#Queryday

I currently have a project due for work in an hour and 50 minutes. It’s a knotty one. And what am I doing?

Following #queryday on Twitter.

I am so, so screwed.

But how often do you get to watch agents answer questions and post about their jobs in realtime?

Also, switching back to the old layout for a day, just because I linked a post from the #queryday stream and there’s some people getting that IE-incompatible mess.

Nostalgia is a *****.

Wow. I just went through and read the old comic, what little was left after I scrapped it and restarted. 31 pages.

It surprises me that I miss it so much.

AmazonFail update.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166384.asp

Thought so. That’s much more sensible than all the pitchfork-waving that was going on before.

Amazon Fails.

This started on Twitter, but is beginning to explode all over the internet: Amazon has stirred controversy and roused protests from its customer base and many high-profile authors (and other names in the publishing industry) by removing the sales rankings from content deemed as “adult,” causing it to no longer show up in certain searches or on certain best-seller lists.

As if the regression back to antiquated standards of censorship wasn’t bad enough: apparently the decision as to what constitutes “adult” materials is highly discriminatory against LGBT publications. While Playboy and other materials with heterosexual adult content retain their sales rankings and remain easily available on all searches and best-seller lists, many LGBT publications with only nominal romantic or erotic content have been de-listed with little to no feasible explanation for the change except for a canned response about the new policy. At the same time, books discussing preventions, cures, or other discrimination against homosexuality retain their sales rankings and now have a more prominent position in searches for “homosexuality” with other, more relevant publications now removed from search results.

Outrage has come fast and furious, and the #amazonfail hash tag is currently the most popular one on Twitter. I’ve been following the conversations, and the outpouring of shock and anger has been growing at understandably exponential levels.

For decades many groups have fought for freedom of speech, freedom against discrimination, and freedom against censorship. Such a simple act, while seemingly innocuous, is an enormous step backwards and displays a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of equality. If the LGBT community – our stories, our authors, our world – were truly seen as equal by those at Amazon who made this decision, then this policy never would have been enacted at all.

I can only hope that this was a short-sighted mistake, and that Amazon didn’t think this or its ramifications through. I can’t imagine a corporation of this size being so willfully blind, and willfully discriminatory. An Amazon spokesperson apparently claims that it was a glitch – but another author has proof that it’s been happening since February. That’s quite a long time to go without fixing a glitch.

Whatever it is, I hope that it’s corrected soon, and that Amazon doesn’t abuse its position as a leading mainstream book retailer to force censorship on a public that never asked for it. I’d like to hold out hope, for now, rather than joining in the rabble-rousing and automatically assuming malicious intent. It’s just too senseless and irrational; there has to be a better explanation than what most are assuming. Amazon didn’t achieve its premiere ranking by being stupid.

Agents as real people: facing down the fear.

(Originally written after #queryfail on Twitter. Sorry to anyone who drops by and gets omg!enormous font; the original WordPress template that I modified has a really strange CSS incompatibility with certain settings in Internet Explorer.)

When you’re an unpublished author, it’s all too easy to think of agents as lofty, snobby elitists who don’t care that you exist and will snub you just for not being on their It List – which makes them, to the initiate, a terrifying unknown that looms over their future careers like some judging demon. There’s at once a certain truth in that, a certain hubris, and a certain paranoia, all of which help in twisting an agent’s responses into something that’s taken entirely out of context and, in all honesty, far too personally. Take it from a writer who’s still trying to get published, and who deals with agent responses nearly every day: you, personally, don’t matter to the agent who rejects or snubs you. But not mattering isn’t as big a deal as you might think, and it doesn’t mean the agent is a horrible person.

Agents, as a whole, are generally very nice people under a great deal of pressure and with very little time to do a lot of things. Sometimes they can be sharp, rude, dismissive, but the reality is that they have to be. On average, an agent is inundated by hundreds of queries a week – or even hundreds of queries a day. To deal with that and still focus on their primary business of working with and for their existing clients and published authors, they have to be sharp, quick, brusque, yet polite without creating any misconceptions that a No, but thank you for querying is anything other than a no. An agent can’t be every new author’s best friend. They can’t make a special exception for you. They can’t help you find a home for your manuscript, or make your manuscript better. If they did any of those things, they’d be doing a disservice to themselves…and to the hundreds of other authors they have to review in a very short period of time.

The truth is that an agent can’t afford to care who you are. The mistake is in taking that personally. Out of the rejection letters I’ve received for my first novel, not once do I think a single agent looked at my manuscript and said “Oh, this is godawful, I hate it” or “Oh, Adrien-Luc Sanders – I don’t like his letter, I don’t like his manuscript, and now I personally dislike him as a result of this query.” In fact, ask any agent I’ve queried and they won’t remember who I am…because it’s not personal. They looked at the manuscript, query, or synopsis and said “It’s not for me, I’m sorry, but I wish you luck with other agents or publishers.”

And that’s what they meant.

They weren’t secretly snickering to themselves. They weren’t subtly saying “You suck, stop writing.” They weren’t doing any number of things that many authors assume agents are doing when they reject a manuscript, because that rejection isn’t personal. It isn’t a reflection on their personal opinion of the author, mainly because they don’t have a personal opinion of the author. The only thing it’s a reflection of is an agent trying to do his or her job in very little time.

For that reason, agents have to cut you short. They have to discourage ongoing personal contact with people who aren’t their clients. They have to set limits and define boundaries, and no matter how nice the agents are on the inside, they have to be extremely stern in enforcing those boundaries – because if they don’t, someone is going to push them. Someone is going to try to take up as much of the agent’s time as possible, rendering it difficult for them to do their job and placing them in the uncomfortable situation of having to disentangle themselves. You might say “I wouldn’t do that,” but you have to remember: someone in the past likely has, and those boundaries exist for a reason.

So when you look at an agent’s strict requirements or their unresponsiveness, don’t interpret it as nastiness or elitism – and don’t be afraid of it. Look at it for what it is: a way for agents to manage their time and maintain their sanity while trying to weigh everyone equally and do the best job they can. If an agent rejects you or doesn’t respond to your manuscript, don’t take it as a personal snub. Take it as a sign of respect for unpublished authors as a whole, because even if they rejected you, they gave you a fair chance: the same fair chance they gave everyone else.

And since they give you that respect, respect their time. Respect their effort. And if they say no, don’t push. Don’t harass. Don’t try to get their attention in other ways, because they’re under enough stress as it is. Have grace, have dignity, and move on to your next query without fear of rejection.

Because there’s always another agent out there, and another fair chance.