Authors and Their Editors: James Frey & Sean McDonald
We have a signed copy of A Million Little Pieces that says something along the lines of “Claire Zulkey was the first bleeping person to every interview me. She bleeping rocks!” Now, his book is an Oprah book. Does it have anything to do with my interviews with him? Of course, I take all the credit.
Anyway, the excerpt below is taken from the transcript for a recent interview between James Frey, the author of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard and his editor at Riverhead, Sean McDonald. The interview was moderated by mediabistro.com Education Director, Carmen Scheidel. The full transcript can be found here (AG only).
Scheidel: And so is this where Sean comes into the discussion. How did the actual sale of the book unfold? Were you working with an agent and…
Frey: Yeah, I had an agent. I knew agents from working in the film industry in L.A. It was relatively easy to contact them. The agent sent the book to 18 publishers, 17 said, ‘No.’ Sean was the last one we were waiting for, Nan A. Talese was actually the people I had hoped would publish it. I thought it was sort of a very cool imprint in Random House and they printed a bunch of writers I liked and the books were always beautiful and you know one day we got the call from Sean and he said, ‘I’m gonna have Nan read it, but I’m not optimistic.’ And then two weeks later he called back and said, ‘It’s a go.’ So I was very fucking happy.
Read the whole thing here.
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