What to do when something or someone in the publishing industry makes you really, really angry
Publishing is an enraging industry. If you’re in it, it’s inevitably going to enrage *you.* My thoughts on how to channel all that anger into personal and career growth vs. self-sabotage.
Of all the challenging emotions one must process in the normal course of an agent’s career—the euphoric high of a great book deal, the satisfaction of a finished proposal, the sadness of losing a beauty contest—I personally find the anger most challenging.
Depending on how you look at it, this makes me either fortunate or unfortunate. It’s unfortunate because publishing is an enraging industry. It is capricious and arbitrary; everything takes forever; no one sticks to their self-set deadlines. It’s full of underpaid, overworked people whose jobs often leave them feeling isolated and vulnerable. Add all of this together and you have a world in which people frequently try it with each other. Oh, God, do they ever try it.
It’s also fortunate because publishing is an enraging industry. Exposure therapy alert! So many opportunities to practice the healthy coping mechanisms I’ve learned over the years. So many chances to grow. So many to get that itty-bitty-bit closer to ego death, one mortifying life experience at a time. Goody.
Like many of you, I suspect, I am a recovering angerphobe.
When you grow up socialized as a woman, it rull hard to make it to adulthood with mature, developed anger management skills. Ditto if you occupy any kind of marginalized subject position and/or grew up in a household with caregivers who had trouble with anger themselves.
My client Soraya Chemaly wrote a whole, excellent book, Rage Becomes Her, about why this is the case. If you want to know more, you should check it out:
I for one am still on the journey to Healthy Personal Relationship with Anger, unless we’re talking righteous indignation on behalf of my clients or children. Anger in defense of others? That’s fine. Anger in defense of me? Aaack. Get me OUT of here.
The moment I spot my own anger on the horizon, I start to run like it’s fucking Mothra. Quick, tell a joke! Send a compliment! Do whatever the obnoxious person wants! Personal boundaries? THOSE DON’T MATTER WHEN YOU’RE FLEEING FOR YOUR LIFE, ANNA. TRAMPLE THEM UNDERFOOT.
Even more embarrassing is the fact that all of the above marks real growth for me. At least now—in my late thirties—I can consciously recognize and name my anger, even if my response impulses still need work. For more than 2/3 of my life, however, my phobia was wedged so deep in my subconscious that I couldn’t feel or name it at all.
Until I was about 32 years old, I usually “processed” my anger by projecting it. I’d obsessively worry if people were mad at me when in fact I was mad at them. Or I’d boil with shame, certain I deserved to roast in other people’s ire when what I in fact deserved—needed—was to acknowledge my own.
I had no idea I was angry in these moments. To figure that out in retrospect, I had to do considerable self-work. I also had to read Soraya’s book, which enumerates the myriad ways in which anger mutates into “safer” feelings inside women and marginalized people.
Whether they’re gently mocked, gaslit, disciplined, abused, fired, or incarcerated, most people in any kind of societal margin whatsoever experience a degree of traumatizing blowback nearly every time they express anger — starting when they’re toddlers. And so their brains come up with a way to protect them by processing the anger in disguise. Projection is just one example of what this can look like, says Soraya: there’s also depression, self-harm, eating disorders, migranes, TMJ, people-pleasing…and on and on.
I owe Soraya such a debt for bringing this existential key to the doorway of my psyche. I no longer project my anger now! …Most of the time!
But that doesn’t mean my struggles are solved. Not quite.
When you’re a recovering angerphobe, it’s twice as hard to handle angry communication at work as it would be otherwise.
Even if you can name and comfortably hold your own anger, it’s a tricky emotion to deal with on the job. Depending on the people, relative power positions, and cultures involved in whatever is making you angry, your expression of what you think is respectful, appropriate, proportionate emotion could land as whiny petulance, inert nothingburger, or relationship-destroying, permanent-ememy-making, nervous-breakdown-triggering napalm. Or anywhere in between.
I repeat: ack.
Seriously?
^If you’re asking that question, I bet you’re a white dude! (Feel free to call me out on my shit if I’m wrong about that.)
Yes, seriously. Let me talk you through a relatively mild example. This is a true story, although I’ve changed some details to have mercy on everyone involved who isn’t me, the Primary Bonehead.
A couple years back, I was about to start an auction. The client whose book I was auctioning had a clear favorite editor in the mix. The love seemed mutual: this editor had been sending me saber-rattling emails all week. I would be so honored to buy this for [imprint]. Please don’t take a preempt. That kind of thing.
On the morning of my auction, however, the editor got in touch to say she actually wasn’t bidding. This happens sometimes. Editors have to get their colleagues’ sign-off on any project they acquire, and it is not uncommon for an editor to be so in love with a project that it doesn’t even occur to them the colleagues might say “meh.” But sometimes they do, and, well, shit. Them’s the breaks.
