JOIN US! #AskUpstart Session coming Tuesday, April 9th!

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Category: The Industry

JOIN US! #AskUpstart Session coming Tuesday, April 9th!

The agents of Upstart Crow Literary are hosting an #AskUpstart session next Tuesday, April 9th from 1:00-2:00 pm EST. This is an opportunity to ask us any publishing or book related questions – we’re here to help! In preparation for that, here’s some information about the session.

 

Who’s participating?

Danielle Chiotti, Susan Hawk, Alex Penfold, and Michael Stearns. For more information about each of us, please click the ABOUT link for our bios.

 

What do you represent?

Children’s books of all kinds—young adult, middle grade, picture books, as well as graphic novels, and non-fiction for children and teens. In addition we also rep select cookbooks, adult fiction, and nonfiction. Again, more details and specifics in the About link.

 

Are all four of you open to submissions right now? 

Danielle Chiotti and Susan … [more]

New #AskUpstart Session on Wed, Nov 7th!

I’m delighted to announce that Upstart Crow Literary will be hosting an #AskUpstart session next Wednesday, Nov 7th from Noon-1:00 pm EST. In preparation for that, here’s some helpful information about the session.

 

Who’s participating?

Danielle Chiotti, Susan Hawk, Alex Penfold, and Michael Stearns. For more information about each of us, please click the ABOUT link for our bios.

 

What do you represent?

Children’s books of all kinds—young adult, middle grade, picture books, as well as graphic novels, and non-fiction for children and teens. In addition we also rep select cookbooks, adult fiction, and nonfiction. Again, more details and specifics in the About link.

 

Are all four of you open to submissions right now? 

Danielle Chiotti and Susan Hawk are open. If you’d like to submit a query to one of us, … [more]

#AskUpstart

I’m delighted to announce that Upstart Crow Literary will be hosting an #askagent session next Tuesday, Aug 7th from 1:00-2:00 pm EST. In preparation for that, here’s some helpful information about the session.

 

Who’s participating?  

Danielle Chiotti, Susan Hawk, Alex Penfold, and Michael Stearns. For more information about each of us, please click the ABOUT link for our bios.

 

What do you represent?  

Children’s books of all kinds—young adult, middle grade, and picture books, as well as select cookbooks, adult fiction, and nonfiction. Again, more details and specifics in the About link.

 

Are all four of you open to submissions right now? 

Danielle Chiotti and Susan Hawk are open. If you’d like to submit a query to one of us, please click the SUBMISSION link and check our feeds this week, as we’ll be tweeting … [more]

Hello from my new roost!

Hello from my new roost, Upstart Crow Literary! I’ve been wracking my brain for some hawk-crow-bird related jokes and can’t come up with any, but it all does seem fitting, doesn’t it? I’m delighted to join the very fine group here, and for my first post, wanted to talk about the kinds of projects I’m looking for. For more about my tastes and my background, please read on.

I represent books for children: picture books, chapter books, middle grade, and young adult, along with some non-fiction for children and teens too. First, and most important, I’m looking for books that make me feel something. Grab me by the heart and don’t let go! … [more]

Ballad of a Thin Man: David Denby Doesn’t Get It

DenbyJonesAt the New Yorker, tetchy old fogey and mediocre former film critic David Denby has published a lament about how few teens are reading books these days. He has one great overheard line—a student saying “Books smell like old people”; and a few careful caveats (“It’s very likely that teen-agers, attached to screens of one sort or another, read more words than they ever have in the past”); but mostly he is describing a decline of western civilization via smartphone. “If teachers can make books important to kids … those kids may turn off the screens,” he wraps up, making clear his real issue here: a favored primacy of one form of technology (ink on paper) over another (e-ink or pixels on screens).… [more]

White Writers: Don’t Write Diverse Books. Instead, Read Them.

There have been some great posts this week about the diverse books movement. Jacqueline Woodson’s 1998 article in the Horn Book, titled Who Can Tell My Story has been revived. Ellen Oh’s salient post Dear White Writer takes on diverse books and white privilege. There are numerous other articles and posts I could point you to; the discussion about diverse books is wide, intense, difficult, eye-opening, enraging, encouraging, and exciting.

In the last year, as the conversation about diverse books has picked up steam, a noticeable shift has taken place in my query box. It’s a shift that happens each time the trends change in publishing. Paranormal gave way to dystopian, which gave way to horror, which gave way to contemporary, which has recently given way to…diverse books?

The We Need Diverse Books campaign … [more]

Congratulations to the 2016 ALA Award Winners

It’s a grand day for books, and we’d like to extend our warmest congratulations to the extremely talented 2016 ALA award winners! 37801-2… [more]

Congratulations to the 2015 National Book Award Winners!

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[Winners in boldface, but it was a particularly strong field of nominees this year.]

FICTION
Karen E. Bender, Refund
Angela Flournoy, The Turner House
Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

NONFICTION
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Sally Mann, Hold Still
Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus
Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran
Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light

POETRY
Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn
Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Ali Benjamin, The Thing About Jellyfish
Laura Ruby, Bone Gap
Steve Sheinkin, Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and … [more]

Goodreads Ratings and How to Read Them

goodreads Unlike a lot of people in the publishing industry, I regularly review the books I read on Goodreads, and it has sometimes gotten me into trouble. I’ve been a Goodreads member since shortly after it was founded, and I have a lot of friends there whose opinions I follow. And who follow me. Some people in publishing feel no one in our industry should be on Goodreads at all; one editor noted that he won’t buy books from people who have given a negative review to one of his books. Others see it as a betrayal of our small community, that we should all be cheerleaders all the time, and to ever be otherwise is to be an Enemy of Books.

Well, I think that’s a lot of malarky, as Joe Biden might say. Goodreads … [more]

Five years!

2009 isn’t all that far back, but sometimes it can seem like a lifetime ago.

Lady Gaga was a breakout artist, and Kanye West was stealing Taylor Swift’s microphone. Barack Obama hadn’t yet served a full year—but had already hosted a beer summit. Steve Jobs was alive (if not well), and the iPad hadn’t yet been introduced. Legitimate journalists wrote about things like Farmville and sexting and the Gosselins as though these things were “news.”

And Upstart Crow Literary opened for business. We were four agents who’d met at another, short-lived agency, and we joined forces and announced ourselves that August. So much has happened since! Far too much to adequately cover in this post. So a quick summary with lots of links.

We moved from a PO box to an address on Fifth Avenue; … [more]

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