How Important Is Genre When Pitching and Promoting Your Book?

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How Important Is Genre When Pitching and Promoting Your Book?

Many novelists, especially those who consider themselves literary novelists, are loath to define their genre. Why reduce their work to a label or box? Doesn’t confining oneself in this way impede the very process of creating art? To get a better understanding of what genre is and how much trade book publishing relies on this concept, I spoke with literary agents T.S. Ferguson of Azantian Literary Agency and Laura Zats of Headwater Literary Management.

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This Month in Book News (January & February 2022)

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This Month in Book News (January & February 2022)

This is the beginning of my series “This Month in Book News,” a new iteration of the “This Week in Book News” segment I previously wrote for my Facebook business page.

February news:

*The finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes

*Addressing racism in “Death on the Nile,” based on Agatha Christie’s book of the same name

*The “bitter row” over Rosemary Sullivan’s THE BETRAYAL OF ANNE FRANK

*The centennial of the publication of James Joyce’s ULYSSES

*Poems by Ukrainian writers Iya Kiva and Ilya Kaminsky

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See second part of post for January news!

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Switching Genres, Categories & More: How Annabel Monaghan Has Scripted Her Own Publishing Path

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Switching Genres, Categories & More: How Annabel Monaghan Has Scripted Her Own Publishing Path

I’m delighted to share my Q&A with Annabel Monaghan, who was my author at Simon & Schuster back in 2007 when I acquired her manuscript for Click!: The Girl’s Guide to Knowing What You Want and Making it Happen. In a rare move, my department ended up rushing it to publication six months after acquisition. Even more remarkable, however, is how Annabel has built such a successful writing career in spite of changing genres, categories, agents, publishers, and her approach to publishing.

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Should You Publish Your Book With a Small Press?

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Should You Publish Your Book With a Small Press?

Small presses have produced Pulitzer Prize winners and International Booker Prize finalists, in spite of sometimes limited budgets or distribution. But not all small presses achieve the same level of success. In some cases, signing with a small press can hinder rather than help a writer’s career, as the Writer Beware website and blog warns. To get a better sense of the nuances of small press publishing, I spoke with literary agents Michelle Brower of Aetivas Literary Management and Jennifer Chen Tran of Bradford Literary.

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Literary Agents Discuss Foreign Rights and the International Book Market

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Literary Agents Discuss Foreign Rights and the International Book Market

Should writers seek publication in the US even if their book’s sensibility isn’t “American”? If they already have a book deal, who should control their book’s foreign rights, their agent or their publisher? How do agents and publishers determine which geographic and language territories they should target around the world, and what sorts of challenges do they face when dealing with foreign publishers?

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