Article Archive: The Practical Writer

After a hotly contested auction among ten major publishers, twenty-eight-year-old Claire Vaye Watkins’s debut story collection, Battleborn, has arrived.  

Three authors who followed very different paths to publication in 2011 speak about what they learned after their books were published, including hard lessons about publicity and reviews, readings and events, and advertising and sales.

The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.

Gabriel Cohen, coordinator of Sundays at Sunny’s, one of New York City’s longest-running literary reading series, talks with John B. Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, who demystifies the complexity of the book-publishing industry in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

The former executive editor of Alice James Books reveals her strategies for editing a strong book.

When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.

The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.

Today, Karl Marlantes's debut novel is garnering praise for its vivid, trenchant portrayal of American soldiers in the thick of the Vietnam War. But for more than thirty years, the manuscript languished in literary purgatory, while the author struggled to find an agent—not to mention a publisher—willing to take it on.