#1: How I Got a Book Deal at 19

or more aptly titled: The Level of Masochism It Takes to Write and Try to Publish a Book at That Age

Like most querying writers, I've always dreamt of writing a post like this long before I sent out my first query. It was therefore surprising that when the time finally came around, I found myself stalling a bit. Perhaps it was because I had not mentally prepared myself for writing this particular version this early; maybe it was because, in all of my daydreams, I'd never imagined I'd skip the traditional “How I Got an Agent” part of this journey and go straight to writing this. But here we are anyway.

Reading Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon partly motivated me to write this (shout out to my good friend, Naomi, for recommending it). The other motivator is another good old friend who warms my bed like an obsessed lover—insomnia. So here I am finally writing this in an attempt to grow bored and trick myself into falling asleep. If you're reading it, it means I failed.

This post is a rundown of my writing journey split into three parts. If how I got my book deal with Masobe is what you're interested in, you can skip to part three.

With all that said, let's get into it.

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Part One: Every Story Has a Backstory. Here's Mine…

2014-2018

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I like to think of my journey to writing as slightly unconventional.

I grew up in an apartment block with different families, something Nigerians colloquially refer to as a face-me-I-face-you, and back then, ten-year-old me had the lightbulb idea to tutor the kids around me. The only problem was, for children around that age, their learning materials such as textbooks were kept in school so I had nothing to work with.

Undeterred, I solved this problem by writing my own textbooks and teaching materials. I'd buy new notebooks, remove the cover and carefully glue it back, the glossy cream-colored inner page of the cover now the outside, then write in bold cursive letters, “MacMillian Mathematics for Primary 3” or “Mastering English by Olayinka Yaqub.” I'd fill the pages with comprehension passages of my own and exercises I made up. Literature-in-English is a key part of primary education here, and it was in trying to replicate the anthropomorphized children's storybooks we used in school to teach at home that I fell in love with actual storytelling.

I wrote my first story in 2014. I was eleven and had just resumed my first year in secondary school. My brother, who was in JSS3 at the time, was reading a play in preparation for his final junior school exams. It was called Sweet Nightmares. I picked it up one lazy afternoon and spent the entire day reading it.

The story, about a teenage girl in a boarding school and all the drama that came with it, was startlingly fresh to me at the time. It was the first contemporary book I'd read, so different from Tortoise and The River Goddess, Ralia the Sugar Girl, or Koku Baboni stories I'd spent my early years reading, stories that although featured people my age, still felt somewhat distant in experience. This story, Sweet Nightmares, had young people doing fun things. And I so much enjoyed it that it propelled me to write mine.

Unsurprisingly, my first story was a literal copy of Sweet Nightmares. It was as clichéd as boarding school stories came - a young girl from a rich background, parents who are too busy, the girl goes wayward in boarding school. Ruins her life by getting involved with boys dealing drugs. End of story.

It took less than a week to fill a 40-leave notebook with this story. I had a classmate draw and color character illustrations on the cover. When it was done, I taped the cover so it could never get damaged. To my eleven-year-old self, I was published. And boy was I proud of it. I made everyone around me read it. And sometimes when I think about it, I cringe, but it was something I was grateful I did. Because writing that story at eleven unfurled something in me and it’s why I'm here a decade later.

As I grew older and read more Nigerian children’s books, I tried to replicate everything I was reading (in style, that is). I wrote stories similar to Ben Akponine Samuel's, plots that mirrored Nani Boi's, and even had a phase when I wrote Korean fanfics on a Facebook group filled with teenagers obsessed with Korean culture like myself. (I wrote a sequel to Kang Chi, because what was that ending?) Like most writers my age, I too had a Wattpad phase, albeit a very short one, where all of my stories had blondes sipping lemonade in San Francisco, their ocean blue eyes twinkling. All of these I did for fun.

In 2018, when the online K-fanfic group I was a member of began its slow death, I found myself in one of these “serious” writing groups. Here, everyone was an adult, writing actual books, talking about story structures and character archetypes and things I'd never heard about. And this was when I rediscovered writing as more than a hobby; as a craft.

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Part Two: The Bride in Black

2019-2020

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I can't remember what early life crisis I must have been battling at 16 that made me decide I wanted to write a novel, because in 2019, quite abruptly, I started one.

Before then, in 2015, I'd read Jason Lethcoe's No Place Like Holmes, which was the first detective fiction/Sherlock Holmes book I read. As with Sweet Nightmares, I had a total mind shift after reading the book, and I knew, even then, that this was the kind of story I wanted to tell. But I'd never seen such a story done in a Nigerian setting, with Nigerian characters, and so I thought stories like that (crime fiction with pulse-pounding actions, incredibly smart detective characters, and ruthless killers) simply could not exist in Nigerian literature.

Later, I'd come to realize I started writing my first book because of this—because a mystery-obsessed teenage me was tired of the almost nonexistent representation in the kind of books I liked to read.

So, armed with nothing but a vague premise and few characters in mind, I started my first book on April 1, 2019. I remember this date because it was my first time participating in (Camp) NaNoWriMo—a writing competition/event where writers are tasked to write 50,000 words in one month. I was super elated to be working on a real book (yay!), and if you know me, you know I'm highly competitive. I was going to write 50k words in April, even when I had no idea what I was doing. I'd win NaNoWriMo.

Well, I did. By the end of April, I had a solid novel; raw, incomplete, messy, but a novel nonetheless. Titled The Bride in Black, the book was a murder mystery about a woman who becomes the prime suspect in the murder of her fiancé few weeks before their wedding; and the webs of lies and deceits she has to wade through on her quest to find the real killer—while being on the run from the police.

Recently, someone asked how I knew my writing was good enough to take on a novel at that stage. Truth is, I didn't. I had no assurance I was good enough—in fact, I never for once thought I was not good enough. I was proudly overconfident, in the way teenagers are, that I could pull off a book or anything for that matter. And that is the most precious thing about being young. You're so full of energy, so self-assured and audacious that you believe you can bend the world to its knees if you will it so.

I set the book aside for some weeks and began editing/rewriting it in August, instead of completing the draft—partly because I hadn't figured out the ending and had no idea who the killer was despite having written 50k words. Around this time, I joined Scribophile, an online community where writers can post their WIP to be critiqued by others. Scribophile was a huge part of my journey and helped me hammer the messy 50k word draft into something readable.

The rewrite lasted from August 2019 till mid-2020. Such a long time it seems to have taken, but considering that I was a secondary school student, I lost the phone on which I wrote (I wrote all my books on my mobile phone), and some other factors, it made sense it took that long.

I completed the book at a total of 86k words in the last week of July 2020. The lockdown was over; my final high school exams were starting the next month and I just wanted to be done with the book.

Between writing/editing, I'd started researching how to get published. I'd seen an open call for submissions from Farafina Books, a Nigerian publisher, in 2019 but by the time my book was ready, it was too late. Someone on Facebook patiently explained trad publishing to me and how I needed to get an agent first for a US/UK publisher to consider my work.

And thus began my journey in the querying trenches…

This is where things get a little bit depressing.

I wrote a badass query letter and synopsis, polished my first three chapters, and could vow nothing was stopping me from getting a book deal from Penguin Random House in weeks. It didn't happen.

I sent my first batch of queries in September 2020. They were all to top agents in super reputable agencies. Surprisingly, I got a full request, then a partial. Both within forty-eight hours. I was over the moon. But the full request ended in a rejection a few days later—I’ve decided to call this situation The Curse of The First Query (more on that later).

For the next three months, I kept sending out more queries. Then came the rejections. No other requests. It was heartbreaking—I knew I had written something good, why wasn't anyone requesting to see more?

By the end of 2020, my heart wasn't in querying The Bride in Black anymore. I shelved it. In retrospect, I gave up too early on the book (as you'd see from the querying stats below). I was new to querying and had thought a “no” from 10 agents meant your book was terrible and would never find a rep.

And so, with a heavy but not-so-heavy heart (because I was already working on something I was more excited about), I stopped sending out queries for The Bride in Black.

Although in February 2021, the partial request from September turned into a full, I wasn't too sad when it came back as a rejection weeks later.

