It’s not you, it’s them

Oh dear.

Every now and then I get an email which is just so annoyingly familiar I want to scream.

In this case, a wonderful human – one of you, a Jericho client – wins a literary prize. The prize is for unpublished manuscripts and the major element of the prize is a publishing deal with an up and coming new publisher.

We will call our wonderful human Jacaranda Cappucino, or Jax for short. In my imagination, Jax is a woman with abundant black hair and always dramatic headgear. Today, she is wearing a red fedora with a pair of pheasant feathers in midnight blue.

And …

I advised Jax to get an agent, but for various reasons, she didn’t – including the fact that the competition rules were restrictive, so there wouldn’t be much room for contract negotiation, so in theory not much need of an agent.

And …

The competition rules were displayed on a website, but after the winner was announced, the website was changed and the rules were no longer posted and Jax could not longer see the rules by which she was bound.

And …

By the time I spoke to Jax about agents, she had actually been introduced to some, one of whom turned her down rather cattily. (And, jeepers, turn someone down if you will, but why cattily? So she didn’t feel great about agents, and I get why.

And …

The book was published. Yay! Jax began work on the next. That next book needed a new contract. She pushed back on reversion rights and got language that she wanted in there. (Yay #2, and well done, Jax.) She also wanted the publisher to modify its language on optioning the next book. (So a lot of contracts mean that the publisher of your contracted book has a right of first refusal over the next book you write. That can be a venomous and destructive little clause, so you need to be careful with it.) The publisher would not modify its option language, but it was worth a go.

And …

Around this time, more agents were in touch with Jax. One agent talked to Jax and said, don’t worry about the option – if this publisher doesn’t take your next book, I can always place it elsewhere. They then apparently, and without consulting Jax first, rang the publisher and told them more or less the opposite.

And …

The book sold. It sold well. Or at least the publisher told Jax that they were ‘thrilled’ with sales. That was their word: thrilled. And thrilled is good, right? Except that after three months of working with Jax on Book #2, the publisher told her abruptly that they wouldn’t be publishing it after all. The publisher “struggled terribly to tell me this and preceded it by saying he wished I had an agent.”

And …

Look: Jax is doing the right thing. She’s writing another book. She’s been published once. She’ll do it again.

But also:

Why does this industry have to be so damn ungenerous to its authors? Why can’t its people simply be truthful? If you win a competition, why not make sure that the winner has a copy of its rules. If you’re an agent rejecting an author, why not do so without cattiness?  If you’re an agent, don’t say one thing to the author and another to the publisher. If you’re the publisher and you are pleased with sales of book #1 but cautious about book #2, why not say exactly that to the author and explain why?

The key here is the industry’s problematic ‘niceness’. The publisher ‘struggled terribly’ to give the author bad news. Don’t struggle. An investment banker doesn’t struggle. A market gardener doesn’t struggle. A plumber doesn’t struggle. Just tell the truth. And do so without personal charge.

This shouldn’t be hard, right? And yet stories like Jax’s are all too common.

It’s not you. It’s them.