Dashboard Literary Agents Success Story Interviews Rowan Brighton Brown

Success Story Interview - Rowan Brighton Brown

An Interview with Rowan Brighton Brown (rowanbrown on QT) upon receiving an offer of representation from agent Rebecca Williamson of Sheldon Fogelman Agency.

01/16/2024

QT: Can you tell us a little bit about the book for which you've found representation? What inspired you to write it?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
No Finer Than I Am is a middle-grade reimagining of Twelfth Night—this time with wedding crashing. Set during the lead-up to the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision on gay marriage, this story is even queerer than Shakespeare’s original!

I began thinking about Twelfth Night when it was assigned to my seventh-grade class. As a young reader, I really fell in love with the story, but as a queer kid, the way it was taught was difficult in some ways. I always felt that the punchline of people marrying strangers instead of the same-sex partners they fell for wasn’t quite right. I was also troubled to learn that in the world of Shakespeare, stories that didn’t end in weddings were classified as tragedies because, at the time, people like me couldn’t get married.

A few years later, I started to crash weddings at the venue in my neighborhood! I came home with a lot of stories and a lot of tacky wedding favors that I always knew I’d write a book about. There was something really interesting and bittersweet about attending those events that I was not invited to, both literally and figuratively.

The Obergefell V. Hodges decision on same-sex marriage changed everything for me, and it was only after that case, and after I began to plan my own wedding that I finally felt ready to explore all of those complex feelings. This book is an expression of my frustration with heteronormative expectations and the English literary canon as well as my love letter to Shakespeare, weddings, and gay happy endings!
QT: How long have you been writing?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
I’ve been writing since I could hold a crayon! Throughout elementary and middle school, I was a voracious reader and I spent a lot of time scrawling down novel ideas and short stories on loose-leaf notebook paper that I always lost before finishing.

I was lucky to come up through a fantastic set of public schools that gave me the tools I needed to begin writing seriously and working toward publication while I was still a student.

I completed my first real novel as a high school senior, worked on my books throughout college, and landed my agent shortly after graduation!
QT: How long have you been working on this book?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
I spent a lifetime writing and five years drafting, revising, and querying other books, but this one came quickly.

From start to finish, the first draft took twenty-seven days, and the revision process took about the same time. The time between coming up with the idea and signing with my agent was about four months. The speed of that process was wild to me, especially after how long it took me to write and query my other work.

One of the biggest things that allowed me to speed through this one was my participation in #PitchMe. This contest put on by the wonderful Krista Van Dolzer is designed to help winners develop their query, first pages, and Twitter pitch fully before sending them out to agents. After going through rounds of revision with them, I decided my submission package was as good as it was going to get and I did not follow the traditional advice of querying in batches. I think this is definitely a riskier strategy, but it worked quite well for me and was much less draining than my previous methods.
QT: Was there ever a time you felt like giving up, and what helped you to stay on course?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
My first book ultimately did not land me an agent, though it came close. When I wrote my second book, I knew that it was much better than the first, and I falsely assumed that because of that it would do even better in the query trenches. When I worked for so much longer, and believed in it so much more, only to find that I got fewer agent responses and still no representation, I was crushed.

It really felt like I’d wasted a year of my life. While venting to my critique group, a friend said that even if it didn’t feel like I’d made progress, that time had contributed to my ten thousand hours (a reference to a TedTalk that claims you need ten thousand hours to develop a mastery of something.) Since then, I viewed setbacks and uncompleted projects as necessary steps along the route to success.

In a nice full-circle moment, it looks like my agent and I will be revisiting that project soon to get it ready for submission! I very much wish I realized earlier on that “failures” in the world of writing and publishing are really anything but that.
QT: Is this your first book?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
No! This is the third book I’ve queried and the fifth book I completed. (There are countless other unfinished drafts in my Google Drive Graveyard as well.)
QT: Do you have any formal writing training?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
As a twenty-two-year-old, my answer to this question is kind of goofy. I do have a BA in English, and while that did give me a lot of experience with analysis and interpretation (and Shakespeare!) it didn’t have much to do with writing commercial fiction.

As a high school student, I attended the Fine Arts Center and South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, both of which are public schools with amazing creative writing programs. There I studied poetry, short fiction, and personal essays. I was able to edit a literary magazine, judge contests, workshop my writing, and get involved with programs like YoungArts, Scholastic Art and Writing, and the Kenyon Young Writers Workshop. I absolutely credit strengthening my prose, broadening my influences, and developing my network of writer friends to that crazy experience we sometimes call the “young writers circuit.”

