Publishing Pulse for July 13th, 2012

 

It's Friday the 13th! Boo!

New At QueryTracker:

Congratulations to our newest success stories! Valerie Cole, Francesca Zappia, and Deanna Romito. 


Six agents updated their profiles this week. Please make sure you double-check every agent's website or Publisher's Marketplace page before querying. Yes, it takes an extra few minutes. Yes, it's worth it.

If you're a QueryTracker premium member, then you can be notified whenever an agent or publisher is added or updates their profile.

Publishing News:

Harper Collins has acquired Thomas Nelson Press, giving them control over more than half the Christian publishing market. I have a soft spot for Thomas Nelson because they published my first novel, so I wish them all the best.

While you're reading your ereader, your ereader is reading you. No, really, you knew this was coming. Your ereader may be collecting data about how much you read, how quickly you read it, and so on. Rachelle Gardner gives a response from a business point of view.

What's the best sentence you've ever written? Tweet it to Galleycat and you could win a free webcast pass to their literary festival and workshops. For the rules and the hashtag you need to use, check out their contest rules.

Also from Galleycat, a talking book cover. This is either very cool or very scary, or both.

Around the Blogosphere:

Janet Reid tells us a fabulous secret to writing a successful query letter in Every Query Letter Must Have This One Thing. (Lest you think I'm being unnecessarily snarky, I've written query letters lacking that One Thing, so I know how easy it is to do.)

Nathan Bransford discusses whether, in the push for tighter stories, books have been stripped too bare.

What to do if you feel your writing life is a bit bi-polar. 

Literary Quote of the Week:

“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.” -Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

That's all we have for now. Until next week, keep those queries flying!

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Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy, to be released by MuseItUp this coming September. She is also 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 riveting Roseanne Wells of the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency.