I'm generally in favor of irrepressible opinions. ;)
The point of my inquiry is that what is excruciating for most of us isn't the "vulnerability"- it's the black hole of communication. :) We're business people too (I manage a multimillion dollar budget, several teams of staff, a raft of large projects, and strategic planning for a $10…
I'm generally in favor of irrepressible opinions. ;)
The point of my inquiry is that what is excruciating for most of us isn't the "vulnerability"- it's the black hole of communication. :) We're business people too (I manage a multimillion dollar budget, several teams of staff, a raft of large projects, and strategic planning for a $100+M government agency. It involves tech knowledge, but it's mostly business management :) ). Katy's comment made it clear that what the publishing industry considers "normalized timelines and practices for business communication" is significantly different than what most of us experience. I've worked in government, Fortune 500, small business - and publishing is definitely the outlier. :)
Because so many of us writers "come from elsewhere", so to speak, our assumptions and expectations around communication are very different from the assumptions and expectations I see in agents' comments on communication. And that difference in assumptions on both sides seems to be the largest part of frustrations (from writers waiting for query responses to agents who howl on Twitter because someone dared to send a follow-up inquiry at less than 6 months), and panic attacks (like the folks who are terrified that their agent is ghosting them because they didn't answer a message within a reasonable-in-every-other-industry time frame).
In any other industry - the way agents communicate is *terrible business etiquette, and those long silences would be *cause* for panic and concern over the relationship. :) So - the point of my question was to ask "what is the norm for an agent" - so we're equipped to assess your responses according to *your industry's norms rather than our own. Cuz it seems like understanding one another better would avoid a lot of heartache - and panic attacks!
I'm generally in favor of irrepressible opinions. ;)
The point of my inquiry is that what is excruciating for most of us isn't the "vulnerability"- it's the black hole of communication. :) We're business people too (I manage a multimillion dollar budget, several teams of staff, a raft of large projects, and strategic planning for a $100+M government agency. It involves tech knowledge, but it's mostly business management :) ). Katy's comment made it clear that what the publishing industry considers "normalized timelines and practices for business communication" is significantly different than what most of us experience. I've worked in government, Fortune 500, small business - and publishing is definitely the outlier. :)
Because so many of us writers "come from elsewhere", so to speak, our assumptions and expectations around communication are very different from the assumptions and expectations I see in agents' comments on communication. And that difference in assumptions on both sides seems to be the largest part of frustrations (from writers waiting for query responses to agents who howl on Twitter because someone dared to send a follow-up inquiry at less than 6 months), and panic attacks (like the folks who are terrified that their agent is ghosting them because they didn't answer a message within a reasonable-in-every-other-industry time frame).
In any other industry - the way agents communicate is *terrible business etiquette, and those long silences would be *cause* for panic and concern over the relationship. :) So - the point of my question was to ask "what is the norm for an agent" - so we're equipped to assess your responses according to *your industry's norms rather than our own. Cuz it seems like understanding one another better would avoid a lot of heartache - and panic attacks!