Rafael Frumkin’s second novel is Confidence (Simon & Schuster, March 7, 2023. Editor: Carina Guiterman. Agent: Barbara Jones, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency). Rafael Frumkin is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Medill School of Journalism. He is the author of the novels The Comedown (2018) and Confidence (2023) and the short story collection Bugsy (2024). His fiction, nonfiction, and criticism have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Hazlitt, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. He is a professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University. How did you find your agent? I found my former agent, Ross […]
Authors Lunch
PM Tips: Get Real Book Sales Data
Finding out the actual sales for a book—whether it’s your own title, or a comp title you are curious about—can be quite difficult. The gold-standard data service publishers, retailers and agents use to track actual retail sales of trade print books in the US is Bookscan. (It includes Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Costco, Target, Walmart, and many other general and specialty retailers selling books, plus over 800 independent bookstores, covering approximately 85 percent of trade print sales in the US.) As of this week, Bookscan’s parent company has changed its name, so you will see it referred to as […]
Ask An Expert: Editor Sara Birmingham
Sara Birmingham joined Ecco in 2018 after stints at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Oxford University Press. She primarily acquires literary fiction, especially debut, as well as memoir, narrative nonfiction, and essays with a contemporary focus. Is it important for an agent to have preexisting contacts or relationships with editors before submitting a manuscript, especially when it comes to debut fiction? When writers are considering agents for representation, to what extent is this track record of previous sales with particular editors or publishers important, and what does this mean when considering new agents or agent assistants building their own lists? […]
Authors Talk: Deepti Kapoor
The Age of Vice (Riverhead, January 3, 2023. Editor: Sarah McGrath. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM — now CAA.) Deepti Kapoor worked for several years as a journalist in New Delhi. The author of the novel Bad Character, she now lives in Portugal. Age of Vice is a Good Morning America Book Club pick and a New York Times bestseller. How did you find your agent? Through Hanya Yanagihara at a breakfast buffet. Seriously. I had been invited to the Sydney Writers’ Festival because I’d contributed to an anthology about Indian Women. I’d seen that Hanya had said some nice things […]
Ask An Expert: Literary Agent Heather Jackson
Heather Jackson became a literary agent in 2016 after a career as a trade editor for Crown, St. Martin’s, Rodale, and other houses. In her 20+ years as an editor she had dozens of New York Times bestselling authors, including: Tim Ferriss, Suzanne Somers, Joy Bauer, Dr. Robert C. Atkins, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, Dr. Susan Love, Dr. Alice D. Domar, Mallika Chopra, Barbara Sher, and Martina Navratilova among many others. When you are reviewing a submission, what is your process for analyzing a writer’s platform? How do you decide whether the writer seems like the best person to write that book right […]
Ask an Expert: Madeleine Morel
Madeleine Morel of 2M Communications started work as a literary agent/book packager in 1982. Capitalizing on the expertise she’d gained in putting authors and writers together, and recognizing that ‘platform’ was increasingly becoming the buzzword, she decided to exclusively represent ghostwriters who could facilitate books by ‘authors’. She works, on a non-exclusive basis, with over 100 professional ghostwriters, all of whom have been published multiple times by the top publishing houses. Each writer specializes in today’s major non-fiction areas. 2M Communications’ writers have resulted in over 50 New York Times bestsellers, several of which were No. 1. If I work […]