Two roads diverged and your agent took the other one

How to phrase your previous representation in a new query letter

In an ideal situation, an author and agent work together for the length of their careers. It is personally so rewarding to watch a writer grow and develop and mature in their writing across their books, see what risks they take and what they keep coming back to. Getting an author’s next draft in my inbox makes my whole day.

But sometimes these partnerships don’t last forever because the needs of either party have changed. This can be a very personal or very practical decision on either side, and there’s a lot of reasons for the split. What I’m going to focus on in this post is how to query a new set of agents after parting with a previous agent, depending on the situation.

It can be daunting to have to go through the query process again, and it might feel like a delicate balance between saying too much and too little about why the split happened. But phrased correctly, it can be considered neutrally or positively by the new set of agents one is querying.

I’ll answer any hyper-specific scenario situations for paid subscribers, in the comments.

Avoid potential red flags with the templates below: