FinePrint Literary Management

Yay! I've been looking forward to querying her for a long time. Cross your fingers for me!

I made a clever graphic of "fingers crossed" for you, Beckstah, but AW was onto me and it didn't work.

Good luck Beckstah.

AW space saver:

Stephany passed on my full within a week. The language was too modern to be a satisfying historical for her. I'm guessing she's not a Judith McNaught/ Virginia Henley fan. Bummer. She would have been awesome to work with.
Querying Colleen now, though she reps Paranormal Romance, it seems YA and MG are higher on her priority list right now. Still, it's worth a shot. She rocks.

Thanks, honeysock! I would have liked to see that graphic...

Haha, it's been about two seconds (or rather, two days) since I queried Colleen Lindsay, but I saw on QueryTracker that someone who queried after me got an R from her in a matter of hours. I'm hoping that she does her queries out of order or something and that the internet didn't eat my query!

If you're a shy writer, this is a good moment to query Colleen Lindsay. Canadian author Patrick Roscoe has pretty much guaranteed that no matter what you say, CL is not going to look at your query and say "This is the most clueless author I've seen this month."

Without getting into any debates and without even wanting to go into the whole mess, I'd love to see people stop posting his name.

I don't know what to make of that.

Obviously, there's a lot of debate out there right now over what went down. Who was wrong. Was anyone right. Posts, disagreements over professionalism, bullying. And I don't choose to go into it here, myself.

But I will say that I do personally find the posting of his name to be unnecessary, esp on this board, and I'd love to see people stop doing it.

Twizzle said:

Obviously, there's a lot of debate out there right now over what went down. Who was wrong. Was anyone right. Posts, disagreements over professionalism, bullying. And I don't choose to go into it here, myself.

But I will say that I do personally find the posting of his name to be unnecessary, esp on this board, and I'd love to see people stop doing it.

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I'm not seeing a lot of debate, so if you can refer me to it, please do so in a private message. As for bullying, I'll agree that he was trying to do so, but I thought Colleen Lindsay handled it very well.

Sure. I can send some links via PM, if others know more perhaps they could to (I haven't been following this closely enough to know of them all.) Maybe someone else can point you to some of the haiku-dissenting tweeters. I definitely didn't/haven't followed it on Twitter.

I'm guessing it'll be up to the mods about the public posting of his name-given the ongoing debate on bullying (on both their parts/the Twitter haiku debacle), correct/verifiable attribution, that it was from private correspondence, and all that. *shrugs* I don't know what the policy would be here regarding that. I just feel, personally, that I wish people would refrain.

It seems too that the post Hapi's link leads to has been edited from the original. Certain content, comments have been removed, hope I'm not confusing anyone.

ETA--I do want to add the link here to YA Writers Against Bullying.http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=105581906147904 People might want to check them out, because one thing I'd hope we'd all agree on-bullying is wrong. It's a great grp.

Well, I didn't have long to wait, as it turns out - big ol' form R from Colleen this morning.

This is definitely one of the more disappointing ones in a while, but I'm glad I got the chance, finally.

Going to give credit where it's due. Queried Stephany Evans twice, and got very quick personalized rejection from her both times. Was thrilled that she was so very friendly, encouraging, and engaging, and must give her all praise for doing so; she is a big reason I've continued to submit, and will continue to submit, every ounce of praise only strengthens each writers determination, and Stephany came through for me a couple of times

Lydia

I'm not going to edit the post. I'm pretty sure Mac won't either.

Given that the name is all over the 'net at this point, it's pointless.

However: There is dissent--and I'm part of the dissent.

From the perspective of someone who deals with Internet identity, assuming that the person in an email is the person they claim to be, no matter what books they associate themselves with, or what Website, is naive.

To do that in the context of email from an obvious nutter? Not really a good idea.

I signed on with a new agent this morning. She took steps to verify that I was who I claimed to be in email.

I get how unpleasant email can be; I note that the owner of this site, Macallister, has been referred to specifically as a "lesnazi", as have all the mods. No, I won't tell you who, or where because stuff that happens on other boards/sites needs to stay there.

lesnazi as in les Nazi? wow, somebody's got some angst going...
As the Poet said, "Non ti curar di lor ma guarda e passa!"

Which should hold for this incident as well. Some jobs have a "public" aspect that sucks, especially if you add anonymity to it: some people don't think twice before sending a nasty word when they don't have to look you in the eyes. Agents are victims of this, but not only agents: ER doctors and nurses (just to name one example) are constantly verbally abused by bummers, drug-addicts, drunks, people that in general they are trying to help and their lives are so messed up that you can't even blame them for their behavior. I've seen clerks at the post office being verbally abused. I mean, some jobs REALLY suck, and the fact that most of us are here typing in front of a computer, it already tells a lot. It says that we are privileged. Think of those poor miners and their families. Think of people scrubbing toilets for a living.

So, we all get our good share of wacko. But somebody's gotta give. Somebody's gotta start forgiving, or else what are we going to do, turn our lives into a battlefield? What's the point of being outraged at world-wide injustice if we don't start from our own heart?

Sorry, off-topic, feel free to remove. Won't call you les Nazi for that, promise!!!

AW Admin said:

From the perspective of someone who deals with Internet identity, assuming that the person in an email is the person they claim to be, no matter what books they associate themselves with, or what Website, is naive.

To do that in the context of email from an obvious nutter? Not really a good idea.

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My point, for the most part, but expressed much more eloquently.

