Golden Apple Awards

This evening, I was given the Golden Apple Award from the New York Chapter of the Romance Writers of America as Agent of the Year. It is quite an honor.

Below is the speech I made:

"I am so honored to be given this award tonight. I can’t tell you how much it means to me.

As many of you know, I have been a literary agent for two decades, where I really started as an agent of horror fiction. I am responsible for the sale of more than 250 vampire novels, and many of them have been romances, although we didn’t call them that years ago.

About 10 years ago, we started calling love with the proper vampire 'paranormal romance'. The romance community truly embraced me, and my writers and junior agents, and made us all feel loved.

I was also an agent of erotic fiction written primarily by women,. They too were taken in by the romance community and you will find many of my authors writing erotic romance happily ever after because they now have a much larger readership.

I am thrilled to be part of this amazing community that continues to grow and support each other, as well as other writers. And this RWA chapter is a dynamic force in this incredible universe.

Thank you so much for this award."

The Golden Apple Award, which fits perfectly in the open palm, is truly one of the most stunning awards out there. Mine has already found its place at the center of my living room table!

Advice to a New Writer

One of my former interns had taken on a new horror writer, whose work has been under submission for 8 months. Most of the houses have rejected him, but he writes in periodically to ask "what's happening?"

I just wrote back to him today, and thought my note to him might be useful to other writers who have recently started the submission process.

"Print publishing is in turmoil right now. Leisure Books has effectively gone out of the print business, and B&N and Borders are having extreme financial difficulties. Mass market sales are suffering during the recession and horror is mass market. It's also summer. So, in all likelihood nothing is happening and nothing will be happening soon. I think it's almost impossible to place a first horror novel right now in print.

I can refer you to one of the other agents in house (go to our website) after Labor Day, but I do think epub is probably the way to go for horror right now.

Just because you are new is no reason for you to fail to follow publishing news. You should be reading the Writer's Digest blogs, Publisher's Weekly and Publisher's Marketplace, as well as Galleycat."