Deep Diving in the Social Media Dumpster? No, thank you.

[lizvogel]

I've been pondering this post for a while now:

Janet Reid, Literary Agent: Getting Ready to Query? Clean up your social media.

Based on what I know of Ms. Reid, I doubt she's screening for anything other than really egregious asshattery. (As, indeed, she has clarified in a follow-up post.) But I also think it's a terribly dangerous precedent: once you ask creatives (or anyone, really) to self-censor the big things, the not-quite-so-big things will look bigger for the lack of contrast, and when they're gone the medium-sized things will loom larger, and so on, until ultimately you're running scared from people who might get offended by the word "the". And of course, as people get more and more bent about smaller and smaller things, tomorrow's cancel-culture shitstorm is today's perfectly innocuous remark. So maybe you'd better not make that remark, or any remark at all, eh? Just sit silently and let the right-thinking people dominate the social narrative.

And to explicitly link cowering from the torch-bearing mob (because that's what this is, really) to one's chances of finding representation, of having a writing career...? I know publishing is a business, not a moral crusade, but I expected better, I really did.

I recommend reading both the post and the comments. There are some eloquent objections in there to sanitizing one's entire persona out of fear of cancel culture overreactions, not to mention the intractable challenge of trying to guess what someone, somewhere, somewhen is going to take exception to.

As for my own journal, I really doubt there's anything all that exciting in here anyway. But after reading those comments, I feel the need to take my tiny little bit of a stand, so:

Dear agents: I am not scrubbing my social media. This is me. If that's not going to work for you, best we find out now, eh?

Comments

[firecat]

I once co-wrote a book for one of those big how-to book series. The book did pretty well, so my co-author and I went back to the publisher suggesting that we do a second edition. The publisher (via our agent) said OK, but only if firecat is not listed as one of the authors. There were a few bullshit excuses given as to why, and then the real reason came out: firecat had a web site about polyamory; this publisher apparently disapproved of being associated with polyamory via one of their authors. (I was told by someone else who worked for the publisher that this particular division of the publisher's had a lot of conservative christians involved with it.)

Co-author and I thought it was ridiculous and it didn't harm us financially or career-wise. If we'd chosen to fight it we probably could have won? It wasn't fiction, and it wasn't the agent refusing to sign me. But I'm mentioning it as pertinent to the blogger's advice.

The original edition of the book continues to sell pretty well.

[lizvogel]

Argh. Unless the book was The Idiot's Guide to Monogamy or some such, there's absolutely no reason they should have cared. I'm glad you weren't in a position to be harmed by it, anyway.

That sort of nonsense makes me want to throw things, regardless of whether it comes from the conservative side or from the self-proclaimed "woke" or whoever.

[firecat]

Yeah. The particular hypocrisy was that they would have been fine with my co-writing the book, as long as my name wasn't on it.

[lizvogel]

Yeah, because lying is a Christian value. *headdesk*