by Jamie Chavez | Feb 5, 2015 | Books You Might Like
I’ve been publishing a recap, every January (or February!), of every book mentioned in posts during the past year. It’s just a list of of books I talked about last year, here on the blog, and I present them as a cross-reference … in case you were thinking of reading...
by Jamie Chavez | Sep 6, 2014 | Authors & Other Writers, The Book Biz
The guys I hang out with certainly do. But parents and teachers (and data) will tell you their boys don’t read much fiction. There are lots of theories about it, but kids’ author Jon Scieszka (rhymes with Fresca)—a former teacher—was in Nashville recently for a...
by Jamie Chavez | Feb 17, 2014 | The Book Biz
Recently a young writer with whom I’d worked some time before entered a contest that changed her life (I wrote about Natalie here). Her success brought to my attention the phenomenon of the “pitch contest,” in which unagented writers are invited to pitch a manuscript...
by Jamie Chavez | Feb 3, 2014 | Books You Might Like
I’ve been publishing a recap, every January, of every book mentioned in posts during the past year. (Except—whoops—I missed January this year. But maybe you did too? Man, that month went by fast!) Mind you, this is not a list of books I read last year (although there...
by Jamie Chavez | Jan 23, 2014 | The Book Biz
One of the first manuscripts I turned in as a freelance editor caused a minor panic at the publishing house. “This novel is too long,” the managing editor said in an email. “It’s 90K words. We contracted 75K.” (Let me tell you just how many fifteen thousand words are,...
