10 Agents Looking for Novels like “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel
Where to Query This Week (3.5.25) | Plus how to choose the right people—from agents to editors—to champion your work
Welcome to Sub Club’s Where to Query This Week!
We’ve got a piece I’m extra excited to share today by bestselling author, ! We all know that publishing can be unpredictable. Even once you get the agent you’re excited to work with, there are many more ups and downs along your journey to publication. One lesson that guided M. L. Rio through every twist was choosing the right people to champion her work.
Below, she discusses her first book deal, a decade of ups and downs in her career, and how learning to find the right agent, editor, and team isn’t just about immediate opportunity. It’s about who will fight for your career in the long run.
Who’s Talking About Your Book When You’re Not in the Room?
Publishing has changed a lot since I was querying back in 2014. My journey through the industry has been strange and unpredictable, but I’ve learned a lot from the many mistakes I’ve made since signing my first book deal at the ripe old age of 23. Ten years later, there’s one piece of advice I repeat to anybody who wants one: Who do you want talking about your book when you’re not in the room?
I can’t claim credit for this wisdom. It was given to me by Chris Parris-Lamb, an agent I knew at the Gernet Company, when I came to him with questions about what to do in the unlikely event that more than one agent wanted to represent me. Agent calls—like the edit calls that come later—are a weird species of creative-professional interaction halfway between a job interview and a first date. You’re trying to figure out if and how you want to make a book together, which invites a lot of flirting back and forth. Practical considerations like the size of the agency and your respective styles of communication certainly matter, but the most important thing is that your creative visions align. Not every agent will pitch your book the same way or to the same people, and most of those conversations will happen without you. Hence, Chris’s deceptively simple question: Who do you want talking about your book when you’re not in the room?
I did, to my astonishment, have more than one agent express an interest in my manuscript for If We Were Villains. The first agent to ask for a full manuscript wanted to see revisions I wasn’t sure about. The suggestion that I make all the characters younger and turn the book into YA shouldn’t have been surprising—this was, after all, 2014—but it didn’t feel right to me. I had never conceived of the book that way, wasn’t a reader of the genre, and didn’t know how to interact with that audience. But because nobody else was offering yet, I thought I should give it a try.
And boy, did I try. But the harder I tried the more the manuscript fought back. Working against the grain like this pushed me towards a deeper understanding of my own work and I gradually came to realize that it couldn’t be YA because the characters’ ages—they’re in their early twenties, like I was when I wrote it—were essential to the story. It was a book about being old enough to be legally responsible for your actions but still young enough to make deeply stupid mistakes. When I finally got another bite and got on a call with the new agent to discuss the book, she understood right away why it wasn’t YA. The more we talked the clearer it became that her instincts were perfectly in line with mine.
Still, there were some pros and cons to consider. The first agency was bigger, with more authors and more contacts, and the agent herself had an impressive list of clients and many years of experience.
The second agency was smaller, boutique, and the agent admitted that she was just starting to build her list and I would be her first official client. But I kept coming back to Chris’s question. I decided I didn’t care if she was new. So was I, and Arielle Datz was exactly the person I wanted talking about my book when I wasn’t in the room.
We took a chance on each other and I’m so glad we did. If We Were Villains was sold in a preempt to a Big Five publisher. Ten years later, Arielle is still my agent, Villains has become an international bestseller, we put a bestselling novella out last fall, and my next novel, Hot Wax, will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2025 as the first of a two-book deal. That said, the last decade was anything but smooth sailing.
When Villains launched, it barely sold at all, and we had several books die on sub between 2017 and 2020. But Arielle stuck with me and continued to be a tireless champion for my work and the way I wanted to present it to the world—even when that made her job much harder.
We had some lean years. We thought we’d never earn out. I thought I’d never get published again. But I wanted to do it right or not at all and I was pretty sure I knew how to talk about the book in such a way that the right people would listen. It took a long time, but our work and our patience paid off.
At long last, the numbers started trending in the right direction. By the time I was graduating from my doctoral program—six years after my first book’s false start—editors were knocking on my agent’s door to ask where the next book was. So Arielle and I put our heads together to figure out our next best move. When I told her I wanted to go out with the same weird novel nobody wanted to buy after my debut, she didn’t hesitate. She said, “That’s the one I still think about, too.”
But even if you and your agent are aligned, that doesn’t mean the marketplace will follow. We were in for a tough sell: everyone always wants more of what’s already doing well, and here we were handing them a novel that was wildly different from my first little sleeper hit. My literary stock had risen significantly, but we still went into edit calls for Hot Wax braced to hear a lot of what we heard: Can it be more of a mystery? More romantic? Less icky, less edgy, less difficult? In so many words, can it be more like If We Were Villains? I kept saying no, and I kept hearing no. I was starting to get a little demoralized and starting to think I’d committed professional suicide when we finally had the call. The right call. The call that made me think, “This is the person I want talking about this book when I’m not in the room.” The man who’s now my editor at S&S understood instantly what the book was about, wanted to take it and make it sing and make it rock and make it scream, and didn’t see its deviation from my debut as a defect.
This little nugget of advice doesn’t just apply to agents but to everyone you work with, including editors, publicists, and art departments. Your team can make or break your book. Publishing is so competitive that most writers starting out are so desperate for representation that they’ll leap at whatever offer comes along, whether or not it’s the right fit for them and their work in the long term. Unfortunately, the industry overemphasizes the debut. Yes, those first sales numbers can determine the trajectory of your career (believe me, I’ve lived it) but that’s all the more reason to think strategically from the start. First dates and job interviews shouldn’t be one-sided, so you can and should ask prospective agents, editors, and publicists how they envision your book in the marketplace, who they think your core audience is, where they see your career going, and whether they’re willing to represent the kind of work you want to do next.
Hopefully, you’re going to have a nice long career after your debut. You want the right people talking about your future work, too. So don’t just look for someone who’s invested in your first novel. Find someone who’s invested in you.
M. L. Rio has been an actor, a bookseller, an academic, and a music writer. She holds an MA in Shakespeare studies and a PhD in English literature. She is the author of the internationally bestselling novel If We Were Villains and the USA Today bestselling novella Graveyard Shift. Her next novel, Hot Wax, will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2025. She is represented by Arielle Datz of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency, Inc.
Sub Club Event: On Saturday, March 15th, I’ll be teaching an hour-long workshop, Why Comps Matter: How to Show Agents Where Your Book Belongs!
I’ll break down how agents use comps to evaluate your book, strategies for finding the right comps (and what to avoid), and how to seamlessly integrate comps into your query letter.
This workshop is open to paid Sub Club subscribers. And if you just want to pay for this workshop without upgrading your membership, it’s $20 a head.
»» Register here ««
10 Agents Looking for Novels like “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel
Here is another book that is on so many agent’s wishlists! Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel has sold millions of copies worldwide and was a finalist for the National Book Award. This critically acclaimed novel weaves together the lives of interconnected characters before and after a devastating pandemic, exploring themes of survival, art, and human resilience. Categorized as literary fiction, speculative fiction, dystopian fiction, and post-apocalyptic fiction, it features a unique narrative structure, atmospheric storytelling, and a character-driven approach—all elements the agents on this list are seeking.
If you’re currently querying and want a curated list specially made for your manuscript, be sure to check out my Personal Agent List service! I’m currently open for the month of March.
»» Get your own agent list here ««
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