Study Hall Subscriber Spotlight: Marissa Higgins, Author of “A Good Happy Girl”

Marissa Higgins is a writer whose work has appeared in NPR, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, and Salon. She was previously a staff writer for Daily Kos, where she covered anti-queer legislation and book bans. A Good Happy Girl, Higgins’s debut novel about a young woman getting involved with a married lesbian couple, is out now with Catapult Books. Sweetener, her second novel, will be published next year. 

On March 22, she hosted an AMA and discussed her writing process, finding an agent, and using BookTok as a marketing tool. 

We have synthesized the exchange for subscribers who weren’t able to attend. 

If you’re interested in volunteering to host an AMA, please reach out to [email protected]. 

This AMA has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you share a bit about your professional background?

I was working at Whole Foods as a cashier when I started trying to place personal essays to get some clips, and from there I slid into a remote part-time hourly job at Bustle in the lifestyle department, which paid poorly and offered no benefits but did seem to impress folks and I think it did help (or at least don’t hurt) when I pitched freelance work elsewhere and got more traditional bylines (Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR etc).

I got my first staff job at a startup website that also did not pay great but did provide benefits, and from there I got my most recent gig that did pay reasonably, provided great benefits, and… laid a bunch of us off last spring, including me! I share all this mostly for context because gig work tends to not pay fairly or a living wage but having it on my resume I think was worth it to me because I don’t have internships to speak of.

Congrats on your debut novel! What was your writing process like?

​I write pretty fast, and wrote the original draft of the novel in a couple of weeks, mostly to see if I could. I tried to get 8,000 words a day and made it to 10,000 a couple times though my wrists did suffer for it. Normally, I use the Pomodoro method and try to write or edit for 25 minute bursts. The game aspect is appealing to me just to help my brain feel like it’s challenged from the outside a little! 

This book started as a short story in an online fiction workshop in the spring of 2020. I wrote the novel draft that summer, and started pitching to agents shortly after. I had to revise for my agent before she signed me, and had to edit for my book editor before they offered, too! The con of writing fast and just getting it out there is having a lot of edits later.

Any advice for getting those sorts of clips at prestigious publications like The New Yorker and the Washington Post?

I have never cracked The New Yorker but if it’s any help to hear, I heard from someone who did get a piece in there that they submitted it and got a rejection, and then once their book was out, they were solicited, turned in the same piece, and they accepted it lol. The Washington Post is definitely possible though.

My pitches for that level of place tend to be long. I know that’s not the typical advice, but I do feel like it doesn’t hurt to really show the work you’ve put in already. I also sincerely do read the section before pitching and really try to personalize it to them. It’s probably more time consuming than it breaks down to being worth it in terms of pay but I think the bylines feel worth it to me because they carry so much weight for other pitches. 

For an unpublished author doing their first book with a real publisher, how much of an advance should I expect? Will it cover my salary for some amount of time so I can focus on the book?

Mine didn’t at all but mine are literary fiction. If you’re doing a nonfiction book on proposal, and it’s like an “ideas” book (like you’re doing original reporting, or you are an expert yourself, etc) the advances can sometimes be high enough to live off of, but it’s rarer in fiction as far as I know.

I hate to say it but I do think if writers are hoping for a bigger or even living wage-type advance, either having a separate platform or even just a big TikTok presence doesn’t hurt.

You mentioned that you had to do revisions before getting an agent. Can you elaborate on the querying process? Do you have any advice?

I matched with my agent originally on something called PitMad [it’s now defunct]. It was a free pitch event where agents and editors could “like” a pitch tweet from an unrepped author and it was a foot in the door to query. I did this when my novel was really rough honestly, like technically done but I had spent months on it versus years, and it did show.

I queried my agent with a draft, revised it myself in the time it took her to reply and sent her the new one (another thing you aren’t supposed to do but just to be real). She read the new one, asked for a phone call where she had a lot of ideas and questions, and basically said she didn’t feel it was ready for her to offer rep and take it on but she wanted to see revisions if I wanted to do them. I agreed on the phone, and I believe I sent her edits in pieces (like a new chapter, revision of a scene she’d already read etc.) over a few months period. Then she asked for another call and actually officially representation. Then I revised more with her assistant as well. I truly cannot count how many times I’ve revised the book. Beyond dozens. Since then, she sold another novel to my same editor at my current publisher (Catapult), and that was a ton of editing as well.

I again drafted [my second novel] maybe in two months, while the first book (the one out in April of this year) was about to go on submission with editors, so then my agent and I revised the second book while waiting on replies for the first. 

I definitely recommend MSWL [a resource where agents can post query instructions] but beware there are unfortunately a lot of agents who just aren’t great or ethical. The industry is opaque and it can be easy for writers to get taken advantage of. The number one scam I’d say to look out for is: you should never be paying an agent, and they shouldn’t be asking you to pay for a class or independent editor. They get paid 15% if the book sells, but at no point should you be paying them to edit your work.

I did personalize all of my query letters and I felt it did help in getting replies, even if they were ultimately passed. I found it helpful to read the acknowledgments sections of books and especially ARCs (advance review copies) in the genre I was writing in (adult literary fiction) to see who was actually successful in selling these kinds of books. You can get ARCs on NetGalley and Edelweiss, as well as reaching out to publishers directly, but I prefer reading on the Kindle so find NetGalley easiest.

Do you have any advice for marketing your own book? What have you learned from the experience so far?

I hate to say this but I do really recommend getting on BookTok. I personally am not trying to become an influencer but the BookTok community is extremely active and readers are so engaged on that platform, it’s really fantastic to tap into. I use TikTok to participate in micro groups that I think might want to read my book, so for me it’s like literary fiction, queer fiction, short books, weird books etc. (Basically, whatever descriptors you’d use for your SEO keywords translate into a hashtag). I know BookTok has a reputation for being all Colleen Hoover but I almost never see her books (lol).

I’ve found it helpful to just get my book cover in front of people’s faces. I haven’t checked my preorder numbers so, grain of salt, but I have seen growth in my Goodreads that I credit to larger accounts on BookTok posting about the book. Your marketing people should be sending your book to these folks anyway. But I have personally had a lot of great interactions with [book influencers] directly  in their DMs or just by engaging with their content in comments, whereas I have heard that when [book submissions] come from publishers or publicists, it can be crickets. 

I’m not sure if BookTokers just feel it’s more authentic to be able to see the author is a “real” person on the app or something else but honestly I’ve found it really nice and welcoming! For the marketing itself, I do post videos that go along with trending sounds (cringy yes) and photo slideshows! Just posting book cover recommendations can work, it doesn’t have to be video. So for example I might do a TikTok like “weird books to read if you loved Saltburn” and include a handful of titles plus my own and sometimes I’ll have long convos with strangers in comments about books I recommend. It’s honestly refreshing compared to Twitter discourse.

The other perk of BookTok is that a lot of the big book accounts do their own book clubs.

One person (who has a following way, way bigger than mine) invited me to join a virtual book club and honestly just her posting about my book on her platform seems to have given me a real boost. I think it’s partially luck and that these folks have really authentic, engaged followings so they take the recs seriously other than TikTok. 

I did do a free publicity incubator with Poets & Writers that I highly recommend: you do have to apply and unfortunately I think they cap it at 10 people so it won’t work for everyone, but I have to credit that resource as being wonderful. Totally free, totally remote, and we got to hear from a lot of professionals in the industry and other writers (Hernan Diaz!!) about their experiences, so it’s definitely worth the application time. 

A Good Happy Girl is out now!