[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

The wonder, following up on your last post (the one after this) is that you had to TELL her to part company. Of course, I do understand that it's not simple to find an agent that will rep you and her reluctance to let go would be enormous.

Oh, she realized she needed to. She was just unsure about how one did it. (I thought a polite and professional but firm "This is not working out because we cannot agree on what I am trying to do. I formally sever my relationship with you as my agent, and will look elsewhere." was the way to go.)

It's more complicated when there is an existing personal relationship. Another old friend is a former Executive Editor at a trade house who is now a full time freelancer and book doctor. Her agent was also a personal friend, and represented authors whose books she bought as an editor. They parted company when her agent wasn't happy with a new book she was working on. It was too much of a departure from what she had done previously that the agent had been able to sell. The agent wanted more of the same. She bit the bullet and found a new agent who was not only willing to represent the work in progress, but represented it successfully enough that it went to auction. She said the money wasn't enough to change her life, but was better than previous advances, and having the freedom to stretch out and do things different from what she had been doing was wonderful.

I have no idea whether she and her former agent are speaking to each other these days. (It's not the sort of question one asks.) But it's a risk you take when you have a business relationship with a friend, and may be faced with a choice between whether the business of the friendship is more important. (I know an assortment of folks I like, respect, and consider friends who I wouldn't enter into a business relationship with because it would end badly.)

Yeah. Book shepherds "take the money and run," fairly often. Not all the time, but enough where even hearing the phrase tempts me to be immature and eye roll.

Any sort of relationship like that has that potential. Musician George Clinton, founder and leader of the black bands Parliament and Funkadelic (and later music director for one of the late night TV shows) got interviewed and was asked why he had taken control of his business dealings as well as his music. He said "I didn't deal with the business end because I thought I had people to do that for me. Then I reached into my pocket and discovered I didn;t have any money, and decides I had to do that myself." Billy Joel in an interview years back talked about what he would have done differently when he was starting out if he had known what he does now. He said "The first thing I'd do is get a lawyer. Then I'd get another lawyer to watch the first one !"

The guy I'm talking about, Mr. "Editorial Differences," never presented as a Shepherd; he said he was a "publisher" and had been, yadda. Our first book with him was a damned nightmare. He knew NOTHING. I mean...publisher? He was worse than half the new authors we get.

He believed his own fantasies.

For example, he asked us to "make an index." I gave him the list of index-creation options and he seemed thunderstruck that it would cost money to have an indexer read the book and create the index. He said "I thought you just pushed a button in Word and it made it for you." What, through that 25th-Century artificial intelligence, you mean? (Speaking of bloody eye rolls...).

I have watched that sort of thing for years. AT&T Bell Laboratories' Unix OS included a utility to generate indexes. But it wasn't "Press a button" It required what it would index to be in a specific format it was programmed to work with, and you had to know how to use it.

Sure, I get that people who don't work in publishing of any kind, business or media, mightn't know that it takes a PERSON to make an index, but someone who claimed to be a publisher? What the holy frack? You push a button and magic happens?

"If you know better, you are lying to me. If you don't know better, you are lying to yourself. In either case, go away!"
______
Dennis