by Jamie Chavez | Apr 12, 2014 | The Book Biz
In keeping with my belief that you should learn more than just #writetips, I’m bringing you a longish article about … well, about agenting, the publishing industry, and how writing a best seller takes equal parts of lucky timing and good writing. I came across it a...
by Jamie Chavez | Mar 20, 2014 | The Book Biz
I laughed out loud when I read this post from literary agent Janet Grant about a guy who got an agent for his first book and was suddenly an expert on the subject. “So who appointed this guy to write about finding an agent,” she writes, “when he was pretty much...
by Jamie Chavez | Feb 24, 2014 | The Book Biz, The Writing Craft
Trying to land a book deal is like trying to land a job. In both cases, the gatekeeper (agent, in-house editor, human resources manager) has lots of applicants for the position (a slot in the Fall 2016 fiction catalogue, a job) and must narrow down the field to,...
by Jamie Chavez | Feb 17, 2014 | The Book Biz
Recently a young writer with whom I’d worked some time before entered a contest that changed her life (I wrote about Natalie here). Her success brought to my attention the phenomenon of the “pitch contest,” in which unagented writers are invited to pitch a manuscript...
by Jamie Chavez | Jan 23, 2014 | The Book Biz
One of the first manuscripts I turned in as a freelance editor caused a minor panic at the publishing house. “This novel is too long,” the managing editor said in an email. “It’s 90K words. We contracted 75K.” (Let me tell you just how many fifteen thousand words are,...
