This is a great discussion, and I think I just figured out the KEY difference between "the pile of emails agents get" and "the pile of emails everyone else gets and answers promptly."
Imagine that of your 300-1000 emails per week, 85% of them are from people you don't have a relationship with. They don't work with you or for the same company. They don't work for a client company. Are you still obligated to answer them as promptly as the emails from the 15% with whom you have an existing business relationship, and whose emails are regarding a part of your job that you are already doing?
"Queries" aren't in the same category as "emails from people I am contractually obligated to be responsive to. Queries are in the category of "someone would like to sell me toner." You probably need toner--eventually. But you have some good toner suppliers already. And you'd love to find another supplier, because you do have one open printer with no toner, but it's also really important to spend most of your time printing things, not evaluating new toner brands.
Queries are SALES EMAILS. While yes, agents are paid by writers, agents select those relationships they want to build from a pile of sales emails. An agent's primary job is "make money for and with the relationships I already have." "Make new relationships to potentially make money in the future" is important but secondary.
As an IT person, your 1000 non-spam emails are all part of your primary job. The sales emails from people who would like to sell you toner might one day get dealt with when you need toner.
I love this analogy. I'll take it one step further and say that an agent's needs for toner change over time. Sometimes, especially when agents are starting out, it's TONER TONER I LOVE TONER GIVE ME ALL THE TONER TONER IS THE BEST THING EVER! As an agent's client list grows, it becomes, Toner is a thing I need and want and love but I only need so much of it right now. OF COURSE queries are not a faceless office supply with only one utility. We know that there are PEOPLE on the other side of queries that have put blood, sweat, and tears into their work. But queries, as Allison said, are only one part of the job.
Yup. Those poor toner sales folks are people too - but their expectation from me is definitely different than the person on the second floor. They *know I'm unlikely to answer them. (I'm with you - I love that analogy - but then, it's Allison, so ya gotta expect pure gold when her fingers hit the keyboard :) )
The trick is - we both know what to expect (unlike that poor writer who was panicking that their agent might be ghosting them ;) ). I'm excited to hear what the 'expectations' are for your various classes of communication, and how your time gets allocated - appreciate you taking an interest in the subject. While everyone will be slightly different, it will unquestionably help a lot of folks be a little less manic about watching the second-hand tick away from the moment they press "send" ;)
Thanks for the time you spend in giving us glimpses of 'the other side of the keyhole' - We're forever learning useful things from you!
Kate, you asked if we answer our emails within a week, no matter what - and that highlights a thing that many of us don't really understand about agents.
As an IT Director, I average 300-1,000 received emails per week (depending on time of year/my organization's work cycle) and am expected to respond to them (other than the junk mail :) ) within 48-72 hours. If I don't, I can expect follow-ups. And if I don't respond to *those, I can expect to be disciplined or even fired for my "rudeness", "lack of professionalism", or "poor communication skills". It's a pretty common refrain in my writing circles: The communication cycle that agents consider normal seems dysfunctional, unprofessional, and thoroughly incomprehensible to most of us. We'd expect to lose our jobs if we communicated the way agents do.
And yet, you asked your question as though, "of course, you don't actually answer all your mail within a week" - which tells me that in your world, it's really unimaginable that this is problematic.
As in so many things, each side assuming that the rules of their world are "obvious" to the other seems to lead to a lot of conflicting expectations. And that missed connection seems to be at the center of most of the complaints in which agents/writers complain about writers/agents.
So - how about a column in which you tell us a little bit about what communications look like in your world? :) As writers, we mostly think of queries - but there are also communications with clients, with publishers, with colleagues, and....other stuff I am sure we don't know. You work in a world where "of course" people don't *really respond to all their emails within a week - and most of us are assessing your responses based on "holy cow, if I did that I'd get fired!"
I'd guess that's behind a lot of the confusion we see regarding "what to expect/how to interpret agent communication/silence" - from the questions you quote, to our writers' groups, to the Twitterverse. If those of us who live and work in "I'd get fired"-land had a better understanding of what communication norms look like in Agent-land, we could probably save a lot of angst on all sides. :)
Good idea! I will attempt to do so! Remember, though, that queries are only a small part of an agent's job. I know that this is the part that queriers want to know the most about (of course!!!) so I will work to highlight that in a future post. But per your analogy, your whole job is responding to IT requests (and of course it's much more than just email). My whole job is not answering queries. The expectations won't be the same. More to come!
