Carly Watters

Yeah.

And where are you going, Cece?

Other conferences you have this year?

yeah I love that so let's talk about like professional development at large like where do you where do you think we get our professional development like as agents one of the things I know just backtracking a little bit I know the AALA which is the Association of American Literary Agents is working on some and they do excellent professional development events I should say excellent they're working on a course to help kind of and some teachings to help agents with their professional development because a lot of what we do we learn on the job it's apprenticeship

you know, again, you learn through years of kind of building the skills, where do you think that you get professional development from externally?

Yeah, the conference that you were talking about where we were at the roundtable together was the People of Publishing Conference, which is put on by the AALA.

And it was great.

I totally agree with what you're saying about being in the room where it happens.

And it sounds a bit silly.

Yeah, and it sounds a bit silly.

But like, there's a reason where...

you know if there's a bunch of agents and say you're at a conference you know I'm speaking to professionals at this point but like say you're at a conference and the agents and editors are going for a drink or going for lunch or you know going off-site to do something like just join even if it feels a bit awkward to be like hey can I come along or hey I didn't bring a car but like can I join you yeah really got to put yourself out there because those like those car rides those casual drinks yeah

That is where you learn so much about the book business that you just can't learn anywhere else because you're learning from the years of experience of all of those people about whatever kind of topical thing is going on.

So incredibly important.

Yeah, I know.

One of the things I'm sure we talked about on the show, but that always comes back to me is like there isn't this hierarchy of, you know, just like corporate America where it's like, you know, you want to be like the middle manager and then this and then C-suite.

And there's just not really like a climbing in that sense and agenting.

The climbing is very different.

And it's kind of hard to explain the way that the climbing happens.

The climbing happens through the networking, through building the client list, through reputation.