Be Your Own Editor

I came across this contest being held by Crown (an imprint within Random House). It’s a promotional gimmick for a recent novel of theirs by Debra Ginsberg entitled Blind Submission. As the title indicates, it’s about the publishing industry. I haven’t read the novel, but it sounds like fun. And the contest, open only to unpublished, unagented writers, is worth entering.

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Contributed by Sophfronia Scott, aka The Book Sistah

On any given day, how many people, events, problems, projects, family issues, things to remember, and appointments are running through your mind? A LOT, right? If you’re writing a book, you have to add on top of that a whole other world of characters, events, settings, plots, (if you’re writing fiction) or stories, bullet points, theories, and rhetoric (if you’re writing nonfiction). How do you keep track of it all?

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With the tremendous success of such memoirs as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the 1990s and early 2000s saw an explosion in the genre. The boom was seen in the number of memoirs acquired by publishers, the number of titles shelved in the memoir section in bookstores, and, as a result, the number of memoirs unfolding on writers’ computer screens across the country. But the brutal truth is that without a few crucial elements, your memoir will have no chance of catching a literary agent’s eye, never mind becoming a bestseller.

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Contributed by Dee Power

The business of books is big business with 172,000 new titles released in 2005 and sales in the United States of about $40 billion. But what makes a book successful? Are there any common characteristics that can spur on sales? As part of the research for The Making of a Bestseller: Success Stories from Authors and the Editors, Agents, and Booksellers Behind Them, Dee Power and Brian Hill, the authors, surveyed over 100 editors and agents to answer those questions.

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Contributed by Mike Moore

Five years ago I was a professional speaker desperately in need of my own book. After each presentation members of my audience would approach me and ask if had a book or a tape for sale. The need was obvious. The market existed. All I needed to do was write a book and bring it to my audiences. This is how my first book was born.

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Ever wonder what your literary agent will be up to once he or she has found a buyer for your manuscript (besides get taken out to lunch by editors)? Check out this very thorough and, judging from my own experience, accurate depiction of the various roles a book agent plays in the journey from manuscript to bound book, by New York agent Jane Dystel.

Jane Dystel explains “an agent’s job.”