Dashboard Literary Agents Success Story Interviews Karin J. Robinson

Success Story Interview - Karin J. Robinson

An Interview with Karin J. Robinson (KarinJR on QT) upon receiving an offer of representation from agent Eric Showers of Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.

08/23/2024

QT: Can you tell us a little bit about the book for which you've found representation? What inspired you to write it?: Karin J. Robinson:
The Faery Politic imagines what would happen if they held an American style election in the Faery kingdom. In the book, an American political pollster has an affair with Queen Titania and manipulates her into calling an election that risks her own power. The point of view alternates between the pollster himself and Adiana, the Queen’s most trusted advisor, who hates the whole idea and is just trying to keep the kingdom from descending into chaos. But she ends up bound in service to him and together they try to fend off a darkly powerful opponent with a Make Faery Great Again agenda.

The book is motivated by my own anxieties about the frailty and fragility of electoral democracy. I was also really interested in the way that American policy often interacts with other countries that have their own political culture and systems and the overconfidence we sometimes display in our way of doing things. The idea first sparked when I was watching some news report about elections being held in Afghanistan. American “election advisors” were being wrong-footed by the tribal politics, and remember thinking “It’s like we’re bumbling around in an ancient, magical kingdom telling them what to do!” But which magical kingdom? I thought of the faery world from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I imagined how Titania might react. It made me laugh out loud, alone at my desk.
QT: How long have you been writing?: Karin J. Robinson:
I’ve always been a writer but not always a “finish what you’re writing” writer! I’ve blogged and podcasted about US politics for many years, and have a published essay included in a book about the US Presidents, but this is my first complete novel.
QT: How long have you been working on this book?: Karin J. Robinson:
In a serious way since February 2022, which is when I started my Faber Academy Writing a Novel course. But I already had the first chapter written at that point and it had been sitting in a drawer for about 10 years. I rediscovered it after the pandemic and had this moment of realising “this is the book I want to read, so I guess I’d better write it!”
QT: Was there ever a time you felt like giving up, and what helped you to stay on course?: Karin J. Robinson:
Oh, I’ve given up a thousand times! But that’s the great thing about stories they wait for you. You can abandon them in a windowless room, but they will grow in the darkness.

More practically, when I realised that it was time to get serious about writing this book, I decided that I would need external structure and community. So I’m infinitely grateful to my Faber Academy crew, to the gang from my Futurecapes workshop, and to the many friends who generously acted as my beta readers and sounding boards. I can’t tell you how valuable it is to have people in your life who take you seriously as a writer even in those moments when you yourself do not!
QT: Is this your first book?: Karin J. Robinson:
It's the first one I’ve finished. I’ve got two other abandoned novels in a drawer that maybe I’ll try again someday.
QT: Do you have any formal writing training?: Karin J. Robinson:
I have a BA in English, but that was a very long time ago. More recently, the Faber Academy course taught me the discipline to finish a long work. And I also read lots of craft books. I particularly love John York’s Into the Woods for story structure and Stephen King’s On Writing for the practicalities of being a working writer.
QT: Do you follow a writing routine or schedule?: Karin J. Robinson:
I prefer to work in long uninterrupted blocks of time when I’m drafting, and I’ve arranged my day job so that I have a half-day off work every Friday. So I do a 3.5-hour session every Friday and a 2-hour session every Tuesday night. I occasionally tried to follow the common advice to “write every day” but except for the few weeks when I was pushing myself to get the first draft done that mostly wasn’t the right advice for me.
QT: How many times did you re-write/edit your book?: Karin J. Robinson:
The file name on my current doc says “Fifth Draft – V2”. So… six drafts, I guess!
QT: Did you have beta readers for your book?: Karin J. Robinson:
Yes, I think I had about six people read the full manuscript at various times and that was incredibly helpful.
QT: Did you outline your book, or do you write from the hip?: Karin J. Robinson:
I had a very clear structure in my head before I started and I stuck pretty closely to that structure in the final book.
QT: How long have you been querying for this book? Other books?: Karin J. Robinson:
I sent my first query in November of last year and got a deceptively positive response with a few full requests right away that came to nothing. After some helpful feedback from a couple of kind agents pointing out how the book could be improved, I paused querying and worked on further revisions for a few months. I started querying again in earnest around March/April of this year and got my offer in July.
QT: About how many query letters did you send out for this book?: Karin J. Robinson:
According to my dashboard I sent 77 queries in total. I had a whole plan to help prepare myself for the process before I started, setting myself a personal target of achieving 50 rejections this year. The theory was that I needed to brace myself for the reality that most books don’t find an agent until they’ve been rejected by at least that many, so I told myself that hitting 50 rejections would be a sign that I was putting my book out there enough to give it a fair chance. As it turned out, I had exactly 49 rejections logged by the time my offer came in, so I feel like that strategy paid off for me!
QT: On what criteria did you select the agents you queried?: Karin J. Robinson:
I obviously looked for agents who repped my genre (fantasy), but I was also looking for those who hinted they might be interested in other aspects of my story such as the political themes. The agent I ended up with said in his MSWL that he was interested in speculative fiction that “explores hierarchies of power”, and that is a perfect fit for my story.
QT: Did you tailor each query to the specific agent, and if so, how?: Karin J. Robinson:
Only a little bit – I did add a few words in each query about why I had picked them. But I tried not to obsess on it too much.
QT: What advice would you give other writers seeking agents?: Karin J. Robinson:
My experience was that I was very bad at predicting which agents would request fulls based only on what I knew of them, so I would advise authors to query widely. Because you just never know!

My other advice is going to feel hard to accept, but I really encourage writers to adopt the mindset that rejections are just a normal and expected part of the process. Don’t think about it too hard when an agent passes – it doesn’t necessarily mean anything about you or your book. Mostly it’s about them and their very specific tastes and needs, which is fine! Try to get into a rhythm of sending out fresh queries whenever a rejection comes in.
QT: Would you be willing to share your query with us?: Karin J. Robinson:
Sure!

Success Story Interview - Karin J. Robinson

Query Letter: