March 1, 2007

As of this morning I still hadn't heard back from the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency, after contacting them a month ago via their web site with my book proposal formatted according to their specifications, and following up by phone and email two weeks ago. So I decided to phone them again.

On the web site it says not to try to reach a particular agent. So when I got the voice mail tree for their system, I chose "general mailbox." The message there had a cheerful woman's voice which said:

Our office is closed for the holidays. We will be returning on January 2. Happy Holidays!

Okay, I thought, time to break the rules. I called again and managed to get through to one of the principals, Jim Levine. I could tell he was busy and in the middle of stuff, somewhere up there on the 27th floor in his office on 7th Avenue in Manhattan.

"Sorry to interrupt you," I said, "but I got the impression that no one was paying attention to your voicemail box." He was very appologetic and said that if I re-sent everything to him, he would route it to someone in his agency, and make sure they got back to me next week. That commitment, which sounded sincere, actually made me feel a lot better.

My thinking and language in the book proposal keeps evolving, and the version I had sent a month ago looked sadly out of date. So first I spent an hour revising and polishing the proposal; then I sent it.

As a former New Yorker and current citizen of the San Francisco Bay Area, I'm always paying attention to how much California sunshine I want to use in a situation, and how much New York elbows. Today's lesson -- lead with California sunshine, try to treat everyone with respect the way they want to be treated. But when you're not getting their attention, consider breaking the rules.