What Tinder taught me about finding an agent
How getting ghosted on dating apps prepared me for the publishing world
The message stared back at me from my screen.
“I’ve been really enjoying your words and would love to connect. Are you free this week?”
My heart—that tender little trained seal—sat up and barked. A squeal wrenched from my throat, the kind that would have been embarrassing had I not been alone.
After months (years and months) of carefully crafted introductions, painstaking research, and countless rejections, I’d finally landed the one.
Not a soulmate—something just as elusive: a literary agent.
The Similarities Between the Dating & Querying Game
Online dating and querying have a lot in common. Both involve putting yourself out there in mortifying ways, enduring interminable stretches of waiting, ghosting, and disappointments, and both involve pretending to love Murakami1.
But as the sportsing adage goes: You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
So it is with love and writing. Both require a special kind of masochism—polishing yourself (or your manuscript/proposal) to a h…