Mitali Perkins, author of SECRET KEEPER, has some excellent advice for writers trying to build their brands online over at her blog Mitali's Fire Escape. This is definitely a must read for authors getting ready to explore blogging or tweeting.
Today's Boston Globe discussed the familial response to Danzy Senna's new memoir WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT? and quotes Wendy on the range of responses family memoirs can envoke.
"... Certainly the genre of memoir writing induces both wounds and healing. "It runs the gamut," says literary agent Wendy Strothman, "from embracing the book to suing people. It depends on the family and what's being revealed."... "
For the rest of the article, click here.
"... Last week, on the eve of the anniversary, came a new offering: "The Attack on the Liberty" by South Carolina investigative reporter James Scott, whose father, John Scott, was also a survivor of the attack and a friend of Ennes'.
Scott's book is a densely documented, suspenseful narrative that uses declassified U.S. and Israeli documents to give fresh insights into the attack and the aftermath. U.S. government officials — and a Navy Court of Inquiry — publicly accepted Israel's account of mistaken identity.
But key government leaders privately rejected that explanation. Even President Lyndon Johnson believed it was a deliberate attack, according to Scott.
Citing...
Editor Cheryl Klein has posted an interesting working definition of what makes a novel Young Adult on her blog suggesting:
1. A YA novel is centrally interested in the experience and growth of
2. its teenage protagonist(s),
3. whose dramatized choices, actions, and concerns drive the
4. story,
5. and it is narrated with relative immediacy to that teenage perspective.
For futher discussion of the terms and to weigh in on her theory, visit her blog at http://chavelaque.blogspot.com/2009/06/theory-definition-of-ya-literature.html
Ever wondered what ARCs from BEA are? Jessica at Bookends LLC has written a publishing glossary and posted it on the Bookends' blog, which you might want to check out.
For a less helpful but more amusing glossary of publishing terms, I suggest you check out Tom's Glossary of Publishing Terms on Righreading.com. For example: ADVANCE: A secret code signaling to the marketing department whether or not to promote a title.
From the New York Times Sunday Book Review,
"... In James H. S. McGregor’s “Paris From the Ground Up” — which offers an informative history of the city’s art and architecture — the Eiffel Tower necessarily plays a smaller role, occupying only four pages of a book that, by contrast, devotes a 30-page chapter to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. But those four pages are invaluable, as they explain with admirable economy a crucial fact that Jonnes, oddly, never mentions: Eiffel’s engineering genius consisted in combining linear and curvilinear support systems — rectilinear cross-braced pylons and arches. This insight is typical of McGregor, who has written three other books in the From the Ground Up series and who is at his best when elaborating on the technical aspects of Paris’s buildings. ...quot...
Alan Rinzler has a must read post over at his blog "The Book Deal: An Inside View of Publishing" about point of view, including some really interesting information about how editors work with authors to revise books with point-of-view issue:
Ask the Editor: Do Publishers Have Rules About POV?
Eamon Dolan at Penguin Press won at auction World English rights to Maureen Stanton’s debut work, tentatively titled WEATHERVANES AND OPIUM BOTTLES; The Passions and Perils of Collecting Stuff. From the populist mayhem of flea markets to the tightly controlled realm of collectors at auction, Stanton unveils the rich, often outrageous subculture of antiques and collectibles. Wendy Strothman of the Strothman Agency, LLC made the sale.
Hali Felt's SOUNDINGS: The Story of Marie Tharp and How She Became the First Person to Map the Entire Ocean Floor, about the tenacious geologist/artist who discovered the mid-Atlantic Rift that proved continental drift, to Marjorie Braman at Henry Holt by Wendy Strothman at The Strothman Agency, LLC (world).
By Christopher Lane, Ph.D. for Psychology Today's Side Effects Blog
... Which brings us to another, almost surreal wrinkle in the story—one I wrote about in my book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. In the fall of 2005, the New York Daily News and Los Angeles Times uncovered, "The rich and powerful pharmaceutical lobby secretly commissioned a thriller novel whose aim was to scare the living daylights out of folks who might want to buy cheap drugs from Canada."
You almost couldn't make this stuff up, yet it happened. Sometime in 2003, PhRMA approached Michael Viner, publisher of Los Angeles-based Phoenix Books (a specialist in tabloid publishing), and offered "a six-figure sum for the marketing and production of a written-to-order fictional thriller." Tongue firmly in...
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