1000 Literary Agents

I couldn't resist sharing:

The boss is in Acapulco till February or March, and he left me in charge till his return.

I am not going to remove the listing.

The listing does not contain any copyrighted information--and you know it, unless you know nothing about copyrights. The listing contains only publicly available information or fair-use snippets.

You called at 2:05 A.M.. At about the same time, you sent the same email message from the contact page many times. Obviously, you have your panties in a knot. You can't tell me that you do ordinary business at 2:05 A.M.. I think you were having a snit fit. Put away your dog-eared copy of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, get off the toilet, and calm down.

Generally, literary agents are pea-brained, teeny-weeny, anally retentive, third-grade microcephalic morons who can't write or think worth a cat's turd. They use the equivalents of Cliffs Notes to judge the writings and intellects of others--because their own minds can't encompass anything larger than a short note. They think they are hot shit on golden platters, though they are cold turds on paper plates. I am sure that none of this applies to you--I am mentioning these literary-agent traits only to clarify why I am not disposed to react "kindly" to an agent's rudeness.

Perhaps later, when I have forgotten your rudeness, I will emend the listing to say that you do not accept queries. In the meantime, you should quit pestering me about this tempest in a teapot that is stirring and intoxicating you.

For Christ's sake--or, more likely, Yahweh's--don't worry about the appearance of publicly available information on the Internet.

Shalom,

Kim Servasso

Last night, I discovered this site had a listing for my firm. It still had me in NYC, even though I haven't lived in NYC since May 2006. I went to their contact page and tried to send an email. It kept bringing me back to the same page, as though my email was not sent. I tried to call and get a fax number, but there was none. I went to betterwhois and tracked down another email address and sent the email quoted above as being in the PDF. I then got the response I did from Ms. Servasso. 1000literaryagents.com is another one of those aggregators and apparently not even a very good one, given how out-of-date their information is. But that an employee would respond to a reasonable and professional request in such a manner as this goes to show you what agents are up against in trying to be sure authors are getting good information.

Z

Personally, I find the email anti-Semitic, not to mention obnoxious and grossly unprofessional.

As for policing, Jim, is it your feeling that I should allow them to post incorrect information about me and my firm, including an out-of-date mailing address, so that authors are misled about what I'm looking for and told to send it someplace I no longer live? And if they find the correct address--when the post office returns their mail--but still have incorrect information about what I'm looking for, will you be paying me for my time in reading all of those useless queries?

I "police" the internet a couple of times a year to catch sites like this and ask them to remove my information because I don't have the time to notify a dozen websites every time I change what I want. Meanwhile, none of those sites has the specificity to describe what I want. They say fantasy when I want very specific types of fantasy. They say women’s fiction when I want only certain kinds of women’s fiction, not all women’s fiction.

In the end, sites like this cost authors money because authors waste thousands of dollars every year printing and mailing queries or submissions off to agents based on out-of-date or incorrect information. This also wastes agents’ valuable time, processing useless queries, that could be better spent reading the queries of those used a primary, rather than secondary, resource. Rather than chastising me, you should be thanking me for caring and wishing that other agents put in the effort, IMHO.

Z