Not quite the analogy - I'm a Director, so my work is much more like common businesspeople - I manage a staff (including one team that does respond to IT requests - their required response timeline is *much shorter than mine! ;) ), vendors, policy, strategic guidance to colleagues, blah-blah. Basically, very similar to any office worker - and across industries we face similar expectations. Like you, I'll respond to a colleague faster than a vendor on most days (or whatever our relative priority scales are). I'll be very curious to gain a picture of what kinds of communications you engage in, how you prioritize or timeline those responses, and where the rest of your day goes, how communication fits into it, and what the common practice seems to be in terms of response times for those various puzzle pieces!!
I’m not Kate but I’m also an agent and have irrepressible opinions, so HERE I AM.
As a human being, I hear you on how excruciating it is to make yourself vulnerable and share your work, only to have to wait interminable weeks for a reply. As an agent, however, I know that slowness (on everything not absolutely time sensitive, such as a contract deadline) is a sign of an agent’s *competence.*
It’s important to remember that our job is not exactly customer service; it’s business, a business partnership with each of our clients. Which means our most important duty is not so much to make our clients “happy customers” in the moment so much as it is to invest meaningful expertise in order to give them the best chance at industry success. What that looks like is generally not emails. It generally involves dozens to hundreds of uncertain, iterative editorial development on both of our parts over the course of many, many months. And the mindfuck is that we can never be certain how long that will take, or what it will take. Sometimes it involves many drafts. Sometimes it involves something completely outside the scope of our work, such as the client releasing their white knuckle grip on their drafts and ending a problematic relationship or gig that’s triggering perfectionist, controlling, art-killing impulses. And this is all very hard to communicate around, especially if we need to prioritize our time in the hard thinking vs communicating. Again, it’s our duty as your business partner to prioritize this.
In an ideal world, agents could articulate this up front. But it’s not always possible. It’s cool to find an agent who CAN articulate this up front if you need that emotionally. But if you take nothing else away from this, trust me on one thing: you do not want an agent who treats a proposal like an assembly line product or open IT repair ticket. The work is a lot more amporpjous than that.
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 just fainted after looking at your workload. My sympathies.
This is a great discussion, and I think I just figured out the KEY difference between "the pile of emails agents get" and "the pile of emails everyone else gets and answers promptly."
Imagine that of your 300-1000 emails per week, 85% of them are from people you don't have a relationship with. They don't work with you or for the same company. They don't work for a client company. Are you still obligated to answer them as promptly as the emails from the 15% with whom you have an existing business relationship, and whose emails are regarding a part of your job that you are already doing?
"Queries" aren't in the same category as "emails from people I am contractually obligated to be responsive to. Queries are in the category of "someone would like to sell me toner." You probably need toner--eventually. But you have some good toner suppliers already. And you'd love to find another supplier, because you do have one open printer with no toner, but it's also really important to spend most of your time printing things, not evaluating new toner brands.
Queries are SALES EMAILS. While yes, agents are paid by writers, agents select those relationships they want to build from a pile of sales emails. An agent's primary job is "make money for and with the relationships I already have." "Make new relationships to potentially make money in the future" is important but secondary.
As an IT person, your 1000 non-spam emails are all part of your primary job. The sales emails from people who would like to sell you toner might one day get dealt with when you need toner.
I love this analogy. I'll take it one step further and say that an agent's needs for toner change over time. Sometimes, especially when agents are starting out, it's TONER TONER I LOVE TONER GIVE ME ALL THE TONER TONER IS THE BEST THING EVER! As an agent's client list grows, it becomes, Toner is a thing I need and want and love but I only need so much of it right now. OF COURSE queries are not a faceless office supply with only one utility. We know that there are PEOPLE on the other side of queries that have put blood, sweat, and tears into their work. But queries, as Allison said, are only one part of the job.
Yup. Those poor toner sales folks are people too - but their expectation from me is definitely different than the person on the second floor. They *know I'm unlikely to answer them. (I'm with you - I love that analogy - but then, it's Allison, so ya gotta expect pure gold when her fingers hit the keyboard :) )
The trick is - we both know what to expect (unlike that poor writer who was panicking that their agent might be ghosting them ;) ). I'm excited to hear what the 'expectations' are for your various classes of communication, and how your time gets allocated - appreciate you taking an interest in the subject. While everyone will be slightly different, it will unquestionably help a lot of folks be a little less manic about watching the second-hand tick away from the moment they press "send" ;)
Thanks for the time you spend in giving us glimpses of 'the other side of the keyhole' - We're forever learning useful things from you!
