that was a long day

The best bits:

MANUSCRIPT WORKSHOP
10 people with one editor. We all had to read three manuscripts (first 3 chapters of each) and write up a report saying whether or not we recommend this project for publication. There was one I liked, one I loved, one I hated. In our group I was the only person who absolutely loved one of the books. One other person liked it. Three hated it with passion. The other 5 just didn't like it. Turns out this book was our guest editor's recent sale which has shot up the charts and won awards. Also, I wrote that the style reminded me of Nick Hornby, and when I went onto the author's website, the blurb on the front page is from Nick Hornby. I think I have good evaluation skills.

After that, each of us got to pitch a book idea to the editor and she gave us feedback. I pitched my Burbank idea, which is a novel that exists as a blog, but it's fiction. It's a comedy travel blog. She seems to like the idea. She doesn't know much about where digital is taking literature (who does?) but says that this is an "exciting" idea.

PUBLICITY
Neil Gaiman's publicity person did a lecture for us and workshops with each imprint launch. He showed us Del Toro's (Pan's Labyrinth) website for his first novel which just came out. It looks really cool. Check it out. I like the book trailers, but my groupmates aren't wild about book trailers (they wouldn't be good for YA anyway).

OOPS
One of the lecturers gave us his new book (I now have 8 new books!) and now there's rumors spreading about how he plaigerized some passages off wikipedia.

IMPRINT WORKSHOP
We're going with the edgy YA (young adult) imprint, which I'm happy with. I would have been happy with the graphic novels too. We're getting so much more positive feedback in the book program than the magazine one. We had to change our title and concept 4 times for magazines, but our imprint concept has been accepted by judges right away. We're called Asterisk.

Oh, and I signed up to tour Scholastic next week. When I was little and thought authors worked in cubicles and editors came by and told them to write specific books, I wanted to work for Scholastic. I'd still work for Scholastic. I don't like kids, but I like making books for them. I think it's a distance thing.