Success Story Interview - Leslie Cook

An Interview with Leslie Cook (lesliecook on QT) upon receiving an offer of representation from agent Andi Twaddle of Spencerhill Associates.

11/12/2026

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

Leslie Cook:
The elevator pitch for THE GLORY OF EMPIRE was Macbeth meets Survivor in fantasy Ancient Rome. During my graduate program, I taught Shakespeare studies to undergraduates and studied early modern literature. Macbeth has always been my favorite Shakespeare play, and I wanted to reimagine it from the perspective of a vicious young woman because women have historically been afforded far less forgiveness for such ambition. I am a reality television fanatic which is where the Survivor influence comes in. The book is about a broadcast succession war in which ambitious aristocrats command armies against one another, leveraging spectacle as a critical part of their military strategies.

QT: How long have you been writing?

Leslie Cook:
I have been writing off and on my entire adult life, but I never got far into a project before giving up. The past six months have been my longest sustained writing period.

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

Leslie Cook:
I started writing THE GLORY May of this year and began querying in September.

QT: Is this your first book?

Leslie Cook:
Yes! THE GLORY is the first book I’ve ever completed.

QT: Do you have any formal writing training?

Leslie Cook:
I have my master's degree in English literature and presented literary analysis papers at academic conferences, but I’ve received no formal training for writing fiction.

QT: Do you follow a writing routine or schedule?

Leslie Cook:
I wrote every single day until the book was finished, sometimes up to eight hours a day. I have small children so a good chunk of THE GLORY was drafted in the Notes app of my phone while I was cooking dinner, putting kids to bed, sitting on benches at playgrounds. I carried a notebook with me everywhere to jot down scene ideas too.

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

Leslie Cook:
I went through three drafts: the first to get down the bones, the second to revise structurally, and the third to line-edit.

QT: Did you have beta readers for your book?

Leslie Cook:
Yes, I had a good friend with teaching experience and a master's degree in English give me incredible feedback.

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

Leslie Cook:
I outlined the six most load-bearing moments of the book the very first day, but the roads in between were written from the hip.

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

Leslie Cook:
I began querying in mid-September, and Andi reached out late October to set up a call. THE GLORY is the first book I’ve ever queried.

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

Leslie Cook:
I sent out a total of twenty-one queries.

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

Leslie Cook:
I wasn’t just looking for agents who represented fantasy; I wanted to find the right agent for this kind of fantasy—peculiar, gritty, morally messy political fantasy. I spent hours on MSWL, QT, and social media sites trying to find the right representation.

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

Leslie Cook:
The first ten-ish queries, I tailored the pitch by applying what I’d learned by researching them: books they felt drawn to, the kinds of narratives they were looking for, and what books (if any) they already had on their lists. For the last half, I stuck with the same query pitch for every agent.

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

Leslie Cook:
At first, I took every rejection as an indictment of my talent, and it really took the joy out of something I loved very much. My advice would be to allow yourself to feel disappointed, give yourself permission to feel sad, and then get back up and do it again anyway. It’s worth the sting.

Query Letter:

There’s nothing reluctant about Aurealia Aurifaber’s pursuit of the throne, and none of her reasons are so pedestrian as altruism. To win the crown, she only has to violently conquer her oldest friends, sacrifice her most intimate relationships, and put on a damn good show doing it. Easy.

A state-sanctioned civil war determines the empire’s next ruler, but military prowess is only half the battle. The succession war will be televised, and Aurealia has star power. How she wins matters as much as whether she wins. Eager to curry favor with the next ruler, the empire’s elite become patrons of their warlord of choice, sending rewards for bloody performances. Allied with her closest friend, Tristan Dorsus, Aurealia embarks on a vicious conquest of childhood companions, weaponizing intimacy and shared history to carve a path toward the throne. Every triumph drives Tristan and Aurealia closer together, even as the price of victory becomes more personal. Tristan’s favorite thing about Aurealia has always been her ambition. A pity it may cost them everything else he loves about her.

There is only one opponent Aurealia considers her equal, and he alone poses the greatest threat to her pursuit of power. Her enemy in truth and in creed, Caspian Sulla seeks to dismantle the very empire she seeks to rule. Their ideological arguments are conducted through military campaigns, each bloodier than the last, and every encounter between them leaves a body count. Aurealia and Caspian spiral into obsessive conflict, their desperation to defeat each other bleeding from the killing fields into something dangerously intimate. Neither can survive the other. Neither can swing the sword.

Aurealia must reckon with who will pay the final price glory demands: the ally she cannot lose, the enemy she cannot best, or the woman she can no longer recognize as herself.

In conversation with Macbeth, THE GLORY OF EMPIRE is an adult political fantasy, complete at 114,000 words. It combines The Will of the Many’s competition structure and Roman aesthetic, The Raven Scholar’s magnetic character dynamics and imperial critique, and The Poet Empress’s cunning protagonist with teeth. It is a standalone with trilogy potential.