Want to finish your book this summer? From July 16 through August 1, 2012, Mediabistro will host its first Literary Festival & Workshops. Among our long list of guests, Rebecca Skloot (pictured) will share some Unconventional Publicity tips and Constance … Read More

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has officially filed a major restructuring plan to redistribute the company’s $3.1 billion in debt, entering what they called “a prompt, court-supervised, chapter 11 process.” The company predicts they will emerge from the restructuring by the end… Read More

Get a pen ready. You’ll want to write this one down. You’re writing a masterpiece. It’s going to be the best thing written, ever, by anyone. It’ll be epic and entirely original. Every sentence will flow with wit, while being… Read More

 There’s a lot of talk in the writing/publishing world about contracts. Author/Agent contracts, publisher’s contracts, advances, foreign rights, non-exclusivity clauses. But those aren’t actually the kind of contracts I wanted to talk about today. I want to talk about the… Read More

Authors’ representatives – otherwise known as literary agents – have done some writing on their own this week. In a missive to the US Department of Justice, the board of the Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR) conveyed “in the strongest… Read More

I want to tell you about a late-blooming author, Behcet Kaya. Like many authors, he has dreams of a literary agent selling his novel to a major publishing house, seeing his screen-play adaptation produced as a major film, and selling… Read More

Ann Coulter has landed a book deal with Penguin Group’s Sentinel imprint, scheduled to publish an unnamed book “directly relevant to the presidential election” in October. William Morris Endeavor agent Mel Berger negotiated the deal with Sentinel publisher Adrian Zackheim… Read More

Award-winning novelist SJ Rozan and BookBaby president Brian Felsen sat down at the 2011 California Crime Writers Conference to talk about her creative process, how technology has changed the conversation with publishers, and the tricks that create a memorable book.… Read More

Craft! Platform! Craft!! Platform!! It’s a debate that might span eternity: how much time should you devote to writing versus platform building? I don’t know if there was ever a real beginning to this debate, but if so, it was… Read More

Novelist Abigail Tarttelin just landed a six-figure book deal with Orion Books UK for the UK and Commonwealth rights to her new book, Golden Boy. Publication is set for May 2013. Agent Jo Unwin from Conville & Walsh negotiated the… Read More

GIVEAWAY: I am (again) excited to give away a free copy of either the 2012 Guide to Literary Agents or Formatting & Submitting Your Manuscript, 3rd Ed., to a random commenter. Comment within one week; winners must live in Canada/US… Read More

Mortal Instruments author Cassandra Clare and The Spiderwick Chronicles author Holly Black have landed a book deal for a five-book middle grade fantasy series. Scholastic will publish the first book, The Iron Trial, in 2014. Editorial director David Levithan negotiated the… Read More

Kath here. Today’s guest is literary agent and author Jean Naggar. Jean was born in Alexandria, Egypt. She grew up in Cairo, moving to England, and then New York City, where she currently resides. She is the founder of the prominent Jean… Read More

Happy tax day! We are celebrating with some literary tax tips from a great American novelist. David Foster Wallace‘s The Pale King was among three finalists that did not win the Pulitzer Prize yesterday.  The 547-page novel follows the… Read More

Secret Series author Pseudonymous Bosch (a.k.a. Raphael Simon) has inked a deal for a new middle grade trilogy with Penguin’s Dial Books for Young Readers. The not-yet-titled first book is slated for release in 2013. Literary agent Sarah Burnes (from… Read More

Davian Aw has won the 2012 Lyttle Lytton contest, writing an awful sentence in 25 words or fewer. Here is the winning sentence: “Agent Jeffrey’s trained eyes rolled carefully around the room, taking in the sights and sounds.” The contest… Read More

The rock band Metallica will get a two-volume biography from Da Capo Press. Written by rock author Paul Brannigan and music journalist Ian Winwood, the first volume of Birth. School. Metallica. Death will hit shelves in the fall of… Read More

Writing and Selling an eBook with Kindle Direct Publishing By Michael S. Mitchell The traditional route to getting published was to create your book, and then find an agent to work with you, who will finally get a publisher interested… Read More

From July 16 through August 1, 2012, Mediabistro will host its first online literary festival and writing workshops. Author Susan Orlean will open LitFest with a keynote speech about the story behind her new book, Rin Tin Tin. It will… Read More

“Baffling.” That’s the take from the CEO of the American Booksellers Association. “A big win” says Amazon, speaking not for the e-tailer but – it says – for Kindle owners. “An intrusion into the business sector by the federal government… Read More

As a writer, you may think you have the market cornered on this. This is one job where you can plug away for twenty years without positive reinforcement from the industry. Then one day, everything changes. Instead of an endless… Read More

Macmillan CEO John Sargent has released a public letter addressed to “authors, illustrators and agents,” sharing the moment he decided to join the agency model in 2010–setting prices for eBooks across different retailers. Check it out: “I am Macmillan’s CEO… Read More

Award-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer has inked a deal with W.W. Norton’s Liveright imprint for his first original graphic novel, Kill My Mother. The book is slated for release in fall 2013. Feiffer (pictured, via) will serve as both writer and artist… Read More

For writers who are looking to turn an idea for a book into an actual book, it helps to begin with a book proposal. To help you get this together, we have outlined 7 Steps To A Winning Book Proposal… Read More

Publishing. It’s a business of words. Yet, definitions of many common words in publishing’s vocabulary are evolving and mutating. What we mean by authors, agents, and even publishers is no longer clear. The man who discovered Tom Clancy in the… Read More

"I detest life-insurance agents; they always argue that I shall some day die, which is not so."… Read More

This article was written by guest contributor, Huff-Post blogger, award-winning poet, and teacher Joan Gelfand. Thanks, Joan! It will also reappear in an upcoming BookBaby writer’s guide. —————————– The good news is that while getting published can take time, the road… Read More

Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs executive director who quit his job earlier this month in a scathing New York Times op-ed, has reportedly landed a $1.5 million book deal with Hachette’s Grand Central imprint. Apparently the book inspired a bidding… Read More

Display date on blog post Publisher, distributor, publicist, agent, marketing team, editor . . . The list of titles in the publishing world could go on for half a page. It may seem like there’s a small army of people… Read More

While reading an otherwise well-written and well-edited book, I was bemused to note that the number of high school students in the United States had “lept” from one total to another over a given span of years. How was it,… Read More

Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs executive director who quit his job earlier this month in a scathing New York Times op-ed, is reportedly looking for a book deal. He is said to be working with literary agent Paul … Read More