, easier to position in the finnicky publishing marketplace, simpler for publishers to wrap their heads and dollars around.
Major publishers like books that are like other books.
Some will argue (on Twitter) that this is a bad thing. That we need different books. Weird books. Challenging books. They’re not wrong. But this is the world of publishing. And this is why it has agents.
Oftentimes, writers get agents by querying. The writer puts together the most polished version of their manuscript or proposal, writes a letter explaining why said manuscript/proposal will be The Next Big Thing, and then sends these materials to a few dozen/hundred agents in hopes one or more will bite.
Querying is stressful. Or so I’ve heard. I was gearing up to query — I had my revised&revised&revised&revised manuscript; I had my thoroughly researched and also thoroughly revised query letter; I had my list of agents sorted into tiers — and then something magical happened.
An agent found me.
Credit for this goes to the brilliant Minda Honey, whose class I took through The Porch in spring 2021 (perhaps on the third day of the equatorial equinox, but who can say?). Minda saw something in my work. She asked if she could share it with her agent. I gasped and cried and fainted. And then I said yes. (Minda, by the way, has her debut book, “The Heartbreak Years,” coming out in October, and you absolutely need to preorder it mmm,now).
Minda’s agent is the equally brilliant Kayla Lightner of Ayesha Pande Literary. Kayla was among my top tier of agents on my to-query list. When Kayla emailed me asking to set up a phone call, I gasped and cried and fainted yet again. And then I said yes. When that phone call stretched on for more than an hour, when Kayla noted the strengths and, more importantly, weaknesses of my pages and how we could work together to make them better, I did not gasp or cry or faint. I just said yes.
Fast forward two-plus years, and Kayla and I are on the verge of publication. “The Mango Tree” has a release date: April 2, 2024 (!!!!). And VERY SOON (as in: stay tuned y’all), this book of mine will be available for preorder.
These last two years have been a wild ride, but Kayla has stood by my side, quite literally in some cases, through all of it. She has done what a great agent should: detailed the steps, eased the fears, smoothed the bumps. She has been neither troll-ish nor God-like. She’s merely and also amazingly been a real live human helping me navigate this very odd and very specific world of publishing with grace and aplomb.
I would not be here without her.
Restaurant of the Week: A. Wong, London
I was, as my Instagram may have already told you, in the UK for two weeks. Two cool, breezy and kid-free weeks. Two weeks filled with pints and G&Ts and so much amazing food.
This week’s Restaurant of the Week is a byproduct of that trip. It’s a place you will not find in Florida. Not even close. It’s A. Wong.
You don’t need me to tell you that A. Wong and its executive chef Andrew Wong are special. Critics from around the globe have lavished the London restaurant with praise. The folks at Michelin, the prestigious makers of tires and raters of food, awarded A. Wong two illustrious stars. I expected A. Wong to be good. I didn’t understand how good.
What struck me about this restaurant wasn’t just the food — the extraordinary, imaginative and wildly delicious food. And it wasn’t just the service — the genuine, warm and thoroughly inviting service.
It was the story.
I am a sucker for a story. But I will be your adoring forever-fan if your story gives me glimpses into my own, as did Chef Andrew Wong’s.
This restaurant space has been in his family since 1985, back when it was called Kym’s, back when Andrew’s parents appeased the Brits of this Pimlico neighborhood with chow mein and sweet-and-sour pork. Andrew, from what I’ve read, grew up in this restaurant — and he longed to escape it. His escape came in the form of Oxford University, where Andrew studied chemistry, and then the London School of Economics, where he studied social anthropology. He planned to leave and never come back. And then his father died. His family needed him. He went back.
He went back, but he kept studying. He went back and he learned to cook — really cook. He went back with research and ideas and innovations, with a plan to create a concept that would bring to light the myriad regional cuisines of China and how they’ve spread throughout the Chinese and Asian diaspora.
What Chef Andrew Wong has created is sheer genius spread across 30-some small plates and bites. It’s a bracing Old Fashioned, its sharp edges smoothed and brightened with just a hint of duck fat. It’s a sweet lump of crab in a spiky clod of “coral” made from hand-pulled noodles that shatter like the last deeply browned chips (ahem, crisps) in the bottom of a bag. It’s soup dumplings in supple wrappers and a singular perfect bite of abalone and lettuce wraps of soy-marinated chicken that make P.F. Chang’s look like a rest-stop vending machine.
It’s all this, plus that service, plus that background, plus the wine, the drinks, the dessert. I’ve eaten a lot of things in my life. I’ve never experienced a place and a story like A. Wong.
I was hoping for a Christmas release. I guess I’ll just have to wait for a Spring release , when the Mangoes are ripe.💙
Thank you for explaining the process behind agents and publishing!
I am so glad your agent found you and is helping you put your words out into the world. Cannot wait for this book.