After an anonymous editor claimed this morning that his or her imprint is blackballing agents that sell them duds, I had some doubts, so I asked if the letter struck you as the real deal. "The letter about the agent freeze-out sounds somewhat authentic, but only somewhat," replied one senior editor. "If an agent gets personally nasty, lies egregiously—an important distinction because they routinely tell white lies that we just ignore—or sells us a book that later turns out to be fraudulent, then we might freeze them out for a while. But if the book merely doesn't perform? Probably not." After all, this editor explains, the house signed off on the project, "so why should the agent take the fall for it being a turkey?" Then again, "ask what happens to editors when they pick turkeys too often, and you'll see why some of these people want to pass the buck to agents." Yeah, kinda figured it was something like that.

Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management is even less convinced by the claim. "Think about the timeline," she sagely observes:

"Project A is sold as the next best thing since sliced bread. It's acquired. It's published. TWO YEARS LATER the book doesn't live up to its pitch by the agent...who the hell remembers??"

By then, Reid adds, so many people have had their finger in the pie that blaming one party for a book's failure makes no sense. Unless somebody's going to go on the record with some hard facts about this alleged vindictive treatment of agents, she concludes, "I not only don't believe it, it's the kind of thing that belongs on snopes." Duly noted—and good to hear that editorial departments probably aren't run like junior high cliques after all.