Sorry, I’m a little late with the post! My excuse is the lazy days of summer are upon us. Hope everyone is beating the heat. By far the biggest news in the industry last week was the liquidation of Borders Books. AP journalist Mae Anderson in this USA Today article presents some of the varying [...]

    This Sunday’s post is brought to you by numbers three, four and five—along with other,  random integers. Excuse the clunky URL’s in the post.  No number was to blame. A certain human, ahem, had issues with WordPress this week. Mystery and young-adult writer Randy Russell touts the “Rule of Three” for pitching a novel and staying on [...]

There was plenty of industry news and buzz coming out of the RWA National conference in New York City, and it has taken a week (or, at least, it has taken ME a week) to process and filter it all. To give you a taste, book reviewer and blogger Dear Author’s Jane posted some Things [...]

Industry News Some independent bookstores now charge admission to author signings in an attempt to wring a buck from the lookie loos who peruse the independents’ stock but place orders with Amazon. While Gawker applauds the fees, the response of agent Miriam Goderich, of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, is nuanced. She sympathizes with the independents’ financial reality yet remembers hanging [...]

Jane Friedman, editor at Writers Digest and blogger at “There Are No Rules” delivered the keynote at the Writers League of Texas’ Agents’ Conference earlier this month and said writers “have more power and control than ever before.” Find excerpts from Friedman’s speech at “TechChi.” At The Shatzin Files, Mike Shatzin discusses the connection between the prices [...]

Publishing was still mulling over trade show take-aways from BookExpoAmerica this past week. Among the more positive reports was this upbeat summary, The Serious Business of 21st Century Publishing, by journalist and publisher Peter Osnos. Osnos reported that: The overall sense in publishing is that, rather than being pushed to the margins of the information [...]

Industry News- June 5 At Writer Unboxed, WF-RWA’s own Jan O’Hara interviews former literary agent Nathan Bransford and asks the questions we’ve wanted answers to since Bransford left Curtis Brown Ltd.  The interview’s a two-parter, so look for the second half soon. Chuck Sambuchino’s Guide to Literary Agents features  a Q & A with Katie Shea of [...]

A few recent posts in the blogosphere and news from this past week’s publishing industry trade show, BookExpoAmerica, may help writers looking to sort out the ever more pressing question of whether to opt for a traditional or non-traditional publishing route—or at least get you thinking. And the answer may well be: both. “The Snowflake Guy,” [...]

Like writers, agents are scrambling to keep up with changes in publishing and some have reinvented themselves. Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware warns in her May 17 post that some agent reinventions may not be in writers’ best interests. Meanwhile, Wylie-Merrick Literary Agency side-stepped the conflict-of-interest issue by dropping the agent label to morph into [...]

How hard an act is Edie Ramer to follow? It takes two of us–Kecia Adams and Pat O’Dea Rosen–to replace her on the Industry News beat. Eventually, we hope to fill Edie’s shoes. Curtis Brown Ltd. agent Sarah LaPolla blogs about five quick fixes to improve your manuscript’s chance of snagging an agent’s interest here. [...]