I've just always felt that because you can doesn't mean you should. And if they're allowed, I wish people would voluntarily refrain.

Ty.

(and congrats on signing!!)

I agree with everything you said, Medievalist/AW Admin, particularly your point that there's little practical value to removing the name here now. Hell, his Wikipedia page has already been amended to reflect this, erm, occurrance (for the moment, anyway- Wikipedia being Wikipedia, and all). But, I do think there's an ethical value to removing it.

Obviously, as not everyone believes the agent behaved even more poorly than the writer, or that the inciteful nature of her actions was reckless and potentially dangerous, that is only one opinion. But it's mine and I'd like to add it.

I'd been pretty impressed that mention of this hadn't found it's way to this thread after so many days. I have seen it discussed several places elsewhere on AW, however. You won't come across any one of those discussions by searching for the writer's name, and you'll only find one post related to it by searching for the agent's. You can, however, get a pretty good feel for the AW community's response in general by <snip>. From there, you don't have to look very hard to find what I'm referring to, and those seperate, random discussions are all worded to keep the names private.

So, if we're leaving the name, I'd like to leave that.

ETA: Cross posted w/Twizzle. What a freaking shock. Hi Twiz.
ETA2: Snipping. Just came across a request to edit this from someone I feel has the right to have it honored.

Giant Baby said:

ETA: Cross posted w/Twizzle. What a freaking shock. Hi Twiz.

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Call or email me sometime, would ya? Heh.

Back OT-

Practical. Ethical. Professional. It's the mods' call. *shrug* But as I said, can doesn't necessarily equal should for me. I'd just love to see my fellow writers and industry insiders refrain from publically posting names. And as you pointed out, regardless of their personal opinions on the actual events that transpired (which do differ), most already are. It does me proud.

I was impressed with Hannah Moskowitz's post, too. Didn't comment on that one, just kept thinking, "Yeah, what the 19-year-old said." And, really, that adds little to the discussion.

Excellent posts, thanks for putting them up Medievalist. There are blogs that are still worth reading.

Colleen Lindsay & FinePrint Management as a whole.

I was rep'd by Brendan. When he left and took a job as an editor I contacted him and he said for me to introduce myself to another agent at FinePrint and to mention he said so.

At first I settled on Janet Reid as she handled my genre and seemed to have an inviting bleak streak, but Brendan suggested Colleen might be a better fit. And when I looked up Colleens's bio I really liked what I saw, along with the posts in this thread, so I readily agreed to introduce myself to her.

Things went great, at first. She got back to me immediately to say that she was glad to make my acquaintance. She had her hands full at the time, though, as she explained in taking care of all of Brendan's clients who currently had submissions out with publishers in addition to taking care of her current clients. So she would be getting back to me by the end of the next week, at latest. That sounded perfectly fine to me and I was glad to see that she was prioritizing clients in this way and was hoping I'd soon be one, myself.

This exchange took place on January 28th. Not hearing back from her by the following Friday, I sent a reminder email the following week after that, just to make sure I hadn't fallen through the cracks. No reply back. As Suzie was also handling Brendan's former clients, I sent an email to her on February 12th to find out the score. (I was becoming a bit of a nervous wreck by this point.) She got back to me immediately and told me that I was on Colleen's list (she went and checked) and would be hearing soon, while also mentioning that Brendan had a lot of clients so some tough decisions would have to be made. It wasn't the best of news but I was very glad for it. I knew where I stood.

Fast forward to last month. Not having heard anything from Colleen yet I sent her another email and when I didn't hear back I called the FinePrint office the following week. (I thought by then that maybe my emails might not have been going through to her inbox for some reason.) Colleen wasn't in the office, as the person I spoke to said. So I left a voice message for her, which was not returned. Letting another week go by I wrote to Peter Rubie, the head of the company, in hopes of getting some resolution.

By that point I had also found out that I wasn't the only one in this situation. Many of Brendan's former clients also hadn't been contacted by the agency and were in identical situations as me. So by contacting Mr Rubie at this point I hoped I might also inspire him to get in touch with the other writers who'd been rep'd by the agency to let them know, officially, of the agency's decision to drop them. I felt we were entitled to that, at least.

No reply back from Mr Rubie.

Sounds familiar

Ken,

That sounds remarkably like my experience. I'm still waiting for replies to my e-mails, but I'm no longer expecting to get any.

I had assumed that I was the only former client of Brendan's who was in this position. Obviously not.

Oh, gosh. This is so damn disheartening for the both of you. I would imagine that they will get back to you at some point in time. However, as a backup plan, I would encourage you to jump on the agent hunt trail again, in spite of what is going down at FP at the moment. And I do wish you the best of luck.

Tri

Just curious but contractually, how does this work? Can either party say at any time, "meh, not working, see ya bye" or is there a minimum time limit during which the author can't shop his work with other agents and the agent promises to make good faith efforts to sell the work?

Either party can end the contract. However, FinePrint remains the agent of record for any works submitted through them, so that even if FP ceases to be my agent, and then later one of the publishers to whom Brendan submitted my book when he was at FP makes an offer, FP get 15% of that money and also 15% of the royalties later earned from that publication.

That's fairly standard in agency contracts.

I can submit the book to other publishers on my own, and FP is not the agency of record in those cases. Also standard. Authors aren't wise to do that while they have an agent. Agents understandably find such outside deals upsetting. But if the relationship is broken, either formally or informally, that naturally doesn't apply.