Her First Book Got Zero Offers. Her Second Sold for Over $1 Million.
Claire McKade shelved her first novel after querying it with no success. She wrote her next one on maternity leave, queried it cold with no industry connections, and six weeks later had 18 manuscript requests and multiple offers of representation. Four months after signing, her debut sold at auction in a major three-book deal — with foreign rights following in five more countries.
💰 Over $1 Million in Deals
📚 18 Manuscript Requests
🎉 Multiple Offers of Representation
⏱️ First Offer 4 Weeks Into Querying
✉️Read her full query letter breakdown here.
The Numbers:
The Backstory
Claire started writing fiction in 2021, in the middle of law school — which is to say, in whatever hours were left over from a workload that doesn't leave many. She spent the next two years on her first novel, finished it, and sent it into the query trenches.
Nothing came back. In 2025, with a heavy heart, she shelved it.
That is where an enormous number of writing careers quietly end. Not with a dramatic decision, just with a manuscript in a drawer and no obvious reason to start another one.
The First Manuscript
What's interesting is how Claire diagnoses that first book now. She doesn't say it was under-edited or badly queried. She says she was writing too carefully:
"Squashing myself into a box. I thought I must write things similar to what I'd read because that was all I knew. Then a developmental editor asked the opposite of me, and my box expanded to a universe."
One question — write away from what you've read, not toward it — and the ceiling she'd been writing under lifted. It's a useful reminder that the thing holding a manuscript back often isn't a flaw to fix. Sometimes it's a permission the writer hasn't given herself yet.
What Changed
Claire enrolled in the April 2024 cohort of Query Bootcamp while she was still working on the book that didn’t sell.
"Query Bootcamp was my first venture out into the writing community from my little lonely silo. I met amazing people and gained a foundational understanding of the publishing industry and query process, including practical tips that I still used when querying my agent years later."
The phrase to notice there is years later. The course cannot change a manuscript that isn’t a fit for the market. What it does do is outlast one manuscript. The industry knowledge, the querying framework, and the instinct for what a query letter is actually doing all carry forward for writers into their future books.
So do the people. Asked for a memorable moment from her time in the program, Claire said:
"Anna Grace! Best critique partner ever and still a main beta reader for The Bridge!"
Two years after her cohort ended, her fellow Query Bootcamper was reading the drafts of the book that would go to auction.
Claire wrote that book in 2025, on maternity leave, after a thirty-nine-hour labor. She wrote it in the least writerly circumstances available to a person, using what she'd learned on a project that hadn't worked.
Six Weeks
She began querying in January 2026 — cold, with no connections in publishing and no platform to lean on.
Her first manuscript request came three weeks in. One week after that, it turned into an offer of representation. Then the rest of the list caught up: seventeen more manuscript requests and multiple additional offers, arriving fast enough that she took three full weeks simply to decide among them.
In early March, she signed with Laura Rennert at Andrea Brown Literary Agency.
Eighteen requests from a cold list is not luck. It's what happens when a strong manuscript meets a query letter that has been rewritten enough times to look effortless — and Claire's had been. Her advice to other writers points at the same instinct that shaped the letter:
"Making a reader feel (not the characters or author) is the greatest key to writing escapism."
You can read Claire’s query letter — and my breakdown of why it worked — here.
Over $1 Million in Book Deals
Four months after signing, THE BRIDGE TO NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE sold to Laura Schreiber at Voyager — at auction, in a major three-book deal, for publication in winter 2028.
Foreign rights followed in five more countries, including pre-empts in Spain and Germany and an auction in France.
Between the US and foreign markets, the deals total over $1 million — for a debut, written on maternity leave, queried cold, by a writer whose previous novel had received no offers at all eighteen months earlier. An absolutely amazing debut story, and a testament to Claire’s talent, work ethic, and perseverance.
About the Book
Pitched as FOURTH WING meets DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL, THE BRIDGE TO NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a mysterious skyscraper stretching into space might be humanity's only salvation — and to survive its televised "Dark Tower" gauntlet, a wayward scientist must entrust her life, and her heart, to her brother's killer. (Read my full breakdown of Claire’s query letter here!)
Follow Claire on Instagram: @clairemckadebooks