QueryTracker Blog

Helping Authors Find Literary Agents

Friday, February 18, 2011

Publishing Pulse, February 18, 2011

At QueryTracker.net this week:
Congratulations to our two newest success stories!
A.G. Howard  http://querytracker.net/ag_howard.php
Erin Bowman http://querytracker.net/erin_bowman.php

Our listings this week include a new agent, Wendy Schermer of Mortimer Literary, and updates to thirteen other agents' profiles. Always double-check before you query.


A huge congratulations:
Happy publication day to longtime QueryTracker maven Leah Clifford! Her novel A Touch Mortal will be released this coming Wednesday, February 22nd. 


To celebrate her book release, she has agreed to participate in a live Q&A session on the blog on February 23rd. Anyone will be able to ask her questions in the comments section. She will also provide a signed copy of her book and a 10 page critique as prizes for a raffle. 


Big news:
Borders Books files bankruptcy, listing a total debt of $1.29 billion. Learn more about the causes, other causes, the effects, and whether their location near you is on the list of ones that will be closing. (Your Kobo ebooks, by the way, are perfectly safe.)


Industry news:
AAP reported that electronic books registered $441.3 million for the year among the reporting companies, compared to $166.9 million a year ago. Ebooks made just under 8% of book sales for the year.

Macmillan has launched a romance community site at www.heroesandheartbreakers.com where you can read short stories, get news, writing tips, and a lot more.

With Texas seeking $270 million in taxes from Amazon.com because they have a distribution center in Austin, Amazon has decided to close its warehouse there

Around the web:
It's a dangerous world. Find out how to spot a bogus literary agent. (Keep in mind that QueryTracker's very own Patrick is selective about which agents he puts into the database in order to reduce this risk; you can also check at Preditors And Editors if you aren't sure whether an agency is legit.)


Jessica Faust of BookEnds will be highlighting one query per week on her weblog. It could be yours!


Literary Quote of the Week:
"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking." -William Butler Yeats
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Jane Lebak is the author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. She is represented by the perceptive Roseanne Wells of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.

7 comments:

Anne R. Allen said...

Thanks for the link to my post. I recommend that everybody check here first before querying. QT and AgentQuery are the two most important sources for authors seeking representation. A lot more writers would fall into scam traps if it weren't for your tireless work vetting and researching agents. Thanks from all of us!

Jane Lebak said...

Thanks for a good post, Anne, and thanks for commenting. Stina was the one who referred me to that for the Pulse, and I was glad to feature it. :-)

G. B. Miller said...

I'm curious about something.

It seems like an awful lot of success stories that you provide links to are in the YA genres.

When's the last time you actually posted a success story from a non-YA authour?

I mean, in spite of the fact that the publishing world seems to revolve around the saturated YA market, there are other people out there who don't write YA who would be interested in non-YA success stories.

But then again, since this blog apparently leans extra heavy towards YA to begin with, maybe its a moot point at that.

Patrick said...

Hi G,
You're right, the success stories do tend to be YA or MG oriented, but we have nothing against adult books and I would be more than happy to do a non-YA interview. But I do the interviews of those who contact me with their success story information. If you know of any non-YA success stories, who used QT to find their agent (and there has to be some) please have them contact me.

G. B. Miller said...

Honestly, I don't know of any.

I've been more or less going solo and all the writers that I know on a semi-personal basis are multi-published short story with the occasional book thrown in, and to the best of my knowledge, I don't believe that any of them have agents.

And most of those writers write in genres that no one really pays attention to anymore (i.e. fantasy, horror, crime and western).

It is what it is I guess. To me I equate YA writers with those who follow 'tween pop singers. Same hyperactive mentality.

Anonymous said...

G, I found my agent through QueryTracker. I write adult fiction. (I'm the Jane Lebak who wrote the above post.)

There are plenty of non-YA success stories, but for whatever reason, the YA writers are more forthcoming with their personal stories.

G. B. Miller said...

Congrats on finding your agent through Query Tracker. Hopefully you'll get published within a couple of years.

To me it seems that YA writers are so insanely passionate (or have a major disconnect with people their own age) about their genre, that they act like giddy teenagers (like OMG! the exact generation that they write for!).

And we all know that giddy teenagers (of which I have one plus a tween) like to spread any kind of good news about themselves at the speed of light.

Again, it is what it is.

I'm just making a general observation that it seems that YA is the dominant force in the cyber world and thus an over-emphasis in the publishing world.

Like in this blog.