4. 'Submitting with the enemy'

Anne Mini's Author, Author! webiste suggest that:

"overeager writers overstep the bounds of common courtesy all the time - and, as I can tell you from direct personal experience, it's not easy being the first personal contact a writer has with the industry: one tends to be treated less as a person than as a door or a ladder. And no one, however famous or powerful, likes that."

Anne's example focusses on other authors (as in using them to get to agents etc) but the principle applies to agents. They ARE often the first contact point between writers and the industry. It IS easy to think of them as a step-ladder or an obstacle. Or an adversary. You cannot, CANNOT let that kind of attitudinal short-sightedness come through in your pitch.

Recognise that the author/agent relationship is symbiotic, neither adversarial or one-way. They are in the same industry as you are. Your job is to write it. Their job is to sell it. As such, the work you present them is nothing (at first) but a business opportunity. If they fail to exude gratitude at seeing your work its because they see so many hundreds in a month they simply don't have time to gush. And so dealing with an agent can be (at first) a sparse, bare-bones experience. That is not always a true reflection of the agent concerned and shouldn't encourage you to start dealing with agents in a cold, bare-bones fashion. There is no excuse for being abrupt or far-sighted with agents simply because they happen to be your 20th submission. It is not their fault that 19 before them declined to pick up your work.

The agent-securing process is an obstacle (but not insurmountable). The agent themselves are a human being who work in a sliver of the industry that is quite brutal and they would be treated as the enemy every day of the week. Don't let your submission reinforce that stereotype.

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