Success Stories: Congratulations to Jess Liese on Signing with an Agent!

1. So, you had a bit of an unconventional journey, where you ended up with multiple offers on more than one book at a time. Can you tell us the backstory behind that?

I started querying in February 2025 after spending most of 2024 writing and polishing my second novel. (I felt ready after your edits on the manuscript and query materials!) I sent queries in an initial batch of 10 or so and added a few every week after that, depending on how many rejections came in that week.

The first time I got a response that wasn’t a form rejection, I almost deleted it! It didn’t seem real. All told, I ended up getting nine full requests out of 64 queries, many of which came back with kind, helpful feedback, but nobody offered representation. By September, I decided I was ready to hang it up and move on. 

In the meantime, I’d finished two other books, polished the one I felt more confident about, hired you to look over my query materials, and got my ducks in a row to start querying that novel in January 2026. I took the same batch approach: start with a handful, add a couple every week. Hearing back from agents took a lot longer this time, and it was far more stressful because I’d paid for premium QueryTracker and could drive myself crazy theorizing about whether I was in a maybe pile or not. All told, I sent out 41 queries for this book.

I got my first offer in late April, and I pinged the 20 or so agents with whom I still had an open query to give them two weeks’ notice in case they wanted to offer as well. Four more agents asked for the full manuscript, and many others stepped aside with kind regrets, noting that they loved the concept and would have been interested if the timing had worked out better. (True or not, those rejections were way more fun than the form rejections.) From those requests, I ended up with a second offer.

There was also one agent who still had the full manuscript of the novel I queried last year. They’d had it for 10 months, and I figured they were ghosting me, but I pinged them as well, just in case. Two days later, that agent offered as well, only on the first book I'd queried!

2. How did you end up choosing the agent you eventually signed with? Was it part of your decision making to consider which book they'd offered on?

After zoom-chatting with all three of the agents who made offers, I ended up signing with Kate McKean. I knew of Kate via her incredible newsletter and her book, Write Through It, and she happens to have represented a couple of acquaintances who had great things to say. She’s also a New Yorker, like me. Location wasn’t a dealbreaker, and 99% of everything is done over email these days, but if I’m here, and most of US publishing is also here, it’s a plus to have my agent here as well. 

WHICH book the agent offered on didn’t end up factoring into my decision. It might have, had I been writing in two different genres or felt more deeply attached to the first one I queried, but I love both books and I’m thrilled that they both had champions! There’s nothing to say that I can’t eventually try to sell the other one, although I know how much better I’ve gotten as a writer since I finished it, and I’m looking forward, not back. 

3. Tell me a bit more about the book that you got your offer on.

My book is a contemporary romance chronicling the journey of a non-athlete who learns to love herself as she trains to fight in a charity boxing match, called I'd Hit That.

She falls in love with boxing just as much as she falls for a hot trainer she befriends at the gym.

It’s loosely based on the six years I spent training as an amateur boxer (regrettably, there were no disgraced-fighters-turned-male-models hanging around the real-life boxing gym for me to fall in love with, but hey, I’d already met my husband by that point anyway). At one point I had a sparring partner who was preparing to compete in a match for an organization called Haymakers for Hope, which inspired the charity event that formed the backbone of my story.

I would also be remiss here if I did not mention my college bestie, Jenna, who used to make fun of my assertions that I would never date a guy who was shorter than six feet tall, or who wasn’t stereotypically book smart. (This is, unfortunately, far from the most cringe thing I said when I was eighteen.) She said there was a great idea for a romance novel in there: a character with hangups about what’s expected of her, falling for a guy who’s shorter than she is and who doesn’t have a college degree…and when I started this one, that conversation popped into my head. Thus, I set out to write a character I, personally, would be down bad for, irrespective of height or education.

4. Was there anything you’d point to as a turning point where you really leveled up your writing? 

When I started writing fiction with a view to finishing a novel back in 2023, I knew two things: 1) I needed to write a whole novel, just to say I’d done it; and 2) I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Your kind but extremely thorough edit letter showed me exactly how much I didn’t know, but at least now I knew WHAT I didn’t know, and how to learn it.

The other major leveling-up point happened while I was writing the boxing book. There’s a sequence of about eight chapters where the dominoes lined up perfectly in terms of one scene directly causing the events of the next one. It happened on the first draft, and very little changed in those specific chapters over the course of the next three drafts. I realized: this is working, and I understood WHY it worked and how to make the rest of it work like that. It doesn’t usually happen that organically. Wish it did!

5. Tell me about the calls! What did you learn from speaking to more than one agent who wanted to rep you?

The Call is kind of a vibe check for both you and the agent. You need to know that you can work well together, and you’re checking them out just as much as they’re checking you out. In that respect, it felt a lot like any other job interview, albeit a pretty fun one. I had my list of questions that I’d need the answers to in order to make an informed decision, but all three of the agents I spoke to anticipated most of my questions and answered them before I could even ask. This should not come as a surprise, since you need amazing people skills to succeed as an agent, whereas writers are more prone to being socially awkward weirdos, I think. But thankfully, I apparently didn’t come across as a COMPLETE weirdo.

I really liked all three of them as people. Picking one was not easy!

6. What’s your top tip for other querying writers?

This process takes much longer than anyone wants it to, and you’re going to need patience and a thick skin.

Your only guarantee in all of this is that you are able to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard…or thumbs to phone when you’re jolted awake at 4 am, not that you should be seeking to emulate my writing habits, LOL). You’re pursuing this in the first place because you love to write.

The best way to save your sanity is to fall back on that love for writing: always have a work in progress that you can get lost in while you wait for the wheels of publishing to turn.

...and while you process your feelings after rejections come in (because you WILL get rejected. A LOT.). Focus on your next writing project, and take the rest of it one thing at a time as it comes.

I’m about to start my seventh novel, and regardless of what happens with the one that’s on sub---whether it sells in a few weeks, a few months, or never---I can rely on being able to sit down, type out some words, and have a blast creating.

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Jessica Liese is a writer and podcaster best known for her work on the top-rated RHAP network, where she recaps The Amazing Race and a multitude of other television obsessions. In addition to writing novels, she’s written reviews and features for Variety, Publishers’ Weekly, Primetimer.com, and others.

Over the years, she has also been a Jeopardy! contestant, a Golden Gloves boxer, a bar trivia host, and an amateur cartoonist. A Montana native and proud alumna of Mount Holyoke College, she currently lives in New York City.

You can find out more at: https://jesswrites.fyi.