IMHO, this debate should be deleted. Although the debate contains useful information for writers searching for an agent, the negatives, in the form of too much information, outweigh that positives. It made me feel . . . kinda icky.
I disagree. I can read all kinds of useful and telling things in the posts you think are TMI. The larger my sample, the more I can see.
Odd fact about conventional publishing: it speaks a distinctive language that's pretty much impossible to get right if you haven't worked in the industry, and has subdialects that are equally hard to fake. To my ear, Priceless rings like silver. In her posts I hear the voice of an editor and small publisher. But in Tom Dark, I hear a frustrated and unsuccessful writer saying the kind of dumb things which frustrated and unsuccessful writers often say -- and which real agents almost
never say.
So let the thread run on. It just gets more interesting.
Oh good gracious. Now I know Tom is the author of this mess.
Yup.
The word choice, habitual punctuation, overall length, and spacing of paragraph breaks are also telling. Ditto, framing this discussion as "a debate," which it isn't. Ditto, the line about
anything "not selling unless it's by a celebrity," which I would never expect to hear from a real agent. As I said to Repunzel, that's a clear indication that we're looking at a frustrated writer.
But for me, the big telltale is the extraordinary indiscretion "Tom Dark" and "C LeBaigue" have displayed here. Real agents are a closemouthed bunch. Tom Dark is out of control. I have real trouble believing that a functional agency has
two employees who not only shoot off their mouths in an unagentish way, but shoot them off in the
same way.
Your story in
comment 18 is scary. Why would a real agent do that? Rejections are rejections. You're not so specialized that you're the only imaginable publisher for the book.
In
comment 21, Old Hack (who isn't earless) said:
I Googled the name of the agency, and of the agent, and found this page (scroll down to find a reference to the agency), which led me to this.
Those two pieces are remarkably similar and I'd say they were probably written by the same person. And that's not a person I'd want representing me. But then, I prefer not to be scared by my agent.
I too find them remarkably similar, though it's not a big enough sample for me to say whether they're the same person. Still, a real agent ought not write things that are even similar to that first piece. (And what would they be doing on that site anyway? As was
once said in Neil Gaiman's weblog, "The more you know, the more errors you see in the "Everyone Who's Anyone" website.")
I doubt Old Hack and I were scared by the same passages. This is the paragraph of Tom Dark's that terrified me:
My biggest failure to date is called "the 'zine," which I conceived and coined in 1985. I commandeered a somewhat immature engineer in Wisconsin to print it up on his copy machine, using whatever he liked out of my letters. He'd print up 250 copies a month. I'd stick them in a news stall at Sather Gate, UC Berkeley. Kids snapped them up and started imitating them right away, eventually, into the millions. I haven't checked a dictionary to see if "'zine" is now listed as a word. Anyway I expected it'd be imitated, and there we have it.
Is he stupid, an astounding narcissist, or just batsh*t crazy?
Zine is short for
fanzine. The word was invented by Louis Russell Chauvenet in October 1940. (Citations:
Wikipedia. The
OED.
Fancyclopedia I (1944).
Fancyclopedia II (1959).) Science fiction fandom had been using
zine as an informal short form for decades before the wave of
punk zines picked up the term in the 1970s. By the early 1980s,
Mike Gunderloy was broadcasting the concept and term to the world. As for Tom Dark's claim that he conceived of and published the first fanzine, any ful kno that was Ray Palmer's
The Comet, in 1930.
If he cares about the issue so much, why hasn't he looked any of that up?
The episode may explain why TD is a failed writer, but if so, it's not for the reasons he thinks.
The story about Tom Dark claiming to have gotten an editor fired at Bantam is only fractionally less damning. A minor employee of a minor agency got an editor fired for rejecting a book about the application of Plato's philosophy to physical fitness? WTF? NFW.
Editors decline to read books all the time. It's a basic editorial skill. Furthermore, every editor who's been around for a while can tell you stories about properties they rejected which someone else successfully published. It happens. You have to make the best judgements you can and live with the results. No competent publisher would fire an editor for guessing wrong on a minor book. And as for the specific book in question, if it was so hot that Bantam fired an editor for passing on it, why isn't Bantam's top management now trying to buy it?
I can dimly imagine an editor getting fired over the book if it were the occasion of the latest instance of a pattern of objectionable behavior -- say, telling detectable lies to established agents. In that case, the editor would have been fired on the grounds that after multiple warnings, he or she was still misbehaving in the same way. That wouldn't be a demonstration of Tom Dark's clout. Neither would it be something an agent brags about to a client. If they mentioned it at all, it would be with regret: "Sorry; my mistake. I didn't know she was like that when I submitted your manuscript to her. It's cost us a lot of delay." Knowing stuff like that about editors is one of the things agents are for.
But let's be maximally generous and suppose that the firing happened just as Tom Dark said. In that case, it would still be nothing to brag about. He'd have screwed over all the other authors that editor was handling, and gotten nothing of benefit for that client. If the editor who had that submission left Bantam, it's probably because Bantam is a shrinking imprint within Random House, and they've been laying people off.
Finally, if my agent were going around bragging about getting editors fired, I'd get a new agent. Being able to work constructively with editors is part of their job
One more thing. As you said concerning editors:
If there is a problem, such as this, we tend to do our due diligence and see where problem lies. We ask around and talk to other agents and such. We don't take anyone's word at face value. Authors should never be afraid to speak out, and I resent the implication that they should keep quiet in order to save their reputation. Silence is how abusive situations prosper.
I couldn't agree more. Tom Dark and his sockpuppets may wish they could get this thread deleted, but they can kiss that wish goodbye. It's information of legitimate interest to us all.
