The Bookseller - Comment - Publishing's hiring problem: the agent's view

Recently I tweeted my frustrations (I know, never a good idea!) about publishers not hiring enough people - or quickly enough. It was a week in which I had been told that a marketing team could no longer spend even one hour (all we would have expected) meeting my author in our initial campaign-building conversation that traditionally brings editor, publicist, marketing, author and agent together to collaborate on launching a book; it was a week after a debut author's publisher had failed to send the author any personal congratulatory note on the day of their paperback publication; it was a week in which I'd written a long email to an editor who is vastly overworked, most often sending emails at 10pm at night, to ask them to please get on a call with our author as quickly as possible so we can finally nail a book idea that the author could have embarked on writing weeks before, and for which the delay has meant the author having to compromise some much-needed time away.