Alan DeNiro and Paul Jessup hijinks at Erie Bookstore!

Rumor has it that two of my juvenile delinquent clients, Alan DeNiro and Paul Jessup, will be doing a reading and signing together tomorrow at Erie Bookstore from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM. You can grab a copy of Alan's critically-acclaimed new novel Total Oblivion, More or Less AND a copy of Paul's limited-release novel Open Your Eyes AT THE VERY SAME TIME!

Win a scholarship to the Backspace Writers Conference & Agent-Author Seminar in NYC!

I am thrilled to announce that the good folks at Backspace (an incredible online writers community THAT YOU SHOULD JOIN IMMEDIATELY! GO! NOW!) have once again graciously agreed to donate two scholarships to their upcoming Backspace Writers Conference & Agent-Author Seminar, which will be held in New York City from May 27th through the 29th.

The Backspace Writers Conference (May 28th & 29th) is two days of panel discussions with literary agents, authors, and acquisitions editors, agent workshops, master classes taught by New York Times bestselling authors, and opening pages workshop critiques, PLUS a Friday evening booksigning and cocktail reception. The Backspace Agent-Author Seminar (May 27th) is an extra full day of small-group breakouts with sixteen of my agent colleagues (including Kristin Nelson, Elana Roth, Jason Ashlock, Paul Cirone, Brandi Bowles, Elizabeth Evans, Joanna Stampfel-Volpe and Diana Fox, to name just a few). It's a chance to have your query read and critiqued and to have agents see the first two pages of your novel. The conference itself is held at the Radisson-Martinique in Midtown Manhattan, walking distance from Penn Station and virtually every subway line in NYC. (If you were to pay for the conference & seminar yourself, by the way, it would be $750!)

A special note from Backspace's Chris Graham & Karen Dionne to those wanting to enter the contest:

"As an added bonus, this year we're giving each of the winners a 1-year subscription to the Backspace Discussion Forums ($40/year), where they'll not only have access to all of the terrific information available, but they can also watch videos from our 2009 Writers Conference and Nov 2009 Agent-Author Seminar!"

So how do you enter? Pay attention:

First, three caveats:

1. You MUST have a finished novel that is ready to query. No exceptions.
2. The scholarship covers admission to the conference only, not travel or hotel expenses. If you're coming from outside the New York-area, bear this in mind.
3. The contest is open only to fiction (any genre, adult, YA or middle grade) and narrative non-fiction manuscripts.

The Rules:

1. One entry per person, please.
2. Print out your query letter plus the first two pages of your finished novel, the same two pages that you want to have critiqued at Backspace. The query letter should be single spaced; the two pages of your manuscript should be standard manuscript format: 12-point type and double-spaced. (Remember, only the first two pages, even if it ends mid-sentence.)
3. Mail your entries (yes, on paper, with a stamp - no email entries for this contest!) to my attention at FinePrint Literary Management, 240 W. 35th Street, Suite 500, New York, NY, 10001.
4. Your envelope MUST have the word BACKSPACE written prominently on the front so that I know it's a contest submission. Otherwise it will be recycled by the ever-efficient interns!
   
5. Although you are welcome to submit projects that you'd like us to consider for representation, do understand that your contest entries won't get a response. Only the two winners will be hearing back from us.
6. Don't include an SASE; it'll be a waste of a stamp. (See above.)
7. Don't call or email to follow up on your entry. Trust in the U.S. Post Office. They've been doing right by your mail for 150 years.
8. If you do call or email to follow up, your entry will be disqualified and a voudou priestess somewhere in the wilds of the Louisiana bayou will ensure that you get a nasty rash in an unspeakable place for at least a year.
9. Entries must be postmarked by Monday, March 1st. Entries received with a postmark later than March 1st will be disqualified.
10. The two winners will be announced the week of March 15th.
11. Your judges? That would be my fabulous colleague Suzie Townsend and myself. (And anyone at the office who decides to stay late and help us read the entries. Last year, we received more than 600 entries!)
    

Thanks so much to the wonderful and supportive faculty at Backspace for making these scholarships possible. I'm sure the winners will put them to good use!

(And as if you needed any further incentive to enter the contest, consider this: last year, we had four winners for the Backspace Scholarship Contest; all four found representation through the Agent-Author Seminar!)

Good luck, everyone! And please feel free to repost!

Closed to queries again!

I have more work than I know what to do with, so as of Thursday, February 18th, I am officially closed to queries. Any queries received after that time will be deleted unread. There will be no auto-responder telling people this because that's my everyday work email, and auto-responders are annoying. I'm trusting that you folks follow submission guidelines and pay attention when I tell you things like "Hey, kids! I'm closed to queries!" (Cos y'all are awesome like that!)

