Publishing is a big business. Writers know that. Agents know that. In this age of Internet most submission is going electronic, and with it comes an attitude—the demand for pristine manuscripts with specified margins, spacing and formats. With it comes threatening remarks of deleting queries that are formatted incorrectly, and a writer’s chance of being snickered at if the agents deem you incompetence in following their simple instructions.
I’m sure agents are swamped with queries to the boiling point. Otherwise they must not forget that writers are artists and their work is a creation of art. To discriminate and incriminate based on their own guidelines is to exclude the possibility of discovering some true talents who are not wired to follow instructions or go online. Some writers are too poor to spend $600+ to go to a writers conference. Others work in obscurity and don’t have time for a “platform”.
You may say too bad for these writers. They’ll never see the light of day. But I say the publishing industry is the loser. Long ago it was the emperor who set out into the mountains to seek the advise of a hermit. Writers are not smoochers, least of all beggars.
