Success Story Interview - Erin Clark

An Interview with Erin Clark (erinclark1980 on QT) upon receiving an offer of representation from agent Bibi Lewis of Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.

07/13/2023

QT: Can you tell us a little bit about the book for which you've found representation? What inspired you to write it?

Erin Clark:
My manuscript BROKEN MOON is a YA speculative thriller, inspired by the fact that we are living accelerated climate change in real time, and the people with the means to fix it seem more interested in figuring out how to get themselves off the planet than do anything useful.

QT: How long have you been writing?

Erin Clark:
I've been writing novels for a year and a half.

QT: How long have you been working on this book?

Erin Clark:
I've worked on this manuscript on and off for a year, bouncing between this project and others as they took their turn sitting in a drawer and waiting for the next revision round.

QT: Was there ever a time you felt like giving up, and what helped you to stay on course?

Erin Clark:
I had exactly one day where I felt like lighting the book on fire and then flinging it off a cliff, after a particularly rough critique experience at a writing conference. Instead, I took the feedback and used it to fix the book. Though I do still think it could have been delivered a bit more humanely.

QT: Is this your first book?

Erin Clark:
BROKEN MOON is my second book.

QT: Do you have any formal writing training?

Erin Clark:
No formal training. I just read about 5,000,000 words of YA speculative fiction a year (not a typo).

QT: Do you follow a writing routine or schedule?

Erin Clark:
As a full-time working parent, I write in the nooks and crannies of my life anywhere and everywhere I can. Sometimes it's before everyone gets up, sometimes it's after everyone goes to bed, sometimes it's sitting in the waiting room at the vet's office... I also yammer a lot of ideas into my phone while hiking and try to decode them later.

QT: How many times did you re-write/edit your book?

Erin Clark:
I did three substantive structural revision passes, two scene-level passes, and several line edits. I worked with a developmental editor during one of the structural passes. I also did some tweaking after each of three or four beta reads.

QT: Did you have beta readers for your book?

Erin Clark:
Yes, I was blessed with several amazing beta readers. I also workshopped the first 200 pages through a writing conference.

QT: Did you outline your book, or do you write from the hip?

Erin Clark:
This book was plantsed. I had a beat sheet, but deviated quite a bit and wrote out of order. I find that as I write more, I am increasingly evolving into a plotter, much to my chagrin.

QT: How long have you been querying for this book? Other books?

Erin Clark:
This is the first book I queried. I queried for three months last summer then took three months off to do major revisions. I dove back in in January and queried for another six months before getting my first offer.

QT: About how many query letters did you send out for this book?

Erin Clark:
I sent around 120 queries out, in bundles of 10 or so at a time. I sent about 40 during the first querying round and about 80 during the second, though about half of those were after I started to get serious interest.

QT: On what criteria did you select the agents you queried?

Erin Clark:
I looked at MSWLs, tweets and genres accepted. Response rates/timelines on Query Tracker factored more heavily toward the end.

QT: Did you tailor each query to the specific agent, and if so, how?

Erin Clark:
I started out painstakingly personalizing my queries. Then I tried not personalizing. There was no difference in my full request response rate.

QT: What advice would you give other writers seeking agents?

Erin Clark:
My advice would be to get as much feedback as you can on your query package, and be open to structural revision of your manuscript if things aren't working.

QT: Would you be willing to share your query with us?

Erin Clark:
Here is my generic query letter:

Query Letter:

Dear Agent,

YA speculative thriller BROKEN MOON (99,000 words) is the story of 17-year-old healer-turned-fugitive Trina’s harrowing journey across a climate ravaged Earth to rescue her captured found family from the horrors of the children’s colony.

Orphaned and then abandoned by her sister, if anyone has reason to give up hope, it’s Trina. Instead, having escaped the Authority labor colony for unregistered minors, she spends her time keeping the three homeless kids she cares for in one piece — until only she evades a raid in which her best friend is killed, and the children are captured and taken to the colony.

With Authority agents now hot on her heels, Trina teams up with inconveniently charming smuggler Dingo to reach the lower hemisphere — fabled to be the last safe place on Earth, and key to the children’s rescue. But Dingo turns out to be more than just a smuggler, and fleeing the brutal heat of the Pacific Northwest to cross the icy plains of Mexico could mean death for them both. If she has any hope of freeing the children, Trina must rely on her wits and healing skills to reach the last transport off the continent. As Trina and Dingo grow closer to her goal and to each other, it’s hard to tell which poses the bigger threat: Surviving the ruined planet of the future, or dealing with the secret traumas of their pasts.

I am a teachers union organizer in San Diego. In my day job, I grapple with the same issues of inequality and social injustice that weave throughout my fiction. A former journalist and high school English teacher, I now divide my time between bedeviling bad bosses, raising a seven-year-old, and writing furiously after everyone else in the house has gone to bed, except the cat.

BROKEN MOON will fit well on the shelves alongside YA speculative novels such as Joan He’s THE ONES WE’RE MEANT TO FIND and Xiran Jay Zhao’s IRON WIDOW, and can be pitched as a YA STATION ELEVEN. My book has been workshopped through the Futurescapes conference and short-listed for the Fictionary Book of the Year Award and the #RevPit contest.

Thank you so much for your consideration. I would truly love to work with you.

Erin Clark