It also keeps folks in the marketing/publicity/whatever department from seeing your behavior and thinking “WHERE is this person’s agent??” https://twitter.com/molly_cusick/status/1359159012642717696

Authors can and should feel comfortable advocating for their work. But there’s a difference between advocating for yourself and turning into Veruca Salt, and too many people cartwheel right over that line.

As someone who had experience on the industry side of things, once I put in the writer hat, it was super-important to me to make sure that once I stepped to the other side, I never did to others what had been done to me or my colleagues.

Before I signed with @thejordache, I was pretty frank about how one key thing I would need her for was to be my adult. As my agent, she would have my back and push when I needed her to push, but she also had my explicit instruction to guide my interactions with others.

Even with the experience from being “on the inside,” I’m new to the author thing, to having an editor, to working with a publishing team instead of being part of that team. Jordan is not new to any of those interactions, and can say “push here; not here; push like this not that.”

I can choose to take or leave her advice. The final decision is mine. But she can’t GIVE that advice if she’s not looped in. (Or if I had made it clear that I wasn’t open to that advice, period.)

This. I WORK IN PUBLISHING and am still not an expert on so much of what’s tied into being a writer. How in the world can you be expected to be? https://twitter.com/molly_cusick/status/1361312156105531392

(And, uh, while we’re on this, your other writer friends will be invaluable sources for so many things, but sometimes THEY ARE THE VERUCAS, so if you use them to calibrate your own expectations? Bad news bears.)

This was an unplanned thread and isn't meant to be tied in to any other agent-related chatter (though intent doesn't always = outcome and I get that.)

It's more like... if you *can* set up multiple checks and balances to keep yourself level, please do.