Janet Reid has passed away. She was my literary agent and the reason I was ever published.
Janet’s official obit is being written elsewhere. I couldn’t hope to write such a thing, there were so many facets to her life, and I knew only a small part of the whole.
People reading this will probably know her best for her literary agent blog, and for the famous (in literary circles) Query Shark. Indeed Janet spent so much time helping others from the goodness of her heart that I don’t know how she found the time to do any paid work. And yet she did. She was an engine, and sometimes a very forceful one, when it came to representing her clients. I was one of the beneficiaries of all that energy, and so were many others.
I’m pretty sure that none of the thousands who read her free and wise advice online knew that she also did volunteer work for her church. I wouldn’t have known either except she mentioned it once in passing in a conversation. That was so very Janet. Also very Janet were the times when she went above and beyond to help, not her authors, but early readers of her online blogs, people who had started as fans and become friends. Invariably over-the-internet friends, because Janet was a remarkably private person for someone who seemed so larger than life, and who knew absolutely everyone in the publishing world.
Have you noticed how so much of what I’m writing is about how she helped others? Everyone else who writes a memorial will be saying the same thing.
You would struggle to find any pictures of Janet. She had an aversion to being photographed. This did not stop some of her authors from playing a game where we made her a character in our published novels. One of her other writers had her as a character, killed her, brought her back to life and then killed her again. She thought it was hilarious.
Janet was one of the heroes of my own novel The Singer From Memphis, in which she was the eponymous Singer. In honour of her dislike of imagery I made her tall and dark, the exact opposite of the real Janet. Spoiler alert, but I think it’s fair enough here…at the the end she outsmarts everyone and rides off across the desert as a true Princess.
That also is the real Janet. So very smart, and a true Princess of Publishing.
She will be missed.