As a Commissioning Editor I receive a large number of proposals via email each week – some are long, multipage emails with attachments, some are simple two or three liners. In all instances, it’s hard to keep on top of them, let alone keep in your head (or even on a list) who you’ve replied to and who might have been accidently overlooked.

Apart from one recent example, everyone I’ve dealt with, regardless of whether we’ve taken on their proposals and developed them into books which are published, or had to turn them down (which is a really tough thing to have to do), has acted in a well-mannered, dignified way.

But in the last few days, I’ve had to deal with someone who followed, after about a week, a quick pre-pitch email with a message along the lines of (I’m paraphrasing here): ‘I take it your silence means no, I expected more of you and your publisher’. Erm… Hello? Do I know you? I wouldn’t want to be spoken to in that way by my own family, let alone someone I’ve never dealt with before.

So I calmly replied, explaining that I’d been away on a business trip and that, plus the weekend meant that I hadn’t yet had the chance to think in a considered, coherent way, about his proposal.

So then he replies with:

‘Since we’re on the topic of E-mail manners, Andrew, please learn not to top-post. You might not alienate quite so many potential authors that way– those of us who use E-mail as a communications medium rather than a way to shout an answer while playing back a recording of the question’.

So, at the time, I don’t know what ‘top posting’ is. Now I know: it’s basically the default setting in email programs where the most recent message is at the top (i.e: top posted). Now, I don’t know about you, but when I get a bottom-posted message (there are a couple of US-based authors who work this way), I find it mildly annoying to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to see the new bit, but it wouldn’t bother me so much that I would fire off an email to them saying what they were doing was ‘bad form’ or risked ‘alienating’ people.

So, given that this blog is open to comment and were all open-minded, intelligent people, I’d like to know what you all think makes for good manners when using email? Fire away…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 13:54 and is filed under q & a, life, Books, social comment, Common stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.