Dear Betsy Lerner:I have three short questions:
#1. If I have sent my entire manuscript, or the required excerpts–Chapter 1, etc., to an agent via email, per his or her request, and I haven’t heard back yet…how long should I wait before sending a followup?
#2. If I receive a positive rejection via email from an agent who has read my work, should I send them a thank you for having read it? It feels like that’s just good manners.
#3. If I sent an email query to my absolute number 1 choice for an agent following his/her instructions to a T, and didn’t hear back, even automatically, should I try again?
NAME WITHHELD
Dear Three Questions: These aren’t really questions so much as matters to midrash as great biblical scholars have done for years not unlike: Can I wear white after Labor Day and if so under what circumstances? If I bring a baby gift to a shower, do I need to send another when the baby is born? Do I tip the hairdresser if she owns the shop? In other words, these are questions of protocol and what makes them interesting is that they can be endlessly debated. All writers sweat submission protocol as they should–it’s that fraught moment when you are testing your work against the market, albeit the agent market. And unless you’ve been writing for magazines, you are probably new and terrified. It’s like being fourteen and wondering if you’ll know how to kiss right. Obviously, there are no hard and fast rules, But since you asked:
1. I would follow up in three weeks.
2. I’m always in favor of good manners, especially if the agent has given you real feedback.
3. Yes, try again. Always try for for what you want.
Your thoughts, advice, experiences??
Filed under: Agent, Protocol, Query | 26 Comments »
I was on a panel tonight at The College of Holy Cross. The moderator asked me what I was doing when I was college age and in the few years after. Fucking up, battling depression, gaining and losing tons of weight, having bad affairs, eating cheeseburgers, smoking Marlboro’s, wearing cowboy boots, going to poetry readings, sending mental signals to guys I liked in my literature classes, failing typing tests at major publishing houses, frequenting coffee houses and haunting book stores, alienating friends, stock piling Percodan, and writing bad poems. I know, I’m an inspiration.
If you’ve been checking in here at Forest for the Trees, you know that I am a devout atheist. Today, while walking to the subway, I asked myself how I could be so sure that there’s nothing. In a world of such obvious uncertainty, where did I get my certitude? THen I had the realization that it makes me feel good. And I think it’s why I believe so deeply in art, that it exists in the face of nothing. We need to make food, clothes, shelter, movies. But art, poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, music. It comes into the world like a child, unbidden. Some people believe that they create to honor god, or glorify god. When I look at a Blake I get that. But I’ve also had a similar experience walking through Serra’s tilted walls.
I gave another informational interview today to a young woman about to graduate college. I was super distracted the entire time, wondering if I could avoid the bread basket at lunch, if a certain author was going to blurb a book, how annoyed I was to get a one word response (“Thanks”) to a three page editorial letter. I was looking at her resume and it all looked good (Swahili! Varsity Tennis! Poetry Prize!), but my mind was on whether I could take the week between Christmas and New Years and finish my fucking screenplay, if I left the money on the kitchen table for Pam our dog walker, if I was ever going to finish vetting the contract on my desk, and get the twenty galleys off on my desk to my foreign agents. Or was I going to die under a pile of manuscripts, or crushed under an Ikea bookcase, or crushed under the huge wheel of the M5, or electrocuted by a live man hole, or go into anaphylaxis as a result of eating a pine nut and die?
Last week at our agents’ lunch, we bid farewell to one of our founding members who is leaving the agenting fold. It’s been a decade since we first got together to commiserate and offer support. What unifies our group is that we were all editors, now agents. I think it’s a very strong bond because we all take an editorial approach to our work, for better or worse. In any case, someone asked our departing agent what he was going to miss most. “Being a writer’s first reader.” We all mewed with identification. It is a sacred position to hold.
Dear Betsy-
Today’s Style section in the NYT devoted a great deal of space to group of highly educated, underemployed kids who started their own on-line magazine called 
Making a magazine is the young writer’s equivalent of putting on a play. It’s that fantastic time in your life when you are nothing and everything, when you have to take what you want, create what you don’t have, band together or die. Algonquin Round Table, Bloomsbury Group, Merry Pranksters, THe Lost Generation, Big Wednesday. What is the point of being a writer if not gathering with other like minded assholes at a bar or cafe and insisting on your superiority. Writers hate each other and need each other and, I believe, will better survive this impossible Darwinian struggle and the world’s general indifference if they have a place to go, a magazine to behold, and a respite from being so alone.
How do you roll?
Hello Ms Lerner
