Forget the YA novel that’s “The Road" meets "Deliverance:” Publishing Twitter is the true dystopia

A.k.a.: my hot take on that literary agent who tweeted the boneheaded thing on Sunday.

The first thing I will say is that I would have fired her, too, albeit probably not for the reasons you’re guessing.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though: have you heard about the blowup on Publishing Twitter this weekend? (I refuse to call it “Publishing X.”) Or are you too well-adjusted or something?

If you are too well-adjusted—ew—here’s what happened.

Once upon a time, there was an earlyish-career agent we’ll call “Mabel.”¹ The internet tells me that Mabel represents primarily middle grade and YA books, focusing on fantasy and horror.

On Sunday, Mabel made the mindboggling decision to tweet this:

Uh…write it for you…like the writer…who was querying you…wanted to do?

Yikes.

The resulting eruption was immediate, cataclysmic, and understandable. Authors were horrified: was Mabel seriously stealing some poor querier’s idea from the slush pile?!

Agents rushed to tweet that THEY weren’t idea-stealing lowlifes like her. Indie authors and editors crowed about how this was why smart people like them avoided the leech-infested waters of traditional publishing. Publishing podcasters promised very special episodes. Commentators commentated (ahem).

Rather quickly, Mabel realized the depth of doo-doo into which she had yeeted herself. First, she floundered with some weak clarifications in her replies: the querier hadn’t used those comp titles themselves; the actual query and idea weren’t strong enough for prime time. This mollified no one, so Mabel deleted her tweet, followed by her entire Twitter account.

It was already too late, though. Less than 24 hours later, Mabel’s agency fired her. They announced this development to the public via social media with a graphic one of them appears to have made on Canva. The graphic had a classy gray fade-out border. I watched all of this go down in real time, riveted and mouthbreathing, because I, too, am classy.

At one point, an aspiring author in my feed declared to no one in particular that this was why she had paid huge sums to register every copyright and trademark to her work that she possibly could. That way, if Mabels of the world insisted on Mabeling her, at least she could make them pay.

Reader: this the point at which I gave up and sank forehead-first into my keyboard. Who was I kidding? None of us were classy. None of us were escaping this unsmeared in at least a little bit of doo-doo.

In other words:

Everything about Mabel’s tweet is wrong and the reactions I saw were wrong and publishing Twitter is just wrong, wrong, wrong and OMG why can’t I just quit Twitter it’s all so exhausting.

Please let me explain.