In some respects, the move has surprised even her. “I grew up in Westchester and never had plans to do anything other than move into the city eventually,” she said earlier this week. “And people don’t usually leave Janklow. I’m still the junior member in my department, even though I’ve been with the firm for ten years.” She described the firm as supportive of her move, even considering the possibility of keeping her on as a remote agent, but ultimately heading out on her own felt like the right thing to do, if not always the calmest: “The idea of planning a wedding, starting my own business, and moving cross-country all at the same time isn’t something I ever thought of doing,” she said. But she’s already got three new YA authors whose books she’s preparing to submit to editors shortly after she lands in Denver… and how are she and her fiancé handling the separation until she arrives? “We’ve been playing Lord of the Rings online,” she smiled. “It can almost be like a date night for us, even 1,600 miles apart.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

• Melanie Rehak on Paula Fox, March 2001

• Peggy Orenstein on Phoebe Gloeckner, August 2001
• Maria Russo on Edith Templeton, February 2002
• Maria Russo on Carol Shields, April 2002
• John Hodgman on Susanna Clarke, August 2004
• Meghan O’Rourke on Marilynne Robinson, October 2004
• Daphne Merkin on Alice Munro, same October 2004 issue

So, yes, while my memory had frontloaded all those stories on young men setting the literary world on fire, the magazine’s editors do in fact make room for women novelists—and it’s also worth noting, for those keeping score, the number of strong women journalists who get tapped to write these pieces. (See also, in this vein, Rachel Donadio‘s 2006 piece on South African writers.)

(photos of Clarke and Robinson from the Times)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“I have tried to think deeply about this,” Beah tells Italie about the dispute over whether a battle he describes in his memoir occurred in 1993 or 1995, “and my memory only gives me 1993 and nothing more. And that’s what I stand by.” Italie suggests, politely, that between the chaos of Sierra Leone and the imperfections of memoir writing in general, we’ll never “know” for sure, but the subtextual implication appears to be that all these questions about dates and accuracy might miss the point of the powerful story Beah has told while trying to make sense of his own experiences.

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“On the face of it, book reviewing in this country is in fairly robust health… if anything the trend has been for papers to expand their books coverage, with several—notably the Guardian and the Times—launching stand-alone books sections that are sort of mini-literary magazines in their own right. Newspapers have proved adept at co-opting new trends in book reading and commentary: some have launched literary blogs and book clubs; many sponsor prizes and festivals. A lively chatter surrounds the British book scene, of which newspaper review sections are a central part.”

A lively chatter, that’s the key phrase. To their credit, many American newspapers and magazines are recognizing that their readers want to take part in a conversation about books, and are creating their own spaces to host those conversations, instead of just ceding the territory to bookbloggers and other parties. Because, as Skidelesky quotes British writer Susan Hill, “the lazy, stuck-in-the-mud, cliquey literary editors, and/or mandarins are now almost totally irrelevant,” and something had to emerge to take their place. Skidelesky does see a similar “crisis” looming on the horizon for the British media, but he offers thoughtful suggestions on how to avoid the worst of the what’s happened in the States—the cuts in coverage and the overwrought handwringing that accompanied them—focusing primarily on the idea that literary journalism really needs to get a lot better if it’s going to be genuinely compelling to readers.

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But I did hear about another book deal, one that took place a few months back, that involved a much more successful approach to keeping a “hot” manuscript from circulating into too many hands. As the agent and author for this particular novel, one of the most buzzed-about deals of 2007, tried to figure out how to minimize the exposure of the pages they were sending out, they turned to a technique that’s become increasingly common in the film industry, where script lockdown is a standard practice: protected paper. Had anybody tried to photocopy these opening chapters, we’re told, they’d have wound up with pages that boldly declared their outlaw status, essentially rendering them useless.

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“Despite their embrace of all things digital, a surprising 50 percent of publicists think traditional media has the same impact now as two years ago, versus 35 percent of media people surveyed. And while 40 percent of publicists and 43 percent of media respondents said traditional media outlets have less impact, both groups chose NYTimes.com and PublishersWeekly.com as the most important general news site and book-related site for promoting books.”

Among the other conclusions: Everybody wants a book trailer, even though nobody knows if they really do any good; smaller publishers might be able to abandon marketing to traditional media altogether once they zero in on their target audiences; and YA authors might just be setting tomorrow’s marketing standard: “In a few years, these teens are going to be the target audience for all book marketing,” says one blogger. “I see most, but certainly not all, book advertising online. Look at teen authors—they’ve got it down; they market on MySpace, on their own blogs, and even on other blogs, plus they blog on Amazon.”

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A bundling deal like this seems like an effective way to get people over the “I’m paying hundreds of dollars for this thing, and I don’t get any books to start?” hurdle. Anyone want to put odds on when Amazon.com lets some publisher alter the casing of a Kindle?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Oh, sure, I can imagine the anonymous response already: “Yeah, but I bet Dan Menaker told him he should write about Bock in the first place.” Maybe, maybe not, but, honestly, so what? Frankly, I’m unconvinced that it matters much; as far as I can tell, this just confirms my theory that many of you view the anonymous tip box as an outlet to vent without being held accountable for your negative attitudes.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

At one point during my conversation with Mark Stevens, he mentioned one of his favorite scenes from Don’t Look Back, the D.A. Pennebaker documentary about Bob Dylan. It’s a moment when Donovan comes into the room, picks up a guitar, and plays a perfectly nice song, and then, as Stevens recalls it, “Dylan rips the guitar of his hands almost before he’s finished and plays ‘Baby Blue.’” It’s a powerful metaphor, he says, for the things we do in our daily business lives, and the difference between mediocrity and excellence. “It’s like, this is Donovan, and we need to get to Dylan… But it’s hard to be Dylan!”

So that’s something to think about in terms of the project you’re working on: “Ask yourself,” Stevens says, “is this Dylan or is this Donovan?” (But, before I get a ton of hate mail coming in, being Donovan can be a good thing! Especially around “Atlantis” time.)

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“Great salespeople, whatever their actual careers, have to position themselves as an expert and a friend,” Mark Stevens explained as we sat in the lobby of a hotel off Times Square last week, chatting about his latest book, God Is a Salesman. “Forget the word ‘sale’ and get into the process of knowing the person and letting them know you. If you can let go even just a little bit, people will begin to want you in their lives… and then they’ll start selling you.”

The book defines salesmanship as establishing a faith-based relationship between vendor and consumer, putting forward the vision behind the product; religion, Stevens points out, is one of the most powerful examples of promoting something that doesn’t exist materially, that can be communicated with passion but not simply handed off. But his examples aren’t confined to religion. “You have 100 teachers,” Stevens says. “You remember three. Those three were salespeople… So is anybody who has the power to synthesize information and sell you an idea—a writer, a musician. It’s an art… Business people should be artists. Isn’t Steve Jobs an artist?”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Heather Fain, director of publicity at Little, Brown, introduces Katie Crouch to the crowd assembled for the prepublication party thrown for Crouch’s debut novel, Girls in Trucks, which comes out in April. The back room at Southern Hospitality, Kevin Federline’s Upper East Side bar, was packed with a mix of Little, Brown staffers and transplanted southerners, viewed as one of the key target audiences for Crouch’s story of one girl’s growing up in Charleston, South Carolina and what happens after she leaves.

As the party wound down, Crouch’s agent, Rob McQuilkin, decided to show me the T-shirt she’d given him as a present:

Whether he actually does brake for boiled peanuts was left unresolved.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

On a side note, there was one bit of detail tucked into the article that an anonymous GalleyCat reader considers proof that this week’s literary sensation was, in his words, “the ultimate inside job”:

“Mr. Menaker… is married to Katherine Bouton, deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine, and has written a book of humor with Charles McGrath, a writer at large at the Times. The first episode [of Titlepage] will feature… Charles Bock…”

The conspiracy theory might be undermined, though, by the fact that Bock was brought into the Random House fold by David Ebershoff, not Menaker…

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