Boy, I’ve been sick as a dog all week and am just catching up with work. And guess what I discovered this afternoon? Some of you agents giving advice on Twitter? I really don’t think it’s such a good idea to insult aspiring writers in public.
Particularly a writer 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 who want 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 snarker’s 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 snarker’s 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.
Victoria Reply:
December 1st, 2009 at 12:44 pm
You’re very welcome!
And thank you very much for commenting on this. I’ve actually quit Twitter, after that appalling display on the part of that agent and the aspiring sycophants who leapt in to posture along with her. I don’t have time for that kind of thing. I have writers to help.
Not all agents are rude. But it’s true that many are. There is a widespread “in-crowd” culture that gives agents of all types permission to ignore phone calls, refuse to send even form rejections, neglect to respond to manuscripts in a timely manner, and now apparently to denigrate aspiring writers on public forums. As I said, the really big agents do not indulge in this childishness. They’re professionals doing a professional job, and they have no need to bolster their egos with “in-crowd” posturing. Many of the middle-ground and less-known agents don’t, either. They are also acting like professionals. But many of them do. Particularly the newbies and those without an understanding of professionalism in general.
As I’ve also said periodically, publishing and writing are two very different things. And now that POD, ebooks, and self-publishing have exploded onto the scene, writers have less reason than ever to put up with such nonsense. Nobody makes beans writing. Everyone’s scrambling for every nickel. The publishing game is hype! And it’s purveyed largely by those who stand to possibly make money off an endless influx of hopefuls doing the actual grunt work at their desks, whether anybody’s taught them how to do it properly or not. It’s an absurd system feeding on the dreams of those in the worst position to understand it.
You don’t have to play the game. Just write!
best,
Victoria