Today in Publisher’s Weekly, there was an article by Kate Lee, an agent at ICM talking about how she uses social media in her job.
The whole article’s a must read, I think, but I wanted to highlight one section:
On Twitter, I follow writers and journalists I admire, and some follow me. One of my clients, for example, wrote a piece about a writer whose blog post had gone viral. So I started following the writer on Twitter and was able to gauge the response myself—it was enormous, and I signed her. A few editors also started following her feed, which helped me make an early assessment of who might be interested in the project.
While this story is about Twitter, it’s also about paying attention to the details (in this case, which editors were already fans). On some level, I’d call this a series of happy accidents… made possible by an agent and writer looking closely and being ready to capitalize on what was happening.
A big part of being ready to act is knowing your goals, even if sometimes you do have to connect the dots to get there. What do you think… and will you be ready when opportunity passes by?
