Do you REALLY want that kind of agent?

Hard truths about the industry support you want vs. what you might actually need.

I’m still cringing over something I read on r/pubtips the other day.

An author recounted an experience that was excruciating for them and painfully familiar for me.

Their story went like this:

1. The author and their agent submitted a novel to editors.

2. Only one editor expressed interest in the novel, but the interest was enthusiastic.

3. Author and agent thence scheduled a meet and greet with this person.

4. Prior to the meeting, the agent set a closing date for the project. That is: they sent a deadline for final offers to the pursuing editor and presumably everyone else on the list who hadn’t responded yet.

5. The editor told the agent they would “absolutely” offer by this date. The agent passed the good news along to the author. Yay!

6. Everything went well in the meeting—until the last minute, when the editor casually mentioned that aaaactually, they hadn’t yet brought the book to ed board.

   Still, they said they were “sure” that their colleagues would sign off on it.

7. :Ron Howard voice: Their colleagues did not sign off on it.

8. The agent’s closing date thus came and went with zero offers, leaving the entire submissions round dead in the water.

9. The author was humiliated—so much so that they created a special alt to post the story on Reddit, loath to stigmatize themselves on main.

10. The agent reacted with performative outrage: never in my career, would never have scheduled a meeting if I’d known, how dare that editor, and so on.

I cringed for the author, of course, but also because of the agent praise I read in the comments.

Inexact quotes include:

Fuck that editor, but your agent is a rock star.

Sounds like your agent managed expectations really well.

Great to have an agent like that in your corner!!

The author vociferously agreed.

Yeah……………no. If the situation indeed unfolded as described, I’m afraid the agent handled it as poorly as the editor did. Worse, actually: on the agent’s side, I count several eager-beaver people-pleasing mismanagement errors; on the editor’s, just one.

The agent acted like a “rock star” only in the sense that in a moment of professional frailty, they chose ego defense over scrupulous accountability. And, I mean, whomst among us. This is a mild and eminently relatable sin.

Still, though: it doesn’t exactly merit a standing ovation, and I’m unsettled by all those authors on Reddit who think it does.

For me, this isn’t just a story of one agent’s mild screw-up; it’s an example of a common and quietly ruinous pattern in publishing, one that hobbles our careers and compounds financial and interpersonal strain on a near-daily basis. (And when I say “our,” I mean all of us: authors, agents, editors, everyone.)

At its core is a confusion so common it almost goes unnoticed: the blurring of our psychological needs with our professional ones.

We’ll get into what I mean by that in a moment—but first, in case you’re curious:

Here’s what the agent in this story did wrong.