That's a 🚩🚩red flag🚩🚩: how literary agents and editors scan for signs of future trouble in our working relationships (and you can learn to do the same)

The warning signs of Future Drama are usually subtle, but they're there. Learn to spot them and save yourself the long-term misery of a mismatch.

This is a post on how to spot early warning signs of publishing relationship dysfunction: between agent and author, author and editor, editor and agent, and so on.

Dysfunctional work relationships drain us of energy, serenity, focus, and time. And in a field as volatile as Contemporary Book Publishing, none of us have those extra spoons to spare.

Before we start talking about HOW we save we save our spoons, however, I want us to be clear on two things. First: we’re talking about dysfunctional relationships today, not dysfunctional people. Relationships between essentially well-meaning, normal people become dysfunctional all the time. And it’s not necessarily an indication that one or both parties involved is capital-b Bad.

Second: dysfunction and abuse are two different things here. When I say “dysfunction,” I’m referring to the way certain individuals’ personality types, emotionality, communication and attachment styles, frankness or fawning, etc. interact to produce feelings of anxiety, anger, avoidance, doubt, and/or distress in one or both parties.

Abuse is what we call the more pathetic range of behaviors a person might exhibit in response to dysfunction. Abusers take the fight-or-flight feelings of relationship dysfunction and use them to justify hurting, belittling, controlling, gaslighting, and/or surveilling the other party.

Abuse isn’t a dynamic; it’s a one-party choice. A CHOICE. And if you yourself react to dysfunction with abusive behavior, that’s 100% on you.

Grow the fuck up.

Dysfunction, however, is a dynamic. It’s a dynamic that comes up between people organically, usually not by choice and often by complete surprise.

THAT is what we are primarily talking about today: how to protect yourself from the surprise and disappointment of dysfunction. In publishing, it’s a working relationship with an author, agent, or editor in which you find yourself feeling chronically angry, anxious, upset, and/or strung out for reasons you might or might not be able to identify.

This of course includes abusive relationships, but the vast majority of dysfunctional relationships in publishing AREN’T abusive. They’re just draining, robbing us of energy, focus, income, and time.

In order to avoid the drainage of a dysfunctional relationship, you’ll need to cultivate self-awareness and self-love.

Self-awareness is important because you need to identify what kind of behavior from other people makes you cuckoo. You can’t avoid what you can’t recognize.

Self-love is a necessary prerequisite to belief that your emotional needs and comfort are valuable and and important. People who love themselves know that it’s not “weak” if you refuse to let people immiserate you just because they don’t empathize with or care about your misery.

Of course, not everybody has the physical or financial freedom to opt out of dysfunction.

That’s real, and it sucks.

In book publishing, however, there is—most of the time, not always—an unusually generous leeway relative to other industries and relationships for Ye Olde Opt-Out. So much of what we do here happens on spec and for pathetic money anyway, you know?

Okay, enough with the preambles and onto the red flags.

Here are some early warning signs of dysfunction.

In author queries, “love your work” emails from editors and agents, and other correspondence about potential business collaboration, consider ye olde cut and run if you encounter any of the following: