Reply All Is Your Friend

Make this your tiniest (and easiest!) new year's resolution

Happy 2025! I hope you've all had a bright start to the new year. The holidays are never long enough 😅, but I love taking whatever "pause" time I get to reflect and make plans for the coming season. One of the ways I'm planning to shift gears a bit with this newsletter is to make shorter posts on smaller, more focused topics most of the time.

So let's dive in to a whole post about one important little button on your email: reply all.

I promise that you don’t need to be afraid of reply all. (Illustration by Federico Fabiani from his book I Quit)

Some of you may already be well-acquainted with the reply all button. There's a whole lot of reply-all-ing in publishing. But for those of you who aren't yet hitting the reply all button every time you respond to an email – maybe because it requires a few extra clicks on your phone and doesn't seem worth the effort, or because you're worried about annoying people with emails they don't need to see, or simply because you forget to – I suggest trying to make this a habit in 2025. Reply all is your friend!

Why does reply all matter?

Let's set the scene. You're illustrating a picture book, and you email your art director (copying in your agent, of course¹) with a question. When she responds, you notice that she copies in your editor, your editor's assistant, another designer, and (hopefully) keeps your agent copied in too.

That may seem like a lot of fuss over whatever you and your AD are talking about. Maybe your question was something really mundane or technical about the art – why would all those other people want to know about that? Should you reply only to your AD and not add clutter to the other people's inboxes?

The answer is almost certainly no! Hit the reply all button, even if you have no idea why your editor's assistant's intern's mom should be copied on an email about the little tweak you're making to the art for page 22-23.

First of all, I'm a big proponent of copying your agent on nearly² every email you send to your publishing team. That includes all the replies to the original note – she'll want to know how the conversation unfolds! Your agent is your advocate, and it's waaay easier for us to support you when we have a full picture of what's going on. It also means we don't need to bug you for status updates about your book, since we'll already know everything you know without extra work if we're looped into your correspondence.

The same applies to your publishing team. Your editor and art director (and others) are working closely together on your book, and it's often helpful for them both to be looped into correspondence with you. The work one person takes the lead on often still affects the other. For example, even though a conversation about making tweaks to an illustration is generally going to fall under your art director's purview, maybe your editor's assistant needs to know that you're tweaking page 22-23 because she's meeting with your book's production editor tomorrow and can convey the update to her. Your editor may be liaising with the marketing team on promo materials that will use this illustration, so she can tell them that an updated file is forthcoming. The other designer may be collaborating with your AD on the book’s design. And the editorial intern may be shadowing all conversations about this book in order to learn about the bookmaking process.

Or maybe it's for completely different reasons. Who knows. We agents and illustrators don’t always know (or need to know!) how labor is divided between your book's publishing team. The great thing about cultivating a habit of replying all is that it doesn't require you personally, as the creator, to actually decide who needs to see what. You're leaving that up to the person on the other side of the line. If you have a question for your art director, you can just send it to her (copying your agent!) and let her decide who else at the house, if anyone, needs to be looped in when she responds to you. From there, you're just keeping the lines of communication open by replying to everyone she's included in your conversation.

Make replying all a habit

Reply all is my default. Even if I'm only emailing one person, reply all gets the job done, so I think it's good to get into the habit.

And when you're in the habit of replying to everyone, you'll also probably pay more attention to who's been copied into what. I usually try to say hello to everyone who’s been looped into an email exchange even if I suspect some people will be silent observers. It helps to recognize the whole team’s contributions to your book, even if they're mostly working in the background (from your point of view), and to build relationships with them, too – and we all know publishing is a relationship business. So even if you're having a conversation with your editor, if she's looped in her assistant to the thread, you could say hello to them both at the top of your note.

There are exceptions to every rule of course, and sometimes you might not want to reply all – for example, if you want to ask your agent for her thoughts on something your editor said before you respond. In those rarer moments you can just switch to regular-reply mode. Or do what I do and start a new email thread for the side convo, then return to the main thread that everyone else is in later³.

The bottom line is that, in my opinion, reply all is almost always more helpful than not. If someone starts copying in other folks to your conversation, you can trust that it's because they all need to see the information you're discussing (even if you don't know why). So as we all dive back into our inboxes, let's lean into replying all. It's a small change that can go a long way towards streamlining communication, avoiding mistakes, and strengthening relationships with your publishing team. If only all my other new year's resolutions could be so easy!

1. You're all copying in your agent whenever you write to your publishing team, right?!

2. There are of course some things we agents don't need to see, but I always suggest my clients copy me on everything anyway, just so there's no energy wasted on deliberating what needs a cc and what doesn’t, and so nothing falls through the cracks. I'm good at skimming emails to get the info I need and ignoring the rest. (I recognize that other agents may have a different preference/approach, though!)

3. Whenever I'm having a side conversation within the main email thread, I'm always afraid that I'll accidentally forget to delete the quoted text or click the wrong email when circling back to the full group. 😬 Having side conversations in a totally separate email thread eliminates the possibility for mistakes like that!