Querying Advice from Tríona Walsh
Yes, play by the rules, but don't be afraid to extemporize where you see an opportunity...
As I put the finishing touches on the first ever recorded installment of Comp Title Book Club, which will be forthcoming by tomorrow night, I don’t want to leave you all hanging. Tríona Walsh has, in so many ways, been the Platonic ideal of a first ever guest for a monthly reading series and podcast. Never more is that true as when it comes to her openness to discuss her writing process and publication history.
In this guest post, Tríona Walsh reminds us all that it’s just as good to break a few eggs as it is to follow the recipe. After all, that’s how you make an omelette. — Jessica
Hi, everyone, I’m Tríona Walsh and I’m writing a guest post today for The Comp Title Book Club about my querying journey. I suspect every writer who is fortunate to get signed has a unique journey to describe. So, what did I do, and how did I come out the other end with the longed-for book deal? And, more importantly, is there any useful advice I can impart about how I got there?
Like everyone, I did my agent research.
And I crafted the perfect query letter (with the best comp titles of course!), and out I sent it into the big, bad agenting world. And out… and out… and out again. After a while I counted myself lucky if I even received a one-line rejection email. The spreadsheet I’d created to track my submissions grew decidedly forlorn.
But this is a familiar story. You hear disheartening statistics from agents on how they only take on maybe one or two new writers a year. And you hear about the sheer volume of submissions they receive.
With little interest in my amazing book, what did I do? Did I grow increasingly bitter and disheartened until I gave up? I was tempted… But no. What I did was I diversified my efforts. This is what I would recommend everyone who wants to be published does.
How exactly did I do that? First of all, I entered my novel in a competition.
The Irish Writers Centre hold an annual competition called The Novel Fair. Twelve writers are picked from all the entries and get to pitch their novel to the top agents and publishers from here and a fair bunch from the UK too. (These kinds of events are run in the UK and US as well, so keep an eye out.)1 So while there were tumbleweeds from agents, I was fortunate to be picked as a finalist in the Novel Fair! I was very excited, as you might imagine.
The pitch day came and went (including a lot of comp title talk). The waiting began, as those who had liked what they heard went off with my opening chapters. I was thrilled when I ended up with requests from four major publishers and one indie for the full manuscript. Cue even more excruciating waiting. (Always so much waiting in publishing.) And, when that didn’t kill me, lo and behold, an offer came in!
This should be where this post ends.
Book contract signed, book edited and printed, into the bookshops, life’s ambition fulfilled. Except that didn’t happen. Like so many of the heartbreaking stories you hear in publishing—Something Went Wrong. In my case, the publishers, a long-established, very well-respected Irish indie publisher, chose, just before my publication date, to hit a rough patch and shut their doors.
Unbelievably, I was back at square one. Heartbroken. I hopped on the query train again, this time a sadder and grumpier passenger. Once again the destination was Tumbleweedville. By this stage I had just about finished another novel. The novel that was meant to be my follow-up to my debut (*cry*). So, now I had two novels going out to agents and being doubly ignored.
I took my own advice, and, as well as sending it out to agents, I looked for other opportunities—among which, I threw the book into that year’s Novel Fair. And, to my delight, I got chosen again. This time the pitching was done via Zoom, as it was the dreaded time of the pandemic. Frustratingly, unlike the first Novel Fair, no one went crazy about book two. COVID certainly didn’t help, as far fewer books were being published. (That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.)
That’s when I found myself, during the summer of 2021, asking, What was the plan? Was I going to give up or keep pushing? As every writer out there will tell you, it is so, so hard. You have this book that you’ve given your heart and soul to, and all you want is to find it a home. But I was tired. Tired of pushing and pushing and getting nowhere. I had been chosen twice for the Novel Fair, so I knew what I was writing was good. I’d even secured a publisher, even if it had all gone wrong. But what use was all that if I couldn’t get an agent interested and I was going nowhere?
I decided that I didn’t want to give up, but I also decided that I needed to be clever. Look again at my own advice to diversify my efforts at getting noticed. I had kept one email close to me all this time. One of the few responses I’d gotten when querying my first novel had been from an editor at the digital-first [UK-based] publisher Bookouture. It had been the nicest rejection I’d ever gotten. I decided to contact her directly with book two.
This should be where this post ends (again), right?
Well, no. I got a rejection. Again. It was an even more lovely rejection than for the first book. The email was glowing about my writing, but sadly, this book wasn’t quite right for their list. I ate a lot of ice cream after that email. And I don’t even really like ice cream.
But what had I been telling myself over and over again? Leverage every possibility. So I got back in touch with the editor.
I told her all about the ice cream I’d eaten (she apologised), and I asked her could I pitch her an idea. If she really, genuinely liked my writing as much as she claimed she did, then it was just the story that wasn’t hitting the spot, right? She was all ears.
Flash-forward six months, a lot of chats, and lot of emails back and forth. And finally, the much hoped and longed-for book contract. February 2023 saw the publication – FINALLY! – of my debut novel, The Snowstorm. A second, The Party, came out in June.
This has been a really longwinded way of me imparting my best advice for querying authors. Follow the rules, give them the hard sell, show them what’s great about your book, give them word count, genre, comp titles. Give them what they ask for. But, at the same time, look for your opportunities as well. Pitch conventions, connections to editors… leverage whatever you can. Keep your eyes open for any opportunity to get noticed, and then it will happen.
Best of luck!
Tríona Walsh is an Irish writer with a passion for creating atmospheric and twisty crime novels. She lives in Dublin, Ireland, with her family—four kids, three cats, and one husband.
She is the author of two novels, The Snow Storm and The Party, both published by Bookouture in 2023, and she was a joint winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair competition, in 2015 and again in 2021. She’s also won the Molly Keane Short Story Competition and the Jonathan Swift Short Story Competition. In addition to prose, she has performed her own poetry with The Poetry Divas at festivals and events all around Ireland. Her poetry has appeared in print and has also been shortlisted for a number of competitions. As you can see, she loves to write, whatever form it takes! Say hello at www.trionawalsh.com or on Instagram @trionawalsh.
Readers in the US, I’ve found Chill Subs very useful for this purpose. (Jessica)