Exactly Allison. And I don't think most folks have an awareness of just how much of an agent's mail is cold-call spam. :)
Well said, and thank you for that insight. It's good to know what's what.
Kate, you asked if we answer our emails within a week, no matter what - and that highlights a thing that many of us don't really understand about agents.
As an IT Director, I average 300-1,000 received emails per week (depending on time of year/my organization's work cycle) and am expected to respond to them (other than the junk mail :) ) within 48-72 hours. If I don't, I can expect follow-ups. And if I don't respond to *those, I can expect to be disciplined or even fired for my "rudeness", "lack of professionalism", or "poor communication skills". It's a pretty common refrain in my writing circles: The communication cycle that agents consider normal seems dysfunctional, unprofessional, and thoroughly incomprehensible to most of us. We'd expect to lose our jobs if we communicated the way agents do.
And yet, you asked your question as though, "of course, you don't actually answer all your mail within a week" - which tells me that in your world, it's really unimaginable that this is problematic.
As in so many things, each side assuming that the rules of their world are "obvious" to the other seems to lead to a lot of conflicting expectations. And that missed connection seems to be at the center of most of the complaints in which agents/writers complain about writers/agents.
So - how about a column in which you tell us a little bit about what communications look like in your world? :) As writers, we mostly think of queries - but there are also communications with clients, with publishers, with colleagues, and....other stuff I am sure we don't know. You work in a world where "of course" people don't *really respond to all their emails within a week - and most of us are assessing your responses based on "holy cow, if I did that I'd get fired!"
I'd guess that's behind a lot of the confusion we see regarding "what to expect/how to interpret agent communication/silence" - from the questions you quote, to our writers' groups, to the Twitterverse. If those of us who live and work in "I'd get fired"-land had a better understanding of what communication norms look like in Agent-land, we could probably save a lot of angst on all sides. :)
So...tell us all about it!
Good idea! I will attempt to do so! Remember, though, that queries are only a small part of an agent's job. I know that this is the part that queriers want to know the most about (of course!!!) so I will work to highlight that in a future post. But per your analogy, your whole job is responding to IT requests (and of course it's much more than just email). My whole job is not answering queries. The expectations won't be the same. More to come!
Thanks Kate!
Not quite the analogy - I'm a Director, so my work is much more like common businesspeople - I manage a staff (including one team that does respond to IT requests - their required response timeline is *much shorter than mine! ;) ), vendors, policy, strategic guidance to colleagues, blah-blah. Basically, very similar to any office worker - and across industries we face similar expectations. Like you, I'll respond to a colleague faster than a vendor on most days (or whatever our relative priority scales are). I'll be very curious to gain a picture of what kinds of communications you engage in, how you prioritize or timeline those responses, and where the rest of your day goes, how communication fits into it, and what the common practice seems to be in terms of response times for those various puzzle pieces!!
I’m not Kate but I’m also an agent and have irrepressible opinions, so HERE I AM.
As a human being, I hear you on how excruciating it is to make yourself vulnerable and share your work, only to have to wait interminable weeks for a reply. As an agent, however, I know that slowness (on everything not absolutely time sensitive, such as a contract deadline) is a sign of an agent’s *competence.*
It’s important to remember that our job is not exactly customer service; it’s business, a business partnership with each of our clients. Which means our most important duty is not so much to make our clients “happy customers” in the moment so much as it is to invest meaningful expertise in order to give them the best chance at industry success. What that looks like is generally not emails. It generally involves dozens to hundreds of uncertain, iterative editorial development on both of our parts over the course of many, many months. And the mindfuck is that we can never be certain how long that will take, or what it will take. Sometimes it involves many drafts. Sometimes it involves something completely outside the scope of our work, such as the client releasing their white knuckle grip on their drafts and ending a problematic relationship or gig that’s triggering perfectionist, controlling, art-killing impulses. And this is all very hard to communicate around, especially if we need to prioritize our time in the hard thinking vs communicating. Again, it’s our duty as your business partner to prioritize this.
In an ideal world, agents could articulate this up front. But it’s not always possible. It’s cool to find an agent who CAN articulate this up front if you need that emotionally. But if you take nothing else away from this, trust me on one thing: you do not want an agent who treats a proposal like an assembly line product or open IT repair ticket. The work is a lot more amporpjous than that.
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!