She rocks in the treetops all the day long

hoppin’ and a boppin’ and a singin’ her song

All the little birdies on Jay Bird Street

Love to hear the robin go tweet tweet tweet
…

As any Angie, Sarah, Daniel, Jude, Alison or Mandy knows, if there is a song with your name in it, you’ll hear it sung to you many times during your life. For me, I’ve had to live with “Rockin’ Robin.” I’m sure it was Bobby Day’s original being referenced by the older folks, and Michael Jackson’s rendition by the younger, but it doesn’t really matter; the question was always the same.

“Are you Rockin’, Robin?”

I like to think of myself has having a dry sense of humor (some people will say too dry) and developed a standard reply to anyone who brought up the song.

“Tweet. Tweet.”

Recently, I was working with a client on a experimental-form memoir and helping her get ideas on how to find a potential home for her manuscript. Since I worked with Andrea Hurst Literary Management in 2009, I’ve seen a few transitions in the way calls for submissions/queries are communicated. It used to be that every year we pre-ordered Jeff Herman’s Guide to Publishers and Agents: A big FAT exhaustive and reliable PRINT guide to who was where and looking for what. We’d find an intriguing listing in the book, then find the website, then cross-reference industry news, then go to the website, and then pick up the phone (gasp) and talk to the editor to make sure what we were trying to sell was indeed what they wanted to buy. Targeted pitching. The right way to do things.

I knew that any printed guide is not relied on heavily anymore, thanks to the up-to-the-minute accuracy of information a publisher can post on the internet, but what I learned this most recent time around is that even the websites are becoming more and more static. Updates aren’t always likely to be posted to the site in a timely manner. How is this information being conveyed? Wait for it.

(I did.)

Twitter. 

So I’m one of the last to land on the branch, but I’m going to try to rock it. (Okay, that was bad.)

You can find me @sacramentorobin.

It’s another tool for the #publishingindustry (See what I did there?) Something else that is helping with democratization and accessibility. And, it’s actually kind of fun.

tweet tweet