How Different Agents Are Approaching ePublishing Opportunities
Agents have a wide variety of thoughts and plans about how best to serve their clients and maintain their businesses in this time of digital change. This panel presents four agents with very different practices and approaches.
Charlotte Abbott
Publishing Journalist and Digital Strategy Consultant
Charlotte Abbott coaches authors and agents on creative and results-driven applications of emerging e-publishing tools and services. Her workshops are grounded in her 20 years in the book industry, as a senior editor at Publishers Weekly and an acquiring editor at HarperCollins and Avon Books, as well as her fascination with digital reading and communities, which began with the first wave of e-books in 1999.
Find her on Twitter (@charabbott), where she moderates #followreader chats with industry innovators on Fridays from 4-5pm ET.
Deidre Knight
Senior Agent and President, The Knight Agency
Deidre Knight established The Knight Agency in 1996 after working in the entertainment industry. In the years since that time, she has built a dynamic, bestselling client list, placing nearly eight hundred titles in a broad range of categories, including romance, women’s fiction, personal finance, business, popular culture, African American history, self-help, religion, health, and parenting.
Laura Rennert
Andrea Brown Literary Agency
Laura Rennert is a Senior Agent with Andrea Brown Literary Agency. She specializes in all categories of children’s books, with a particular emphasis on young adult fiction, and represents up-market women’s fiction and narrative nonfiction. Her client list ranges from award-winning and best-selling authors, including New York Times Bestsellers Ellen Hopkins, Maggie Stiefvater, and Jay Asher, to brand new authors.
Laura is also author of BUYING, TRAINING, AND CARING FOR YOUR DINOSAUR (Knopf), illustrated by Marc Brown, and the forthcoming ROYAL PRINCESS ACADEMY: DRAGON DREAMS (Dial, Fall 2012). Laura is spearheading her agency’s development of a program to support clients who want assistance with self-publishing.
Scott Waxman
Principal of the Waxman Literary Agency, Chairman and Co-Founder of Diversion Books
In 1997, Scott founded the Waxman Literary Agency, a mid-sized agency with a roster of more than 200 authors, including many national bestsellers in a variety of fiction and non-fiction categories.
More recently, Scott has founded Diversion Books, a new arm of the agency focused on providing the agency’s authors as well as authors outside of the agency with the benefits of electronic publishing. Diversion has successfully published dozens of frontlist backlist titles, offering authors and agents a total epublishing solution that includes editorial, design, conversion, distribution, marketing and accounting.
Ted Weinstein
President, Ted Weinstein Literary Management
Ted Weinstein is a literary agent who represents a wide range of authors of nonfiction for adults. With a background that includes traditional book publishing as well as the dot.com world, he is currently working with many clients on direct publishing, multimedia projects, and other new publishing models, in addition to a wide range of traditional book projects. More information about his agency and clients is available at www.twliterary.com.