What made me mad was not that this editor had to pass. No: it’s that she told me as much in a polite, generic pass email—one that read like she was responding to a submission she’d just gotten over the transom, not one for which she had been pitching aggressive and unqualified woo. Not one on which she’d taken a meeting with the author.
I really cared about this project and client (as I do everyone I represent). I felt frustrated and embarrassed that I would have to go back to her with disappointing news.
That’s why I responded to the editor with an email along these lines:
Geez, [name]! Please give me a heads up next time if you don’t know how your reads will come in. My client will be disappointed and surprised to hear you’re out, as am I.
We haven’t worked together before, so I want to tell you this: with me, you don’t need to bluff on your certainty level in advance of an auction. Whenever you *are* able to bid on one of my proposals, I will know you are a strong candidate and endorse you whether or not you’ve indicated that your colleagues have reservations.
Please give me a more accurate sense of your position on these things in the future.
Had this editor and I been at the same seniority level or ever worked closely together, this would have been a fine email to send. She might have rolled her eyes at me, responded with something defensive (“I never promised I would bid”), or called me to yell and then make nice. Regardless, NBD.
Ah, but this editor was younger—only by a handful of years, but early-career and just beginning to build her list. And when she got my email, she was Upset. I ended up getting a coldly furious email from her boss/mentor, who stuck up for her against me, the Power-Tripping Executive-Level Agent Bully.
I was mortified. It had not occurred to the void where my self-esteem should be that I was no longer early-career myself. Although I felt and still feel that my anger was worth sharing with her—she was and is awesome, and my goal was to build the foundation of a long, productive, respectful working relationship—I had not brought it to her in the ideal way. Instead of compassion, I had gone with peer-to-peer candor for someone who was not actually my peer.
In situations like the above, it’s important to reach out and make repairs—but it’s also important to forgive oneself. People who have difficulty expressing their anger come by that difficulty honestly.
I shared that story with you all because it’s a small-stakes, ordinary business conflict—and as such, it does not cause me agita to look back on. I made a mistake, although not a huge one; I apologized; I clarified; all ended well.
It was nowhere near the angriest I’ve been in my career. Nor was it one of the handful of similar situations I can recall that—despite my frantic best efforts—ended up somewhere gangrenous.
There is a reason that women and marginalized people struggle to express our anger “right.” It’s this: just often enough to be terrifying, whatever we manage to express lands in the lap of someone who has an even more dysfunctional relationship with anger than we do. Perhaps this someone feels entitled to our sweetness and compliance. Perhaps they feel the only way to ensure their own safety in the face of our anger is to retaliate with a display of overwhelming emotional or physical force. When this happens, and it does!, it is so, so scary.
Which is all to say that if you’re a recovering angerphobe too, please don’t feel silly or stupid for struggling. And although I’m about to get into some strategies for developing a more mature relationship with professional anger, please know that if you’re not quite Handling it Perfectly yet, ditto. Is anyone?
Still: keep struggling with me, OK? This struggle is worth it, both for our peace of mind and our career success.
Why will it help your career to keep working on your relationship with anger?
Life on a publishing salary is so precarious, especially if you’re an author. But so is your physical health if you have a dysfunctional relationship with anger. I don’t want you to fall apart and die.
Publishing a book is a dream opportunity that takes years and years to work toward and is relatively easy to lose in an instant. But so is your sanity if you have a dysfunctional relationship with anger. I don’t want you to end up catatonic.
The criticism, uncertainty, and rejection inevitable in any publishing career can feel so dehumanizing. But as long as you have a dysfunctional relationship with anger—whether you’re consumed by it or running from it 24/7—you’re participating in your own dehumanization. You’ll never feel grounded and safe as the full human being you are, and the people you love will never be able to know or connect with the real you, either.
Plus, there’s this: People who are alienated from their anger are generally bad at writing. Something feels missing on the page; their words don’t connect. They come off flighty, flaky, blithe, and unreliable.
People who are drowning in anger are generally bad at publishing. Their colleagues don’t want to help them; their social media flaps with more red flags than a state parade through 1960s Chechnya. No one feels safe around these people, including their would-be readers.
A healthy relationship with anger is not something you can magically gift yourself by reading one newsletter, rakish and toothsome as that newsletter may be.
Emotional maturity is tectonic. It involves nourishing yourself with a steady stream of information, counsel, and new skills—for years. Then what’s left is to practice, practice, practicing those skills for the rest of your life, all the while and in the wobbly aggregate getting closer to the asymptote of emotional health.
Go to therapy if you aren’t yet! And read Soraya’s book. And also, learn to recognize what healthy anger looks like in practice at work, even if you can’t consistently pull it off yourself.
After many years on my own journey here, I think I have a pretty good sense of what healthy anger looks like in publishing-world communication. Here in no particular order is what I’ve observed: