New Write Stuff editor opportunities!

By Kathryn Craft

With the conference almost sold out, Juliet Grames, of Soho Press, still has appointments available. We know why, of course—most of her acquisitions are in crime fiction set in other cultures, and apparently we don't have any authors at present who are targeting that narrow genre.

Since Juliet's background in publishing and bookselling has so much to offer us, we've decided to do something about that.

To best serve our conferees who do not yet have agent/editor appointments, and to make the best use of Juliet's time and expertise, we are now opening up her appointments to the following additional consultations:

• Literary fiction and memoir.

Juliet writes:
Sorry if I wasn't clear--I DO acquire literary fiction, and also memoir. I just also acquire a very specific kind of crime. And the ratio of titles is really about 1:3, litfic:crime. If you want an idea of some of the books I've bought, I'll post a couple literary fiction deals announcements here.

(World English) Fuminori Nakamura's THE THIEF, winner of the prestigious Oe Prize, the story of a virtuoso pickpocket who is drawn into a web of intrigue in the Tokyo underworld, to Juliet Grames at Soho Press, by Kazuto Yamaguchi at Kodansha, for publication in early 2012.

ROCK PAPER TIGER author Lisa Brackmann's second novel, a literary thriller about an American woman who stumbles into a dangerous circle of spies and cartels in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to Juliet Grames at Soho Press, for publication in early 2012, by Katherine Fausset at Curtis Brown (world English).

THE SPANISH BOW author Andromeda Romano-Lax's THE DISCUS THROWER, about a young German art dealer sent to Italy in 1938 to collect a famous statue for the Fuhrer, pitched as compared to REMAINS OF THE DAY, to Juliet Grames at Soho Press, for publication in 2012, by Gail Hochman at Brandt & Hochman.

• Individual ten-minute consultations on the publishing/writing subject of your choice.

  Possibilities include:

• People who will be ready to pitch next year (they don't have a finished manuscript) but would like to practice pitching this year, and get feedback from a pro.
• People who'd like to get a sense of the commercial viability of their project, or want to ask for an insider's perspective on how to make it more so.
• People who'd like feedback on their query letter.
• People who are stymied by a writing challenge and seek advice. 
• People who might be interested in learning more about how the publishing industry works.

Keep in mind that you'll still only have 10 minutes, so have your material/questions ready.

How we'll do this:

Dianna will give appointments to the first "X" number of e-mails she receives ( X = number of appointments still available). Please put "JULIET GRAMES" in the subject line. You need not tell us what you want to use the appointment for; we'll trust you'll come up with a good idea.

To reduce work on Dianna, who has held up so beautifully to the rigors of registrardom that we'd hate to crack her now, you will only hear back if your appointment has been granted. If you don't hear back, you can assume you were too late.

Please take advantage of this amazing opportunity! On your mark, get set...

...e-mail Dianna!



  

Meet editor Juliet Grames

By Kathryn Craft


When Juliet Grames last came to our conference, in 2008, it was as Editor at Overlook Press. This year she will represent Soho Press, where she is the Crime Fiction Editor. Soho Press was last represented at our 2005 conference, by co-founder Juris Jurjevics.

About Soho Press
Soho Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City. They publish a superior roster of hardcover and softcover trade books that are primarily publishes fiction, with the occasional autobiography or cultural historical account. Completed manuscripts should be 60,000 words or more. While many of their published works arrive here through agents, they place a high priority on publishing quality unsolicited materials from new writers. Authors on the Soho Press backlist include Oprah winner and National Book Award finalist Edwidge Danticat, Sue Townsend, Maria Thomas, Jake Arnott, Stephen Fry, John L'Heureux, Delores Phillips, and Jacqueline Winspear. 


What they're not looking for: Though eager to accept a wide range of literary fiction, they do not consider formula fiction, young adult dramas, stock romances, juvenile literature, short story collections, cookbooks, how-to books, self-help, fantasy, and anything that might recommend itself as a "quick read."


Click here for recent releases.


About Juliet Grames
Juliet is Editor at Soho Press, where she acquires and edits for the Soho Crime imprint. Now 20 years old, Soho Crime specializes in mystery and crimes series set in other countries and cultures. At Soho Crime, cultural components and rich atmospheric settings are almost as important as the mystery itself. If you have a great mystery—preferably the first in an envisioned series—set in a locale outside of the United States, and whose detective or amateur sleuth is native to the locale in question, you should definitely let Juliet know!


In August, after I invited her to the conference, Juliet wrote back:

I would just LOVE to attend! I think you already know how much fun I had in 2008 with you guys.

Just to give you a feel of my new landscape, Soho is freakin' awesome. We do half crime fiction, half literary fiction, and we do acquire from unagented authors. So I'm happy to do pitch sessions, etc. I'm personally the crime specialist here—I do all the crime acquisition and curating—so if you'd like a crime workshop, or some other talk, etc, I am very happy to do one.

And with that, her 2011 Write Stuff session, "Elements of a Bloody Good Crime Novel," was born.


We asked Juliet:

In what ways does your past experience as a bookseller inform your work as an editor? 
I think all editors should work in bookstores at some point—it gives you a great idea about what categories are being sold in retail stores, who buys what, which genres move the most copies, which covers customers react well too, what people are buzzing about. I simply can’t imagine not having that experience before starting in editorial! But I’ve seen it happen where really top-notch editors buy books that end up flopping because there’s no good category for them in bookstores. That’s a mistake a former bookseller would never make!

What is your favorite aspect of your job, and why?
I’m kind of a dork about editing. I love to edit. I love taking something that’s 80% perfect and making it 100% perfect. I love working with authors, exchanging ideas, and collaborating as a team to reach a goal. It’s just so satisfying. Creative people are also generally wonderful people to work with, and I feel really blessed to maintain friendships with authors long after books are published.



For more about Juliet

To get more of a sense of Juliet, check out this letter she wrote to her new company back in May. If you click on the link at the end you'll learn more about Soho Press as well:

Dear Soho Press,

It’s me here, Juliet Grames, your new editor. You know, the one who just started. So I know it’s not exactly elegant for me to come out and say, but I’d better just put it out there, lest it nag at our blossoming relationship. So here goes.

I have a big crush on you.

There, I said it.

It’s true–I’ve had a crush on you for a while, ever since I read my first Soho book... (read more)

Get to know Soho better through Juliet's blog entry about Rock Paper Tiger, a recent release by Lisa Brackman:

Soho publishes two new hardcovers a month: one international detective novel for Soho Crime, and one literary novel or memoir for Soho Press. When I started in May, Ailen, the Marketing Director, slipped me a shiny new copy of Lisa Brackmann’s Rock Paper Tiger, the story of Ellie, a 26-year-old Iraq vet living in China... (read more)

An interview with editor Juliet Grames

The registration links at the conference website go live tonight so that conferees can start marking their choices of limited availability opportunities and pop the registration forms in the mail as early as tomorrow, January 15. 


Those who want to sign up to pitch to agents and editors get only one appointment so we urge you to make an informed choice. To that end, this interview with editor Juliet Grames, who made valuable contributions to our roster at the 2008 conference, completes our seven-part blog series on the agents, editors, and publishers coming to The Write Stuff conference this year. In addition to listening to pitches and serving as a Page Cuts panelist, Juliet will participate with her author, Irene S. Levine, PhD, in a session moderated by Patti Giordani, “A Conversation with an Editor,” about what happens after a publishing deal is signed.

About Juliet Grames
Juliet Grames is an editor for The Overlook Press, a mid-sized independent publishing company in New York, where she has been happily editing and acquiring fiction and narrative nonfiction for the last three years. Out of the 15-20 titles she acquires and edits a year, she works on a very small number of fiction titles, most of them women's fiction with a strong multicultural bent, so she can devote special time and attention to them editorially. 

Among the titles she has acquired and edited at Overlook are the groundbreaking self-help title Best Friends Forever: Surviving A Breakup With Your Best Friend, by Irene S. Levine, Ph.D., Book Sense Pick The Secret Adventures Of Charlotte Bronte, by leading thriller author Laura Joh Rowland; the critically acclaimed Enlightenment, by translator Maureen Freely; Sophie Brody nominee Sima's Undergarments For Women, by Ilana Stanger-Ross; the feminist media critique The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization Of Young Girls And What We Can Do About It, by Dr. M. Gigi Durham, which was featured in such diverse venues as People magazine, Time, and Fox news; and When Autumn Leaves, by bestselling songwriter Amy S. Foster, which has just been released. 

She began her career in editorial at John Wiley & Sons after spending a year at the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency. Before that, she worked as a bookseller at Borders for five years, in her college library for two years, and even in the public library of her tiny hometown. In her free time, she reads.


Juliet's interview with conference chair Kathryn Craft
Kathryn Craft: You say you are most interested in narrative nonfiction, and your examples bear out the fact that this is a pretty inclusive genre. How do you define it? And are you interested in memoir? I know a number of our conferees have interesting memoirs in the works.

Juliet Grames: Don’t get me wrong, I love working on fiction, too. But fiction comes to an editor nearly complete, usually only in need of a little polish. The reason I love working on nonfiction is because it’s a more collaborative process than fiction—I, the editor, get to have a piece of the action! An author generally submits a proposal for a book, and the publishing team gets to work with the author from the ground up on developing the ideal book for the marketplace. Often, narrative nonfiction offers good writers an opportunity fiction does not—the story comes to you ready-made, and your job is to execute it well and interestingly.

For me, almost any kind of nonfiction has potential. The most important component is that there be a need for it in the marketplace—that the content is interesting and that the book offers something new. I personally edit everything from pretty academic history to popular psychology to memoir. Memoirs are fun because they’re essentially nonfiction novels, great stories that are about real people, allowing the reader a real voyeuristic thrill. One memoir I published that I’m really excited about (it just came out in January) is called To Kill a Tiger—it is the story of the author’s childhood in Korea, and the extraordinary circumstances of five generations of her family. I’m hoping it will touch readers as strongly as it touched me. Besides those particular genres, I have also enjoyed working with authors on passion projects, as well. For example, I have published a narrative history of sunflowers, and one of my forthcoming books is about raising a dog in the city. Both things the authors who proposed them happened to be really passionate about.

K: In what ways does your past experience as a bookseller inform your work as an editor?

J: I think all editors should work in bookstores at some point—it gives you a great idea about what categories are being sold in retail stores, who buys what, which genres move the most copies, which covers customers react well too, what people are buzzing about. I simply can’t imagine not having that experience before starting in editorial! But I’ve seen it happen where really top-notch editors buy books that end up flopping because there’s no good category for them in bookstores. That’s a mistake a former bookseller would never make!

K: What is your favorite aspect of your job, and why?

J: I’m kind of a dork about editing. I love to edit. I love taking something that’s 80% perfect and making it 100% perfect. I love working with authors, exchanging ideas, and collaborating as a team to reach a goal. It’s just so satisfying. Creative people are also generally wonderful people to work with, and I feel really blessed to maintain friendships with authors long after books are published.

K: For aspiring authors who have not yet heard of it, what are the best reasons, in your estimation, that an author should consider publishing with Overlook Press?

J: Overlook’s mandate (well, one of them) is to publish books that have been “overlooked” by major trade publishers. The idea was that great books are often passed over because big houses are unable or unwilling to take risks on edgy, literary, or unusual projects, and that we would not let those overlooked masterpieces fall through the cracks. We support literature of quality, and although we do at this point have a number of commercial, money-making books on our list, we haven’t let our original goal go.

There are pros and cons to publishing with both big houses and small presses, and each author’s situation is unique. But for me, a small house represents a second family, as well as a place to shine. There is tons of personal attention you might not get at a big house. At small presses, employees wear many hats, and you can probably bet that everyone at a company is sinking their teeth deeply into each book. If you’re a person who thrives on that level of cooperation, you’d probably find the small press experience really fulfilling. 

Write Stuff registration links go live this evening, January 14, and registration opens with forms postmarked tomorrow. Register early for best choice of limited enrollment options. Days until the early bird deadline, when registration rates increase: 43