In yesterday’s item about Aaron Greenspan‘s query letter, the young Harvard grad (and possible creator of the technology behind Facebook) explained some of the rationale behind his decision to use another of his technological innovations to carpetbomb more than 800 literary agents with a one-page description of his memoir/exposé of the college experience: “If reasonably intelligent people writing books on serious topics have such a hard time getting attention from agents,” he wrote via email, “then maybe there’s something wrong with the system, or many of the agents themselves.”
Publishing insiders were not necessarily won over by the argument, if all our mailbag is any indication. “Greenspan makes the same assumption all authors make: ‘My stuff is good,'” commented one author, who described his approach as “not that much different than spam.” Another GalleyCat reader, who’s actually looked at sample pages from Authoritas, took offense at the suggestion that agents had fallen down on the job by failing to sign him up. “Aaron has a lot going for him that other writers don’t,” this agent points out, including a Harvard alum email and a visible platform in his own technology company. “But we reviewed the memoir and found it insufferably boring,” due to a writing style that is “technically good” but also “dry and flat.”