Deals, News, Reviews & Writer’s Resources

Guest post by Susan Kushner Resnick, author ofGoodbye Wifes and Daughters

I’ve been opening readings for my nonfiction book about a Montana coal mine disaster by acknowledging the obvious: I don’t belong with this story. What, I asked the audiences across the state of Montana, is a New Englander who has no connection to the west and had never met a miner before starting the book, doing here? Then I tell them how I found my subject. Or, rather, how the subject found me.

It all started with E.B. White. After reading The Trumpet of the Swan to my son, I decided I wanted to see the Montana swan preserve where White set a main part of the novel. A little research showed that the area isn’t as populated with trumpeter swans as it used to be and that it’s not near anything else that a conventional tourist would want to see. But Yellowstone isn’t far, and Grand Teton National Park isn’t far from that. We made plans to visit the...

Last weekend, Wendy Strothman joined two editors, three other agents and about 30 midcareer writers at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.  The setting was a panel discussion that sought to demisify book publishing.  Here's one piece of their invaluable advice:

Editors and agents think simultaneously about the quality of the idea and the existence of a market for it. This is why in developing a book proposals it’s important to research and write about the competition—the existence of other successful books in an area shows that people will be willing to plop down $25 for a book on the subject. As Wendy Strothman explained, if she’s going to spend months with an author developing a worthy idea, she wants to make sure that there will be a payoff in eventual sales.

For the rest of Constance Hale's report on the panel, head over to a href="...

The Teen Brain: It's Just Not Grown Up Yet

By Richard Knox

Client Hélène Boudreau has some excellent advice on her blog today about query letters.  Her query letter was so well done that Jabberwocky is using the first sentence on her book cover.

2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalists

History Finalists

To see the finalists in the other categories, click here.

What every author should know:  if you want your book to succeed today, you’ll need to do lots of legwork.  Here’s an inspiring story from a bestselling author:

 From: The Immortal Book Tour By Rebecca Skloot -- Publishers Weekly, 11/9/2009 2:00:00 AM

A month ago, I’d have thought the idea of organizing my own book tour with the help of my brain-damaged father was nuts. My father, Floyd Skloot, has written several books about the neurologic damage he suffered from a virus in the ’80s—it affected his memory, his abstract reasoning, and his ability to think about multiple things at once. Exactly the abilities a person needs to envision and organize a book tour. And I’m no better. Somewhere between writing a book, taking a teaching job, freelancing, and becoming my own publicist, things got a bit em id="id1693989-1-em...

From Publisher's Marketplace: Make eBooks Cheap, Or Grandpa Will Steal Them

Op-Ed From the Baltimore Sun, February 7, 2010:

Oysters vs. oystermen?: Maryland should try harder to preserve both a healthy bay and a way of life

by Christopher White

A watershed moment in Maryland history unfolded last month when Chesapeake Bay watermen marched on Annapolis to protest Gov. Martin O'Malley's Oyster Restoration and Aquaculture Development Plan. At stake was whether the bay's shellfish beds will continue to be in the public domain - a public fishery - or whether they will be reassigned, in whole or in part, as private leases available for aquaculture.

Unfortunately, this issue is typically...

In the recent issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes: “In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “The Catcher in the Rye.” All three very good books, but what about the women?  We think Gopnik’s pantheon leaves out some equally wonderful American novels written by women. If we...

Guest post by Martha A. Sandweiss, Author of NBCC finalist Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

Researching and writing Passing Strange presented many challenges, not the least of which was making my two main protagonists – Clarence King and Ada Copeland – equally vivid characters in the book.

King’s life is well-documented in the historical record. An intrepid explorer and brilliant geologist, he led the fortieth Parallel Survey that helped map the West in the years following the Civil War and in 1879 became the first director of the United States Geological Survey. A talented essayist and celebrated wit,  he made his mark among the elites of Gilded Age...