Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Is your agent still alive?

At least two clients, and two prospective clients are now eligible for the Emily Post Good Manners Award of 2007.

Two days ago in a fit of fire and brimstone I called a publisher with whom I'm cooking up a deal. I'd emailed them two weeks ago and hadn't heard back. I was ready to be briskly annoyed.

oops.
They had replied.
Yup...caught in my spam filter.

The briskly annoyed cloak lives on their coat rack now not mine.

I had a bit of down time today waiting for meeting to start so I hauled out the Hazmat suit and dove into my google slush.

17 emails from people I wanted to talk to. 2 clients. 2 prospective clients. One publisher.

I called most of them and said 'yikes' . I'm hoping the clients weren't shopping for funeral wreaths thinking I was dead. Everyone was very nice. Even the client who sent me a full manuscript and had heard NADA for three weeks.

Lesson learned I hope--check the spam filter at least once a week. And a reminder to everyone I'm in correspondence with (ie not the folks in the query pile)..if you don't hear from me, I'm not dead, all evidence to the contrary.

Now, back to reading that manuscript.

3 comments:

Sha'el, Princess of Pixies said...

I always check my Spam filter. The "ooo we like this, sign here" email from my soon to be publisher went to my Spam filter. Just think ... if I hadn't checked ... I'd still be pouting.

Eric said...

I go through my spam filter with some degree of frequency. Sometimes there's some great stuff in there, some of the spam I mean. Some of it might even come in handy. I'm currently trying to think up a title for a book and I might get some ideas. Here's just a few subject lines from spam emails:

Impudent statesmanship
Sadist assembly line
Manliness gratuitous
Good Book refugee
Very Woof
Realism sheepish
Protagonist detention

Sandra Cormier said...

I set up my mail with rules, so if I get one that says 'query' or 'submission' in the subject line, it'll pop into my inbox, even if it was tagged as spam. Good thing, or I would have missed that request for a full from an editor.