Fiza Saeed McLynn looks back on how she finally became a published author when her debut novel, The Midnight Carousel, came out after years of trying and trying again to get an agent. It’s never too late, she says, and offers the tips for first-time authors she learned from her experience.
Way back in April 2015, I had the idea of writing a historical novel centred on an enchanting carousel. Little did I know then that it would take almost 10 years to the day for that initial spark to become a published book.
I came to writing relatively late — or rather, I rediscovered writing late. As a child, I was a daydreamer, most often to be found either reading, or creating my own books.
Then, a comment made by my Year 9 English teacher that my stories were ‘too weird’ shook my confidence to the point that I stopped writing creatively in my spare time.
In hindsight, I should have carried on, anyway. But teenagers will be teenagers, so instead, my focus turned to doing well at school, and getting into University.
A marriage, two children, a divorce and a host of seemingly unrelated jobs later – chartered accountant, website creator, therapist, doggy daycare owner – and I felt the urge to write again. “It’s now or never,” part of me thought.
By this time, I was a single parent in my mid-40s, working full-time, which meant that progress was slow. So slow, in fact, that after I had drafted the outline of my carousel idea, it took five years to write the first two chapters. Then lockdown hit, and for the first time ever in my adult life, unfilled months stretched in front of me. Now, I could devote all my attention to this book.
In January 2021, armed with a completed manuscript and oodles of excitement, I compiled a list of 20 literary agents, using the free database at Jericho Writers, and queried them in batches of five
It took six days for the first rejection to arrive. As anyone who has ever received the ‘Thank you for your query, but….’ email will know, it was a crushing experience.
But I rallied myself with the thought that there were 19 other agents who were still considering my book. Surely, one of them would love the story? After four months, I was the unenviable recipient of a further eight outright rejections, and 11 silences (to this day, I haven’t heard back!), and it became clear that securing an agent was going to be a lot more challenging than the challenge I had expected.
Determined to give this project my best shot, I hired an editor via Reedsy to assess my manuscript. ‘‘Am I wasting my time?’’ was one of the first questions I asked Lauren. Tactfully, she told me that I was not, but my manuscript would need work. A lot of work.
It turns out that she was correct because it took several rewrites over 12 months before I was ready to query another 20 agents. This time I just knew I would be successful.
True, 60 per cent of the agents asked for the full manuscript. However, it was still a resounding ‘No, thank you’ at the end of this round. Three agents were generous enough to offer detailed feedback, which was helpful beyond words.
Possibly, if they had held differing opinions from one another, I would have continued to query the manuscript in its current state because writing is subjective, and what one person hates, another might love. But all of them honed in on the same major section of the story that they felt didn’t work. So, I took the decision to hire Lauren again, but this time for a developmental edit, which led to me scrapping 80,000 words!
In January 2023, I queried my reworked novel – and what a different experience this was from my first two attempts! Within hours, I received a flurry of requests for the full manuscript. Within two days, I had my first offer of representation. One week later, I signed with Hellie Ogden at WME, who is not only a superstar agent, but also the loveliest person.
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Thanks to her brilliance, The Midnight Carousel is out now in the UK, South Africa and Australia with Penguin Books, and was published by Harper Collins in the USA in January 2026, as well as in other international territories over the past 12 months.
My bumpy road to publication has taught me many lessons over the past decade. Here are my top four tips:
1. Listen to feedback. Early readers are invaluable for spotting the parts of your novel that might need work. This doesn’t mean you have to change everything – or anything — but who knows what creative inspiration you will draw from listening to other perspectives. In my case, it’s unlikely that my book would have got this far without me taking on board the suggestions of those three kind agents.
2. Query, query, query. Your aim is to get your manuscript in front of the right person at the right time, and querying widely increases your odds. While most agents give a general overview of what they are looking for, it might be an obscure detail that swings it for you.
Unknown to me back then, my own agent has “a weird obsession with carousels” (her words!), so when my query popped into her inbox, it was beautiful synchronicity.
3. Press the pause button, if necessary. Rejections are a rite of passage for every author (and they continue even after the first book’s publication!) but knockback after knockback can be emotionally exhausting. It was for me. I found that taking a break from querying and/or writing meant that I returned to the process refreshed, and with my mental health intact.
4. Focus on your own journey. Some writers attract multiple agent offers after querying for one week; others are smacked with hundreds of rejections over months, if not years, and eventually end up with a single offer. Neither is indicative of your future long-term writing career, and comparing yourself to anyone else just leads to misery!
Hopefully, my story has gone some way to inspiring you, wherever you are on your journey. As someone wise once told me: the only route to guaranteeing that your novel won’t ever be published is to fail to write it, in the first place.
The Midnight Carousel by Fiza Saeed McLynn is published in paperback on 12 March, 2026.
Fiza read History at Oxford University and had a brief career in finance before spending the next 12 years helping the bereaved as part of her work as a complementary therapist.
Images:
- Carousel at Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park: Oxyman for Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- A merry go-round with a horse on it (detail): Picryl (public domain)
- Tête de cheval — sculpture pour manège, Musée des arts forains: Dinkum for Wikimedia (CC0 1.0)
- Carousel horse’s head, New England Carousel Museum: Picryl (public domain)
- Carousel, Toms Farms: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- A traditional manège (French carousel or merry-go-round): AlNo for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
