Kathy Kmonicek for The New York Times
“For Would-Be Authors, a Chance at a Happy Ending”
By AILEEN JACOBSON
HUNTINGTON, N.Y.
December 10, 2010
SUZANNE WELLS, a slight woman with a careworn face, looked a little shaky as she walked up to the podium and faced a table where four judges sat. To her left was an audience of more than 200 people, ready to listen to her bid to become a published author.
Glancing at her notes, Ms. Wells launched into a description of her life, which started in affluence and comfort and devolved into heroin addiction and poverty, including an excruciating evening “when I took my children to a housing shelter.”
That was one of the more dramatic moments of “Pitchapalooza!” an event at the Book Revue here during which would-be authors pitched book ideas to a panel of publishing experts. All the presenters got advice from the panelists; the winner was to receive an introduction to an agent.
Though only 25 people were chosen at random to make their pitches, 187 had signed up for the opportunity at the Dec. 2 event, which was part of a cross-country promotional tour by David Henry Sterry and his wife, Arielle Eckstut, the authors of “The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published: How to Write It, Sell It and Market It … Successfully!” The crowd in Huntington was the largest yet, they said.
Click —> HERE to read the full story on The New York Times.
“The Book Doctors Offer Cures for Book Proposals”
If hope is a thing with feathers, Politics & Prose Bookstore could have taken flight Wednesday night.
Usually a venue for best-selling authors, the Washington bookstore was filled instead with would-be novelists, expectant memoirists and unpublished writers of all kinds. They’d come for Pitchapalooza! — “The American Idol for Books” conducted by husband and wife team Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry. The Book Doctors, as they call themselves, are the authors of “The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published,” which instantly sold out at Politics and Prose.
Click —> HERE to read the full story on The Washington Post.
“One-Minute Pitches from Aspiring Authors: Publishing Professionals Hear Book Ideas at Pitchapalooza”
“One time, I only held a job for three hours. I hired as a lighting technician at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the early 1970s,” recalled author Steve Turtell. “I nearly killed someone when I lost my grip on a ladder that I was holding up—it just started falling and I froze! Luckily, a lighting cable stopped it from falling all the way over. After that, the guy who hired me asked me to leave.”
Mr. Turtell was in the sunken auditorium at the office of Workman Publishing, an independent publishing house in the West Village on Thursday evening, ready to pitch his book “50/50: 50 Jobs in 50 Years, a Working Tour of My Life.” (He has also worked as a nude artists’ model; a research assistant at PBS; a janitor at Gimbel Brothers; a fashion coordinator at Joyce Leslie; a butcher; a baker; and the director of public programs at the New-York Historical Society.)
Click —> HERE to read the full story on the Wall Street Journal.
As the Ides of March recede into our rearview mirror, the cherry blossoms bloom and the tulips poke their heads out after a long hibernation. The Book Doctors have just returned from an exhilarating, exhausting, and altogether magical trip to that great flyby kingdom called The Midwest.
