12 Gifts of YA #3.5: One Particular YA Peep

Blog friends, today is Agent Love Day, as declared by a few authors who love their agent. Since that is me, too, I wanted to share in the joyousness.

My agent is Amy Tipton of Signature Literary Agency. She is cool as the day is long. I queried her on December 1st of last year, and she wrote back on the same day--THE SAME DAY. That doesn't happen. In the midst of my decision process, I knew she was the one for me when she sent me song lyrics and said, "hey, your main character is like this." And he was. So I signed, and then there were two of us who were enthusiastic about a small, quiet, musical book with an unusual, maybe-difficult-to-market main character. Plus there was Elvis (!).

After our first rejection in March, she convinced me that Elvis had to go (fair enough, even though I was sad about it). Not long after that, she had some major medical craziness, so I was in some other capable agents' hands for a while. I missed her tons and sent her mix tapes to help with recovery, though I don't know if they did. When she came back this fall, there was much rejoicing. Now we are submitting that small, quiet book, and she is reassuring me that someone will love it just as much as we do. And I believe her.

Amy is brilliant, editorially astute, well loved by other agents, editors, and clients alike, and the absolute best agent a girl could wish for. I am blessed.

And yes, I realize my blog posts have run to the sappy lately. But sap is a deep river within me, and sometimes it overflows its banks.


Photo of Amy by (I believe) her fiancee, Ed.