The following is a short excerpt from my book Writing and Selling the YA Novel, published by Writer’s Digest.  This section appears in the chapter on finding ideas, and it focuses on one of the most frequent litmus tests used by agents and editors to decide if a proposal is worthy of publication. Knowing whether your idea is an article or a book is crucial to making a sale. It’s also essential for writers who need to maximize their time and energy. Read More...

I’ve been privileged to know Cameron McClure for a long time - ever since our days as assistants at Curtis Brown, Ltd. Since then she’s risen in the ranks at the Donald Maass Literary Agency. I’m very pleased to introduce her to all of you! Read More...

As an author, I’m often asked to write blurbs for up and coming books. Quite often. Of course, it’s a huge honor that an author or their editor would value your work enough to ask you to provide a blurb for them. It’s especially touching when it’s someone’s debut novel and they write you a gushing request letter. But this is also challenging because if I said yes to every request, my name would be on way too many books. Readers would get sick of seeing my blurbs. They’d think, “Her again? Well, this doesn’t mean anything because she blurbs everything!” So, somewhere along the line I decided to limit myself to one blurb per year. I definitely want to support other writers, but I also want my blurb to mean something special. I want my quote to indicate that I connected really strongly with this work. Read More...