That being said, the young writer’s circuit is geared towards literary writing. Commercial fiction, genre fiction, and children’s fiction are at best ignored and at worst discouraged. Learning to write novels was something that I did through YouTube videos, library books, and trial and error. My most valuable training for this project was definitely the years of informal obsession with reading and understanding books I enjoy.
QT: Do you follow a writing routine or schedule?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
I write in the in-between, which means I work over lunch, on the weekends, during breaks at work, on the train, or really any time I can sneak in a couple hundred words or a few pages of revision. It means that writing is a very constant presence in my life, even when I’m spending most of my time in class or at work.
QT: Did you have beta readers for your book?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
I did! My first and last editor is always my fiance, who I am incredibly lucky to have come up through the young writing circuit with. She helped edit my outline from day one and she was the first person to read my first draft. After implementing her developmental edits, I traded my manuscript with a few other aspiring authors online, made all of their edits, and sent the book back to my fiance for a final language pass.

I’m so lucky that my best friend is also my best editor and I keep trying to convince her to put her name on the front of the book next to mine!
QT: Did you outline your book, or do you write from the hip?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
With every book I write, I’ve grown more and more involved with outlining. This book was the first one I outlined fully scene-by-scene, which I think was made much easier by the fact that it's a retelling and a relatively short one at that. Having that plan laid out from the beginning made revisions much easier both logistically and emotionally and I think I’ll be writing this way for the foreseeable future!
QT: How long have you been querying for this book? Other books?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
I started querying my first book in 2020 and have been querying off and on for the past four years.

For this book, I sent queries for exactly one month and signed my agent about two months from the date I sent the first query.
QT: About how many query letters did you send out for this book?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
I queried 105 agents for this book, and in my personal opinion, I over-queried. I realized too late that there were folks on my list that weren’t the best match for my project and I’m lucky to have ended up with the right person.

In the two months when I was in the trenches, I ended up receiving fourteen full requests, two partial requests that eventually turned into fulls, and two offers of representation.
QT: On what criteria did you select the agents you queried?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
After querying for so long, I’ve developed a pretty good list of reputable agencies that represent children’s fiction. My aim for this project was to submit to the best fit at each of the agencies I identified. (I got close, but with different closures and holidays, it wasn’t 100%)

The bare minimum requirement was agents who were seeking books in my age range and genre (middle-grade contemporary.) After that, I looked for folks who were deliberately championing diverse stories, especially LGBTQAI+ narratives. My favorite queries to write went to the agents I found who were looking specifically for retellings, Shakespeare intertexts, or diverse takes on classic stories.

Interestingly, I got more responses from agents with vague or unrelated MSWLs than from those who specifically wanted books like mine. I ended up still being very grateful to the people who talked about wanting Shakespeare retellings or queer takes on classic tales because they gave me a good idea of how my book would fit into the current market.
QT: Did you tailor each query to the specific agent, and if so, how?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
I personalized about a third of my queries and about half of my nudges after the offer of representation. Both offers and over half of my full requests came from personalized interactions. (Whether or not this means that personalization works or that personalization is simply easier to do for agents who are already a good fit, I don’t know.)

I used MSWL, Twitter, client lists, interviews (especially Literary Rambles and Middle Grade Ninja) and Publisher’s Marketplace to get a good sense of what agents were looking for. I liked to reference other projects they represented, specific things they were looking for, or ways that their background connected to the material in my book.
QT: What advice would you give other writers seeking agents?: Rowan Brighton Brown:
Instead of setting a goal to “get an agent” or “get a book published,” I found that it helped my mindset to set goals that were more within my control. For example, if I set the goal of “submit to 50 agents,” or “get 100 rejections,” it actually felt productive instead of destructive when I sent a query that was unlikely to work or received a negative response.

Obviously, this doesn’t eliminate the difficulty of spending years of your life on something only to hear a chorus of “Nos.” I’ll be honest, on my first two books I never met the goals of submitting to 50 agents or getting 100 rejections. Sometimes it’s just too hard, and learning to give yourself grace when shelving projects or taking breaks is vital.

Success Story Interview - Rowan Brighton Brown

Query Letter: