Writer's Resources Articles

Lit Agent Lauren MacLeod Has "Sweet Spot" for Funny Books

"Lauren MacLeod of the Strothman Agency is poised to help her clients through the ebook revolution. In this interview, she tells us why her agency only takes books that they are passionate about, and why the ebook is not the death of publishing.

What is your title and who do you work for?
I'm a literary agent with The Strothman Agency. I'm terrific at what I do because I stay very dialed into all the digital changes authors are facing both in regards to e-book and publicity and marketing. This puts me in a better position to negotiate on my clients behalf as well as give advice. Furthermore--though I suspect this is true of many agents and perhaps even most people in the publishing industry--I truly love my work and there is nothing I'd rather be doing. If I won the...

From The New Yorker

Alphabet Soup by Susan Orlean

"This is a true story:

My first book was acquired by two people I will call Editor A and Editor B, who ran a small imprint at a big publishing house. We had a great lunch to celebrate. A few months later, Editor A left book publishing to become a newspaper writer. Editor B became my primary editor. She and I had a nice lunch to talk about my book.

A few months after that, Editor B was promoted to publisher of the larger house—let us call it Publisher W—that owned the small imprint. Because Editor B—that is, Editor/Publisher B—now had too many duties to edit my book, I was assigned to Editor C.

Editor C and I had lunch. A few months later, he got a new job at another publishing house. I was assigned to Editor D.

Editor D and I had lunch. It was a pleasant...

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="...

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.

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...

Rachelle Gardner has a great post up on her blog about why authors (as a group) need agents (as a group):

" You, as an individual author, may or may not require the services of an individual agent. But whether or not you realize it, whenever you deal with a publisher, you're benefitting from the collective work of agents over the years.

For the last few decades, agents have been on the front lines when it comes to advocating for authors in their relationships with publishers. It's interesting to speculate on the state of publishing contracts if agents had never been involved and authors had to fend for themselves or just take whatever the publisher was offering. ..."

Reach Rachelle's entire post here.

Since today is "Cyber Monday," we want you to remember your local independent bookseller.  Here's a note from one of our favorites...

The internet is killing storytelling

by Ben Macintyre

Narratives are a staple of every culture the world over. They are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information

"Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that...

By Jonathan Meyer, Intern

November 1 marks the start of this year’s National Novel Writing Month (wonderfully abbreviated as NaNoWriMo).  The event, which challenges people from all walks of life to complete a 50,000-word piece of fiction in 30 days, is in its eleventh year.  In 2008, over 20,000 writers were certified “Winners,” meaning they met or exceeded the minimum word count, turned in their manuscript on time, and made sure their work made at least some sense.     

NaNoWriMo is the literary equivalent of Hands Across America, except with actual...

Agency client (and masterful synopsis creator) Hélène Boudreau has posted an excellent guide to writing synopsis on her blog. This is a great method for authors who have trouble distilling their novels into a one page description.

Read Hélène's 9 step synopsis crafting method here.

This would be funnier if it wasn't quite so true.

From The New Yorker:  Subject: Our Marketing Plan  by Ellis Weiner

I came across this blog post "Johnny, Dressed in Layers" on Edittorrent this weekend and thought it was a really unique way of thinking about creating characters:

"... If you're at all familiar with astrology, you might already have some basis for understanding this concept. (We're going to file this under "things I learned in creative writing school.") When an astrologer casts a natal chart, the first three placements identified are the sun sign, the moon sign, and the rising sign.

The sun sign is a person's core personality, the foundational traits which will always make up part of their character in some way. These traits can be magnified or diminished by other factors, but they're still pretty constant. When we say things like, "Geminis have quick minds," or, "Capricorns are good with money," we're usually referencing a sun sign trait. And when we read our horoscopes in the newspaper, we're reading for our...

Passing along a great essay from The Chronicle Review on how academics can write for trade audiences.

Prune That Prose: Learning to write for readers beyond academe

By Gail A. Hornstein

"... Do you ever read your prose aloud, either quietly to yourself or at a public reading of your work? Too many academics would answer no to that question. We have a kind of reverse aestheticism—if our writing is dense and unwieldy, filled with technical terms and convoluted sentences, we wear its lack of accessibility as a badge of honor.

A friend in mainstream trade publishing, who'd like nothing better than to buy books written by smart people on important topics, cringes when she spies an academic heading toward her at a party. For D and her editorial colleagues, "academic" is shorthand for "lifeless prose, cumbersome to read, filled with unnecessary complication, often disdainful and stridently obscure in style and...

Most of us went into publishing because we love to read.  But too many of us get caught up only in our own projects and don’t have time to savor or recommend books that aren’t our own.  Three books have crossed my desk that I simply can’t resist recommending.  Although I know each of the authors, I’m not the agent or publisher for any of them – I just admire them:

Coming soon from Bloomsbury is Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou.  This utterly original book tackles a topic you might consider intimidating – Bertrand Russell’s search for the fundamentals of mathematics – and turns it into something magical and much more – an exploration of the links between genius and madness.  And it’s a graphic novel with delightful art that brings the story to life.  Trust me – you won’t put it down.

Next is Tracy Kidder...

By Audrey Chait

There is no window in the intern’s alcove where I sit at the Strothman Agency, so I generally have no idea if it’s sunny or pouring buckets. Given the summer I have spent here, it is probably misting humidly in that delightful East Coast way that inflates my hair to the size of Andrew Jackson’s. The agency is tucked away in a building full of law firms at No. 6 Beacon St., and here it has been my pleasure to be an intern at this oasis of historical fiction, food memoir, and teenage superheroes, happily discovering that there are indeed ways to make a career out of reading.

 I read a lot of slush, and some pretty wild things come across my desk. Glittery query letters, missives in other languages,...