How to have difficult career-related conversations without sounding like a huge dick

Complaining, requesting, reminding, accepting, apologizing, checking in, backing out, saying no, and other crucial book publishing diplomacy skills.

If you work with, in, or for the publishing industry, you’ve got to have difficult conversations every day.

They’re unavoidable. LE SIGH.

All of us in book publishing spend time rejecting and getting rejected. We agitate for responses while agonizing about the dozens of responses we owe. We invoice for money. We invoice again. We wonder how we are ever g…