When will I reopen again? Beats me. Frankly, I have plenty of clients to take care of right now, and lots of agency work on my plate as it is, so I'm really in no hurry to take on new clients. I'll open when I feel like opening again. That's the most honest answer I can give you.

(And yes, If I have a manuscript of yours, I'll still be getting back to you about it sometime soon.)

Building Your Author Brand: A Course for Writers

A frequent question I hear at writers conferences is how authors can effectively build their platform and their own personal brand.

One great way is to take a class like the one my colleague June Rifkin Clark is teaching at the end of February. June, who was a literary agent for many years, got her start as a marketing and branding expert. Now she works with authors and businesses on how to build brands. Lucky for you, June also teaches an inexpensive workshop in brand-building for authors. And if you're in the New York City area, you can sign up for this class now:

BUILDING YOUR AUTHOR "BRAND"
A Course for Writers

Six Wednesdays, starting February 24 and running through March 31
6:00-8:00 PM

Cost: $240

Whether seeking a publisher, self-publishing, or simply wanting to attract an audience for your work, it's all about your "brand." Over the course of 6-weeks, you'll hone your brand and master platform-building tactics and social media tools that'll cultivate readers and fans, create buzz, and get you noticed!

Location: Pearl Studios, 500 Eighth Ave., New York, NY

For more information and to register, email June at june (at) juneclark.com or call her at (917) 677-9600.

(Oh, and I'll be a guest-speaker on one of these nights, too!)

Guest blogger Richard Bowes: Thoughts on The Catcher in the Rye

Critically-acclaimed writer Richard (Rick) Bowes has published five novels, the most recent of which is From the Files of the Time Rangers (Golden Gryphon). His most recent short fiction collection is Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies (PS Publications). He has won the World Fantasy, Lambda, International Horror Guild and Million Writers Awards. Recent stories are in F&SF, Subterranean Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Sybil's Garage and The Coyote Road, Beastly Bride, Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy and So Fey anthologies. Rick and I recently got into an online discussion about the merits of the late J.D. Salinger's most famous work, The Catcher in the Rye; I asked him to share his thoughts with readers of The Swivet.

No Writer Can Survive Being Assigned in High School
by Richard Bowes

Salinger's death a few days ago brought some mourning and some jeers. The death in a way was overshadowed by his famous book. Lots of people - especially kids who have been forced to read it in school - don't like Catcher in the Rye; they consider Holden Caulfield a whining loser.

But back when Catcher not only wasn't taught and in many communities was not readily allowed into the hands of the young, it had all the magic of the subversive.

Age 15 in 1959, I'd first heard of the book from older kids, but when I went to the Codman Square branch of the Boston Public Library, I found you had to be 18 or older to read Catcher. The excellent children's librarian let me check it out for a week.

I read it two or three times before bringing it back. I'd already read Huckleberry Finn and Evelyn Waugh's comic novel Decline and Fall about a REALLY bad English Public School and loved them. But the narrator of Catcher was almost contemporary and spoke pretty much the way I did. He was Prep School and Manhattan; I was middle/working class Boston. Even then I doubted that we would have liked each other if we'd met. But we were disturbed and pissed off in a lot of the same ways.

Does this make Catcher in the Rye great literature? No. But when it came out it was unique, a novel read mainly by young people, some of them very young at a time when YA as a category didn't exist. There were only adult novels and a substratum of novels for children and very young teens.

By the time Salinger finally produced Franny and Zooey and got on the cover of Time Magazine, two other novels that also appealed to the young - Lord of the Flies (1954) and A Separate Peace (1959) - had started to get mentioned along with Catcher.

Like The Catcher in the Rye, these novels weren't written for adolescents; they were discovered by them.

By 1961, in fact, On the Road (written in 1951 - the same year that Catcher was published - but not published until 1957) had captured the attention of alienated young men. In 1967, S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders was published and the YA category rich in compelling first person narrative was underway.

On a guess, I'd say that by 1976 - twenty-five years after its first publication - The Catcher in the Rye had stopped speaking to kids. It has a cultural significance. Anyone wanting to understand the USA in the 1950's will have to read it. Anyone interested in YA as a phenomenon needs to know this book.

But I think it's pretty much axiomatic that anything that can be assigned in school has already lost its edge.

(The above is a photo of Richard Bowes at the very age he first read The Catcher in the Rye. He doesn't look like a trouble-maker, does he?)