Hi everyone,
I woke up today feeling incredibly guilty about my full inbox and slow response times and decided to explain why everything has been getting slower. On my end for sure, but I think for everyone too. I mean, we all know why — more people want to be published and the industry has been getting increasingly complex and difficult to navigate so everything takes more work and we all just lack time.
I thought I’d give you a snapshot of my inbox to show you the actual numbers and also why I think that, while deeply frustrating, demanding faster response times may not be a good thing. If anything, we should slow things down more.
Let me walk you through my inbox (please don’t judge). I have three for the agency which I look at (though I have recently passed ownership of the info@ one to my colleague!!).
I use my inbox as a to do list and everything in the inbox itself requires me responding or doing something (and then responding). That can be taking two hours to research something, a week to edit or two seconds to log. Every email I receive that is an FYI or has been dealt with gets filed in its appropriate folder or deleted. I will read an email that comes in more or less when it comes in, but it then joins a massive priority triage system that only makes sense in my brain. I have a Focused section for every day business emails and an Other one for newsletters / notifications / non-clients.
I currently have 198 emails in my ‘Focused’ inbox which makes me break out in hives just thinking about it. These are emails I have triaged already so I do know I need to deal with them (or I’m waiting for an answer to fully deal with it). (Don’t ask me how long some of them have been in there, I can’t bear to look.) Then I have 389 emails in my ‘Other’ inbox which has industry newsletters for me to read (and log editors moves or publishing news), google docs notifications of edits made by my clients which I need to review, google alerts for coverage on my clients, and submissions or full manuscripts which have come to me either through referral, or Substack or which I’m looking at as a favour. The info@ inbox has 50 emails on it that need to be replied to as well.
Then we get on to the submissions inbox. The way I deal with my submissions (and yes, I deal with all of them myself) is through a two-step triage system. First I scan the letter and if it isn’t something I represent (children’s books, gritty crime, historical fiction, romance) or if it’s something I’m not keen on, I will put in a ‘To Reject folder’ to email back at a later stage. Then all the ones I need to read (and engage with fully) stay in the inbox. My submissions inbox has 747 emails in the To Reject folder — I’ve assessed them but haven’t had time to email back yet. I will usually do them in chunks when I have a minute (sorry). The inbox itself has 319 email submissions. 177 of them arrived in the past month or so which I haven’t opened yet. The rest of them (yup, all 142 of them), I represent the genre, I like the pitch and I just need to take the time to properly assess them with a quiet brain to see if I am the right agent for them. I wish I could speed up this process but the only thing it needs is a quiet functioning brain which I don’t often have because of everything else.
Unfortunately, my job isn’t emails only. The bulk of my job involves editing, writing pitches, meeting editors and authors, contracts, invoices, payments, submitting (which does involve SOME emailing!!) so it’s not like I’m not trying to get to the bottom of it. It’s just that every week a new wave comes, I have offers/auctions to work on, or a crisis hits I need to deal with. And I COULD close submissions fully, or pass on everything in one go, or stop sending rejection emails. But I do think it’s respectful to take the time to send a rejection email (even if a form rejection email) for someone who has taken the time to submit.
It’s also that I’ve been having to step in to do a lot more things which aren’t necessarily my job — publicity and marketing, trouble-shooting, etc. — and I am often having to deal with the constant staff changes on the publishers’ side.
That means that the ghosting that happens or the long response times, are not (on my end at least) that I don’t care or don’t want to read. It’s also not that you are not a priority — a lot of my inbox is for priorities that should all have been done yesterday if only I’d had the time. The odds are that I just haven’t gotten to it yet. And we all face ghosting from every other part of the industry, we are all essentially drowning.
I want to be able to fully engage when I look at an author and a submission I like the sound of and I need my whole brain for that, which seems in short supply these days. And it’s the same for every editor ghosting me — a lot of the time, a decision just hasn’t been made.
I thoroughly reject this need to optimise every aspect of the publishing process — to be a good agent, I also need time to think, time to research, time to transition from one book to the next. We are not machines. We need to carve out more space for publishing people to have time that isn’t filled with meetings or undoable to do lists. So yes, more staff are definitely needed but it doesn’t look like this is the direction publishers are going… It isn’t healthy for employees and I think it is also making the industry worse.
I personally think that snapshot decisions only favour writers who have the ‘right’ background, the ‘right’ connections and write the ‘right’ things. There is a reason there have been huge steps back in inclusion in publishing, lack of time has made people prioritise what they know is easy.1 This has led to commissioning which is risk-averse and samey which is a real shame. I don’t think it’s what people are craving and I don’t think this is going to help book sales get out of their slump. So maybe, instead of trying to find ways to optimise publishing as it is now cough AI cough we should actually look at the whole process and slow it down a wee bit2.
You will ask me why I took the time to write this post and not tackle the aforementioned mountain of work… the answer is guilt. And I feel this works as a general apology to everyone because all this to say, I know I didn’t reply to your email yet, but it’s on the list, I promise!
Until next time,
Caro
As a deeply contrary person who accidentally specialises in doing things which are inconvenient, unpopular and hard, I cannot emphasise how much I will need someone to stop me if I ever do choose the easy road as a first option.
And I hear those of you who are published and find it a glacially slow industry but from experience, there is so much time within the publishing calendar where nothing is done and manuscripts just wait to hit their assigned times in the critical path for things to get done.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.