Karen – You’re welcome.

Cindy – It’s not rude to get all the expectations out on the table up front; it is, in fact, good business policy. And the author-agent relationship is a BUSINESS one. It is as well to remind oneself of that periodically. You want to like the people you work with, but if they become your bestest friend ever, it can be exponentially more difficult to express even minor discontents (much less actually firing the person if that ends up being what’s needed). Most of the agents I’ve talked to expect to have a long conversation about this stuff before they take someone on, and it’s useful to talk it over periodically afterward, as situations change and expectations change with them.

If any of us do make it past the first hurdles and get to the point where an agent is deciding whether to take us on, is it considered bad form to ask said agent upfront about her agenting and submission philosophy and/or how she envisions the author-agent relationship developing over the long haul? And can we talk about what we’re hoping for career-wise and what we’re looking for in an agent, or is that considered rude (sort of like we’re putting the cart before the horse)?

I really love this post and think it’s such an important thing for us EWBWs to understand. Having the wrong agent can actually be worse than having no agent at all. That’s really hard to keep in the front of my mind but your post made so much sense to me that I think I have a much more solid grounding in reality now. Thanks so much for the insider’s look into the agent/writer partnership.

Regards
Karen

A couple of days ago I pre-ordered _Beyond the Great Barrier_ from Amazon.com. I received mail *today* that it had shipped.

Whaaaat?

Surely you only turned in your draft a week or so ago and are waiting for editor’s comments?

(Amazon’s description said, as it’s been saying for months, that the book would be available August 1. That’s next week.)

Are Amazon off their collective rocker? Or is it merely that the shipping department doesn’t talk to the order department? (I’ve worked in offices like that.)

Unless what just shipped is a piece of cardboard saying “Good for one book when the printers deliver it.” My family has done promissory notes at Christmas for years.

Or the printers use thiotimoline in their ink.

I really like your snakebite kit and bug spray analogy. It really got the point that you need to plan, and you need to know where you’re going across.

Oh, and it’s a good idea to think a bit about how you’d feel about firing your agent, too. A lot of people, me included, have a hard time firing someone (sometimes to the point of keeping an agent for YEARS longer than they know they should, just to avoid having to give the person the bad news). If this sounds like you, you ABSOLUTELY do not want to take the “I’ll take whoever I can get and then switch agents after a book or two” position. Even if you’re sure you could do it, you want to think about it; it’s harder than you might suspect to deal with someone for months or years and then tell them it’s not working for you.