QUERYING STAT FOR THE BRIDE IN BLACK

Total Queries sent: 30-35

Rejections: 24

Full Requests: 2

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Part Three: The Crimson Vigilante

2020- Present

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I've heard from most writers that shelving their first book was an emotional hassle. It wasn't that difficult for me to put aside The Bride in Black because while writing my final high school exams, I had become fixated on a shiny new idea that kept buzzing in my head. This idea for a book that follows a revenge-driven, modern-day Robin Hood in Lagos made The Bride in Black so pale in comparison that I'd started secretly hoping TBIB wouldn't be my debut. I was that enthralled by this new book. It was ambitious, exciting, and had all the right ingredients for a blockbuster crime fiction novel.

This time, I did a little prepping. Read Save the Cat Writes a Novel and had a mental map of the direction I wanted the book to go, major plot points, and most importantly, the endgame/killer. In October 2020, I finally started writing The Crimson Vigilante.

It took me a full year to complete this novel, putting the finishing touches just as I packed my bags to head off to uni in November 2021. It was over 110k words, and I knew I had to cut it down to something below 100k before querying. So, I started editing almost immediately. As a first-year engineering student, my academic schedule was packed —with after-class, weekend tutorials and all—and I only had late in the night to work on the book. Still, I powered through the edits and got the wordcount down to 104k words.

In February 2022, after working on feedback from friends, The Crimson Vigilante was ready for the trenches. I sharpened my query arsenal—workshopped my query letter till every word sparkled, had published authors read my opening chapters —and with assurance from various sources that I was good to go, I sent my first batch of queries. I had so much faith in this book—it would do well in the trenches, I’d told myself.

Two days later, I had a full request in my inbox. I freaked out in a friend's DM, looked over my manuscript again, then sent it to the agent and waited for their response with bated breath. It came a week later. A rejection that said while they thought the plot of my book was exciting, something about the writing didn't click for them.

I was gutted. Rejections are normal. But there's something about having a full request on your very first query turn into a rejection, and that hits differently. This was the second time it was happening to me, and it felt like I had “the Curse of the First Query”.

Querying The Crimson Vigilante was hard. I was more than convinced I had written a good book, everyone kept assuring me of it too, but things were only going downhill. I kept sending out queries and kept getting nos. During this time, the university/academic staff union in Nigeria had gone on an eight-month-long strike, meaning I was out of school; my family had moved to a different state and I was staying alone with a family-friend who was mostly away, so, my days were filled with scrolling through the rejection emails that wouldn't stop coming in. It was one of the toughest periods in my life.

In-between querying, I continued revising. I started a complete rewrite with a friend as my editor. Sent out the new version, less than 100k words now, but nothing changed. I entered a host of contests with the book but it yielded no bites. It was as if no matter how hard I tried, The Crimson Vigilante wasn't going to make it out of the trenches.

I was sad and frustrated. I wasn't going to give up on this book, shelving it would break me, I knew, yet I didn't know what to do differently to turn the nos to yes.

My breakthrough happened in March 2023, a full year after I started querying TCV. An agent I queried had passed on my submission to someone else at the agency who loved it and wanted to read the full. The following day, Masobe Books, a Nigerian trad publisher whose open call for submissions I had submitted to earlier in the year, also got back to me saying they wanted to see more.

At this point in my journey, I was numb from all the highs and lows. I sent the full manuscript to both places with little hope of a positive outcome. The agent got back to me first. They loved the book but felt it was too noir for their list. Another rejection.

Masobe reached out to me a couple of weeks later. It was a busy week, I had exams coming up and I had actively started avoiding my email at that point, so I missed when their response came in by some hours. But when I did check it, my eyes skimming through the email, searching for the word “Unfortunately…”, it was shocking to discover it was the opposite. I had an acceptance! The Crimson Vigilante was going to be published!

I signed my contract in September 2023, a few weeks from my 20th birthday, and the rest, like they say, is history. The Crimson Vigilante will be out next year and I can't wait for the world to meet this book and the characters that have been a part of me for the past three to four years.

Writing this has made me realize maybe this isn't a querying success story, but it is a success story nonetheless, and while this might not be the most grueling querying journey you'll ever hear of, it isn't one of the instant success ones either.

QUERYING STATS FOR THE CRIMSON VIGILANTE.

Queries sent: 73

Rejections: 53

Closed/No Reply: 16

Full Request: 4 (3 agents, 1 publisher)

Offers: 1