Agentfail – a Response from a Non-Failing Agent

The Internet has been hopping recently in the literary community over what seems to be a war of attrition between writers and the agents they query. It's a situation tailor-made for bad blood: writers, by nature of the strong feelings they have for their "babies" have a tendency to take every rejection, every no response personally; and agents, faced with overflowing inboxes and limited by Earth days with only four and twenty hours, cannot possibly give every query the personal feedback the querier craves.

The recent Twitter uproar over #queryfail and its backlash known as #agentfail was brought to a head last week on April Fool's with this this blog post from the Bookends Literary Agency. The comments overflowed (last count, over 300) with both constructive feedback and - more noticeably - angry vitriol from frustrated writers.

But writers aren't the only ones following this conversation. My agent, Ginger Clark of Curtis Brown asked if she could voice her opinion – an Agentfail rebuttal, so to speak – from the other side of the query.

Ginger, there are several points of contention that frustrated writers bring up again and again in regards to what they see as the failure of the literary agent, and one of the biggest seems to be agents blogging/Twittering about what they do in their free time when, theoretically, they "should" be responding to queries and requested materials. What is your response to this?

Firstly, Gretchen, thank you for letting me hijack your blog to discuss this. I had a lot of thoughts reading those comments. So thank you for letting me take up some of your blog to share them.

My most passionate response was: Agents are allowed to have personal lives. Everyone is allowed to have personal lives. Everyone is entitled to time to rest and relax.

And not everyone has to put their career first to be a good agent. Here’s what my priority list looks like for my life:

1. My husband Brian
2. Friends and pets (when our chinchillas were still alive)
3. Career

I’m sorry if that makes me sound unfocused. But I do want to spend time NOT working. I do want to have dinner with my husband, call and see my friends, and when our rodents were around, play with them and take them to the vet when they were sick. I want to take a vacation, and I also want to spend what little time I have free when I am away for business talking to the people I miss back home.
And agents who blog about what they do in their free time are not doing anything wrong.

Also, not every moment of my day at work is spent working entirely on serving my clients and getting new clients. I sometimes take a break to talk with a coworker, or read something online, or gossip with an editor friend. And that is OK. I need a few breaks during the day. Every agent needs a few. It should not be held against us. We are not androids.

While I read these comments, I thought of Don Draper on “Mad Men” telling a coworker of his (Pete Campbell, perennial douchebag) to go home and be with his family when his father dies. Don says, “There’s work, and then there is family.” Meaning, family is to be put ahead of work. There is NOTHING wrong with that.

(PS Don Draper TOTALLY does not take this advice himself, of course.)

This is the important point I hope everyone registers: agents, just like writers and editors, are real people with real lives, and how they choose to budget their time is an inalienable right.

I also feel as if many commenters on the Bookends blog post are not taking into account the way an agent has to divide their designated "work time." With commitments to clients and your agency, how much of an average work day can you afford to allot to queries?

I can afford to give maybe 5 to 10% of my work day to queries and potential clients. Often less. The rest of the day has to be spent helping and looking after my clients, or British rights to our children’s list. That’s how I make money, and, more importantly—that’s what my clients are paying me to do.

One comment on the blog that particularly caught my eye was this:

"Stop telling me how hard your job is. Life is hard. Being a writer/agent/doctor/soda salesman...Work sucks. deal with it."

It seems to me that agents, like anyone else who keeps a blog, should be able to complain about any damn thing they please. Do you think agents should draw a line with what they post on their personal blogs?

Firstly, yes—if you have a blog, you can complain as much or as little as you want. If your readers don’t like it, they can just not read it.

One of the reasons that I don’t have a blog is that I do not trust myself enough to keep it either strictly professional, or strictly personal (and my personal life is not interesting, nor is it for public consumption). There are some days when I just want to rant about someone who is driving me crazy, or screwed over one of my clients. If I had a blog, I know I would be tempted to do so. So I don’t, and instead I call a friend, or bitch about it at home to Brian—and I save myself the complications of offending someone in my industry.

I applaud agents who are able to keep their blogs professional and helpful. Nathan Bransford (and I am not just saying this because I work with him) has the ideal agent blog, in my opinion. He is brilliant; he is extremely well-informed; he is kind and funny; he spends a lot of his free time helping writers. There are plenty of other agents who blog, and do themselves a great service in doing so.

There are a few (very few, but a few) agents who really should not blog, for the sake of their own careers, though. They don’t come off well. That’s my own opinion, and so I’m not going to name names.

There also seems to be an overwhelming sense of anger in regards to "no response means no," a policy frequently used by agents in regards to queries. Common comments include "How hard is it to set up an email signature that says 'thanks but no thanks?'" or requesting a confirmation email that queries have been received. From the other side of the desk, what is your reaction?

I have some experience here, doing both. When I first started officially welcoming emailed queries (in late 2006) I would reply to all of them. When I rejected one, I would say, “Thank you, but this is not for me. Best, Ginger Clark” or something like that. I did that for about four months. Then I stopped—because I got sick of receiving rude responses. Email makes it so easy for someone to reply, “Well, screw you.” Which people did. Repeatedly.

So I stopped responding, and made it very clear on my Publishers Marketplace page what my policy was.

As for an automatic response—that’s something I have considered doing. Then I remember that every so often, one of my clients will email me a question with a subject line saying, “Quick query for you.” I would rather they not get an automated response, treating them like an aspiring author.

I suppose I could just hit reply on every email, and paste in a form response, but—please see my earlier experience! Some stranger saying “screw you” or “Wow, you’re an asshole”….I try not to take that personally, but some days it would just really get under my skin.

I know that 90% of the people I would be replying to would behave professionally, but it’s that 10% that keeps me from amending my policy.

I realize that many writers feel strongly about their side of things, and that the anger behind Agentfail is sometimes warranted. I welcome your comments but I also hope that you listen to what Ginger has to say with an open mind. This is one agent openly posting her response, her opinion and her feelings in regards to this topic, and that deserves a great deal of respect.

Thanks, Gretchen. Can I add one thing?

Of course!

A lot of the comments were helpful to me to read. And a lot of the commenters had positive things to say about agents. Those were heartening.

So there you have it. Writers, agents DO read your comments, your complaints, your blog posts, your Tweets and your online forum threads. And with an objective eye. Personally, I couldn't ask for anything more.