Comparison isn't always the thief of joy
In book publishing as in life, comparing yourself to others can be helpful. You just have to know when and how to work with this tool--and have the discipline not to use it for self-harm.
Last week, I did a thing I long ago swore I would stop doing.
It is such a stupid thing. I am so embarrassed.
I worry that you’ll all think less of me when I tell you what it is.
Oh my God, the very fact that I did it feels irreconcilable with having any professional dignity or status whatsoever.
But I did it, so I might as well tell you.
Reader: I checked my “dealmaker” rankings in PublishersMarketplace.
Worse: I cared about my “dealmaker” rankings in PublishersMarketplace.
UGH.
In case you have no idea what I’m talking about: PublishersMarketplace is the town square of the book publishing industry. It’s where agents, editors, scouts, and rights-acquisitions types (e.g. Hollywood producers) go to see who’s selling what to whom. PM sends out daily deal-announcement digests via email and breaks most of the big news in publishing, e.g. Bob Miller’s departure from Flatiron yesterday.
PM is where authors get those “I did a thing” deal announcement screenshots you see on social media, e.g. this one, which is my latest, smug chuckle, yay Rebecca:
Were you actually on PublishersMarketplace right now, you’d be able to click the hyperlink over my name (or Emily’s, or Neon’s) and see our status on PM’s ever-changing list of dealmaker rankings. Here are mine, for example, relative to other literary agents:
These numbers are complete bullshit.
I cannot emphasize this enough: they mean nothing. I suspect PM calculates them algorithmically based on the total number of self-categorized deals one has reported to their site within the past year. As a result, they are gameable. They also favor quantity over quality.
There is so SO much priceless information available on PM, but it does not include these lists. There is no correlation between who constitutes a “top agent” on them and who is actually a top agent by industry reputation, income, access, taste, or prestige.
There’s also no way PM’s staff are unaware of this, which means that for them, the value of these rankings must reside elsewhere. I believe it’s is the same as that of the niche category bestseller lists on Amazon: driving engagement and free promotion for the host site via the brags and neuroses of the people named on them. But who knows. I could be wrong.
Quick tangent: please keep the above in mind if you’re a querying author.
If you see an agent bragging in public about how they’re a top-ranked agent on PM, do not be impressed—be concerned. You’re looking at someone who is sharing an impressive-sounding statistic knowing full well that only the naive will be impressed. That’s someone trying especially hard to attract the naive. I for one would find that discomfiting.
Anyway —
I know what’s up with these lists. I know they mean nothing.
I know.
AND YET!!!! AND YET I STILL CARE ABOUT MY RANKING ON THEM!!!!!!
Try as I might to act otherwise, I am a morbidly, white-knucklingly competitive person, especially when it comes to intellectual achievements.
What can I say? Going to a highly competitive college prep school broke me forever. I am a 39-year-old woman who can still recount in granular detail not just what I got on the SAT but on all of my SAT II subject tests. Had I no tact whatsoever, I could also tell you my high school, college, and grad school GPAs down to the hundredth of a point.
I am more or less always ready to type out my resume from scratch, and there is no external measurement of me whatsoever—past, present, or future—about which I do not obsess at least occasionally. Including my dealmaker ranking in PM.
BARF. HELP. WHY.
Last week, I checked my dealmaker page and then fretted about it for longer than I care to admit.
I checked to see where I was in those stupid rankings. I checked the underlying data that established my place in the rankings: i.e., how many deal reports I had posted in the past 12 months. Then I got worked up about the fact that I had only posted 7. Seven book deals.
I hold myself to the arbitrary standard of selling about one book a month. That would be twelve deals in a year. And seven is five deals short of twelve.
Only seven? What was I doing with my time? I had at least a couple of deals that weren’t reported, right? Right?! Or maybe I was just losing my edge?!
OH GOD, WHAT IF I WAS LOSING MY EDGE? WHAT IF WAS I SINKING FOREVER INTO OBSCURITY???1
You want to know what got me out of this achievement-addict shame spiral?
Comparison, that’s what. (Comparison: the cause of and solution to all of my professional misery.)
Here’s what I did—oh, God, the embarrassment continues: I looked up five or so competing agents whose work I hold in particularly high esteem. All of these people absolutely own at their jobs. All of them are by any sane measure “top-tier” in terms of their record and reputation; were I an author, I would die to be represented by any of them.
You want to know what these agents’ twelve-month reported sales totals were? Five, eight, three, seven…and twenty-two, from a fiction agent who is so preposterously and famously productive that I couldn’t even be upset, I was just in awe.2
Anyway: most of my heroes were right there with me in the single digits. I was keeping pace with my pack. And knowing that was such a relief. It gave me the peace to stop dissociating and pay attention to work that actually mattered.
See, that’s the thing:
No matter what Teddy Roosevelt might have told you, comparison isn’t always the thief of joy.
Comparison is just a tool—an ethically neutral tool. You can use it to build closer relationships, deeper self-security, and a sturdy sense of belonging just as well as you can use it to hit yourself in the face. This is true inside and out of the publishing industry, and it’s true no matter who you are.
The trick is in knowing how and when to use the tool—and in having the discipline to hit yourself in the face with it as little as possible, no matter how much self-flagellation your subconscious happens to be cheering you toward today.