How to Announce Your Book to Readers

How to announce a book deal to your readers

But first, the publishing stories worth reading this week:

How to Use Guest Blogging to Promote Your Book (Beth Hayden on JaneFriedman.com): This is a great all-in-one post on why writers should be guest blogging and how they can go about doing it, with an easy step-by-step process to follow. Take it one step at a time, and you’ll find it’s not as intimidating as it seems!

Not Enough Hours: Marketing Priorities for the Author Without a Team (Chad Cannon): “So what about the author without a team? I often hear frustrations and concerns from authors who want to market their books well, but who feel there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to hit all the ‘perfect marketing plan’ check boxes.”

‘You May Also Like’ and ‘Pretentiousness: Why It Matters’ (Jennifer Szalai for The New York Times): “The word ‘tasteful’ can, like its well-bred cousins ‘refined’ and ‘agreeable,’ function as either compliment or insult, depending on the thing it’s modifying and the person who’s doling it out. Does the thought of spending a day in tasteful company sound enjoyable or unbearable? Would you want to see a tasteful movie? Hear a tasteful joke? Do you think a professional critic should be tasteful? Does ‘tasteful’ entail a cultivated aesthetic, one arrived at through formidable powers of judgment and discernment, or a contrived affectation that degenerates into an automaton-like weakness for bamboo cheese boards and artisanal-coffee-shop playlists?”

The Powerful Case for Developing Your Fiction Writing Platform (Emily Wenstrom on The Write Life): “Your author ambitions don’t stop with one book deal, right? Most writers consider a book release a stepping stone, rather than an end goal. You want to keep growing your audience so your next book sells even better, and so on. This audience growth over time is called the long tail. A platform is key for this.”

How to Announce Your Book to Readers

{By the way, I have a fun little giveaway at the bottom of this post, so scroll down to catch it!}

Last week was one of those weeks I got to say my favorite words: “We’d like to accept your offer.”

I love saying that. It’s one of the shining moments of being an agent, especially when you know how much an author deserves that deal and how much they’re going to love working with that particular editor.

That moment naturally always brings me to this moment: Announcement Day, one of our favorite days around here. Today I have a big “congratulations!” for Rachel Tiemeyer and Polly Conner of the blog Thriving Home, who will be writing a whip-smart practical cookbook called From Freezer to Table: Whole Foods Recipes + Strategies for Cooking Ahead, Freezing, and Eating at Home. Here’s the official Publisher’s Marketplace deal listing:

Rachel Tiemeyer Polly Conner Thriving Home book deal

I have had so much fun working on this project. Polly and Rachel are just dream authors (says the broken-record agent who thinks this about all her authors…but they really are!), and we had a blast coming up with creative ways to make the book even more useful and helpful to readers.

Here’s a little sneak peek at how I described their book in my pitch letter to editors:

When Rachel Tiemeyer gave birth to her son, she had a rude awakening: dinner was not happening anymore. Most nights she would throw her hands up, open up the freezer, and pull out a boxed lasagna or frozen pizza. Her family wasn’t eating well, and she didn’t have a clue what to do about it. That is, until a friend invited her to a Freezer Club in the spring of 2007. She realized that if she wanted to eat healthy, easy, affordable, whole food meals, all while spending less time in the kitchen and more time with friends, then freezer cooking was the ultimate solution.

Now, in From Freezer to Table, Rachel and Polly will share their foolproof freezer recipes that hit the coveted trinity of healthiness, ease, and affordability, as well as step-by-step instructions on exactly how to freeze meals correctly (and how to make sure your friends stay your friends even when the cooking goes wrong!). With over 6 million page views in 2015, Thriving Home has already carved out a large majority of the readership in the freezer cooking world: the site is a top 5 Google search result for all freezer cooking search terms, making it the go-to resource for millions of freezer-curious cooks.

Rachel and Polly announced their book deal on their blog this week, and they did it the very best way:

Read More

5 Cookbooks to Make Healthy Eating Easier in 2015

cookbooks to help with healthy eating

If you like food, (i.e. you are any sort of human), you’ve probably encountered one of the most gut-wrenching struggles of mankind. It is this: food has calories. Calories make you fat. This is not good.

I do wish a scenario had worked out where we could eat unlimited qualities of highly caloric food and feel more energetic and healthy than ever. Part of me is still holding out hope that this scientific breakthrough is on its way. It’s the same part of me that is convinced my life purpose is to eat twelve brownies a day.

BUT, until that golden day, you can bet your butt that I will be trying to get as much flavor out of healthy food as possible. And the best way to do this? To the cookbook shelf!

Here are the 5 cookbooks I’ll be pulling from my kitchen shelf this year to make my “get healthier STAT” resolution happen:

For your post-holiday detox:

Clean Slate

Clean Slate: A Cookbook and Guide to Reset Your Health, Detox Your Body, and Feel Your Best by the Editors of Martha Stewart Living

How gorgeous is that cover? My sister bought this book over the holidays, and we both completely fell in love with the spare but elegant design. It also has options for a 3-Day Cleanse or a 21-Day Cleanse, and the recipes look delicious. If you need to watch what you eat, why not do it in style?

Read More

Easy Garden Frittata

Late August is a cook’s favorite time of year. Especially if you happen to know a gardener with an overflowing veggie patch.

We’re out on the farm this week, and we were so lucky to get baskets and baskets of gorgeous produce from a neighbor. We had insanely delicious heirloom tomatoes, corn, every color and shape of pepper, leeks, fresh dug potatoes, cantaloupes, lacinato kale, curly kale, purple beans, and cukes. Man, it is good to be in with a gardener.

photo (78)

But the best part of all was the farm fresh eggs. Oddly shaped, blueish, orange-yolked eggs.  I dream about these eggs all year. No matter how much I spend on cage-free, organic, humanely raised, pampered and petted eggs from the store, they never come close to these. You just can’t buy this kind of freshness.

afterlight

The only thing to do with a bounty like that? Garden frittata! We sautéed the peppers, leeks, and tomatoes in butter with s&p, added some store-bought chopped portobellos, and then covered the veggies in beaten egg with a splash of half and half. I like to cover the pan so the top can cook, or you can just pop it under the broiler for a few minutes to cook the top.

I meant to take a picture, but Jarrett ate the whole thing too quickly. That’s how most of our meals end.

Hope you have delicious meals and relaxing days ahead of you over the long weekend! I’ll be back next week with more book news and thoughts on publishing.

Read, Eat, Drink–Fourth of July Edition

A weekly round-up of books, news, thoughts, recipes, and miscellany for the weekend.

Read:
It’s just about time for some good fiction summer reads! I read almost entirely nonfiction, since it’s what I specialize in as an agent, but every once in a while I get a hankering to jump into a novel. And that hankering has now hit hard. The problem is, I’m completely hopeless about deciding on just one book when there are so, so many fantastic summer reads I hear about through industry folks. I just can’t do it.

Right now, I’m leaning toward picking up The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty, because it’s guaranteed to be a knock-out (and it has one of the most striking covers I’ve seen in awhile). But what’s everyone else reading? Recommendations wanted!

Liane Moriarty

 

Read More