Boy, I’ve been sick as a dog all week and am just catching up with work. And guess what I discovered this afternoon? Agents giving advice on Twitter? I don’t think it’s such a good idea to insult aspiring writers in public.
Particularly one you’ve actually requested a manuscript from and are hoping will turn out to be a client.
I just took the heat this afternoon for standing up for aspiring writers and suggesting that advice can come without insults, and it was not a fun experience. I don’t like dealing with rude people, and I certainly don’t like doing it in public. But I felt sincerely bad for aspiring writers out there, who know less about this industry than I do, thinking, “Thank god that agent offered me that advice. Too bad about the sacrificial lamb, and yes, if it’d been me they were talking about, I’d know and I’d be feeling like crawling under a rock right now. Nothing like having your innocent hopes twisted in a knot by an agent who thinks they’re funny when they’re actually just mean. But I guess that’s the rough-&-tumble biz.”
No business is any more rough-&-tumble than the participants make it. The “thick skin” everyone talks about is about accepting the reality of rejections, not ridicule in the guise of snark. There is absolutely no need for discourtesy from professionals to amateurs.
No need at all.
Sure, I know there’s a kind of brat pack of young literary agents out there who are very visible on blogs and Twitter. I link to a lot of their articles and retweet a lot of their advice. They post some incredibly smart and helpful information. I also sympathize deeply with their problems with people who are neither writers nor aspiring to be, just nuts wanting someone to pay attention to them. I deal with some of those people, too. And I know some of those agents are quite funny on their blogs and trade a lot of commiseration about their jobs among themselves. My editor friends and I commiserate about our jobs, too. Sometimes about nuts agents.
But Twitter is not the place to be snarky about potential clients. If you think they’re idiots, that’s your business. If you flaunt your opinion in their faces, though, they’re going to take their business elsewhere.
Do agents not have competition in other agents? Um. Yes, they do. The world is full of aspiring literary agents. The big names—who are completely out of the snarkers’ league—actually compete rather stiffly among themselves. And with current lay-offs from the publishing houses, there are more and more hungry literary agents every day, many of them seasoned professionals who know publishing insiders personally. People with long, illustrious publishing careers behind them, sometimes as the heads of whole publishing imprints. People also out of the snarkers’ league. Hungry for clientele.
So here’s some advice for hopeful agents in these troubled times: Don’t expect writers to flock to submit to you and then sharpen your wit publicly on their mistakes. In my professional experience, that is called, “Shoot self in foot. Repeat as necessary.”
The really successful professionals—with the great accounts and the brilliant authors and the big reputations—don’t have any need to publicly make fun of the writers who submit to them.
It’s a small planet, folks. We’re all in this together. And we all have feelings. Let’s remember to treat each other like human beings.
So today we’re linking to peace, because, you know, it’s all we’ve got that actually works. And maybe some people just need to be reminded.
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