New Literary Agency Listing
firstwriter.com – Thursday August 9, 2018
Handles: Fiction
Markets: Children's; Youth
Handles fiction for children, from chapter books for emerging readers up to young adult / crossover titles. No picture books. Send query by email with one-page synopsis and full ms. No postal submissions.
Ebooks: How digital publishers are 'shaking up' the industry
bbc.com – Wednesday August 8, 2018
JK Rowling notoriously received numerous rejections before meeting her literary agent, and later, publisher. Having stacked up at least 60 rejections in my writing career, I know exactly how that feels.
And while being a novelist recently came out on top in a survey as one of the most desirable jobs to have, it is definitely not for the faint hearted.
I now have an agent and an award, but it wasn't always that way.
As a writer, the first step to securing a publishing deal is to acquire an agent, a middle-man, basically your number one fan who will shout about how good you are to publishers and hopefully persuade them to read your carefully-crafted novel.
They are the gatekeepers to the publishing industry.
Digital publishers, however, are changing the game because they talk directly to authors.
ICM Promotes Three to Agents
variety.com – Tuesday August 7, 2018
Talent agency ICM Partners has promoted three to agents.
ICM upped Celestine Au and Madeline Feder to agents in the talent department, and Viviane Telio to agent in the motion picture literary department.
Au started at ICM in 2015, spending two years as a talent department assistant before being promoted to talent department coordinator last year. Au was recognized as one of Variety’s 10 Assistants to Watch in 2017 and is part of Time’s Up Next Gen. She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Shanghai before moving to the U.S. to attend UCLA, where she completed 12 internships and graduated with a degree in communication studies. She is fluent in Mandarin and has traveled to China with ICM agents, acting as an interpreter, and helping the team close deals and sign clients.
The one piece of advice every aspiring author needs to know
independent.co.uk – Sunday August 5, 2018
If you are one of the millions of people who aspire to be a published author, I have some writing advice for you: never listen to writing advice.
Not that it’s easy to avoid. If you go on Twitter and follow the hashtag #amwriting you’ll get more unsolicited advice than you know what to do with. Do this, do that, don’t on any account do the other. Everyone it seems, has some rules for you to follow.
Which is hardly surprising, as literally almost everybody is writinga book. And I use the phrase “literally almost everybody” advisedly. At the BookExpo America conference in 2015, author Jane McGonigal claimed that 90 per cent of young people in the US say they want to write a book.
New Publisher Listing
firstwriter.com – Friday August 3, 2018
Publishes: Fiction; Nonfiction;
Markets: Adult; Youth
Describes itself as a conventional independent publishing house that thinks unconventionally. Willing to consider most genres of fiction and nonfiction, other than hate books and gratuitous pornography. Approach using submission form on website.
How to Write a Book Without Losing Your Mind
theatlantic.com – Thursday August 2, 2018
A few months ago, I promised some nice people in New York that I would, sometime very soon, write a book.
Since then, I have:
Called my mom rejoicing.
Called my mom crying.
Considered changing my Twitter bio, then thought better of it.
Considered emailing all my ex-boyfriends and mentors to let them know I’m an impostor, then thought better of it.
Extensively researched three different long-form writing softwares, only to find that I prefer the first one I ever tried.
New Magazine Listing
firstwriter.com – Thursday August 2, 2018
Publishes: Poetry;
Markets: Adult;
Preferred styles: Literary
Online magazine publishing poems that are unique or thought provoking. No religious poems, nature poems, greeting card styled poems or teenage angst. Send submissions in the body of an email with bio up to 75 words and author photo.
Why Are So Many Wannabe Screenwriters Getting Scammed?
hollywoodreporter.com – Wednesday August 1, 2018
From "pitch fests" to online script coaches, an entire cottage industry has sprung up to help aspiring scribes crack the movie business, and while some offerings are legit, many are schemes designed to prey on the Hollywood dreams of gullible strivers.
A few weeks after Manny Fonseca arrived in Los Angeles in the early part of this decade, having left his native Michigan with the hope of becoming a Hollywood writer or executive, the then 30-year-old was at a party when a producer asked if he’d “like to make a hundred bucks.” Sure, he replied. What would he have to do?
The answer was to show up the next day at a “pitch fest,” one of dozens of such gatherings each year in which hopefuls pay hundreds of dollars to serve up their story ideas to agents and executives who, in theory, will buy them if they’re good. Fonseca would be there as one of the buyers, which struck him as strange — not only was he not an executive, he didn’t even have a proper job: he had been interning with producers Arnold Kopelson and Irwin Winkler.
Judith Appelbaum, a Guide for Would-Be Authors, Dies at 78
nytimes.com – Monday July 30, 2018
Judith Appelbaum, whose almost 60-year career in book publishing became a crusade to make the industry better — for writers, publishers and readers — died on Wednesday at her home in Bedford, N.Y. She was 78.
Alan Appelbaum, her husband of 57 years, said the cause was ovarian cancer.
Ms. Appelbaum held numerous jobs in the book publishing industry. During the early 1980s she was managing editor of Publishers Weekly and wrote the “Paperback Talk” column for The New York Times Book Review. But her best-remembered and most influential project may have been the 1978 book “How to Get Happily Published: A Complete and Candid Guide,” which she wrote with Nancy Evans.
How the ‘brainy’ book became a publishing phenomenon
theguardian.com – Sunday July 29, 2018
This is a story about a book that just kept selling, catching publishers, booksellers and even its author off guard. In seeking to understand the reasons for the book’s unusually protracted shelf life, we uncover important messages about our moment in history, about the still-vital place of reading in our culture, and about the changing face of publishing.
The book is Sapiens, by the Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari, published in the UK in September 2014. It’s a recondite work of evolutionary history charting the development of humankind through a scholarly examination of our ability to cooperate as a species. Sapiens sold well on publication, particularly when it came out in paperback in the summer of 2015. What’s remarkable about it, though, is that it’s still selling in vast numbers. In its first two and a half years of life, Sapiens sold just over 200,000 copies in the UK. Since 2017, when Harari published Homo Deus, his follow-up, Sapienshas sold a further half million copies, establishing itself firmly at the top of the bestseller lists (and convincingly outselling its sequel). Sapiens has become a publishing phenomenon and its wild success is symptomatic of a broader trend in our book-buying habits: a surge in the popularity of intelligent, challenging nonfiction, often books that are several years old.