Beyond the Book: Creating a Writing Career
Beyond the Book: Creating a Writing Career from Pipeline Artists - Symposium on Vimeo.
Stop thinking about your book and start thinking about your writing career.
Most writers don’t think beyond writing “The End,” but if you intend to be a professional author, you need to have a plan and make smart career choices to stay on the path to meet your long-term goals—from mapping your next books out, to landing the right agent, and signing with the right publisher.
Chantelle Aimée Osman, the editor of Agora Books, discusses a solid strategy for laying the foundations to career success.
- How to diagnose your manuscript is ready, standard editing mistakes new authors make and how to avoid them.
- Starting to build your team: finding the right agent, and how to get your query to the top of the pile (finding agents: including having more than one agent for film, foreign, etc., how to know if they’re right for you, query letter, synopsis, pitching: in person and in writing).
- Building your team, step two: finding the right publisher (the difference between small, independent and major, considerations in making these decisions as it relates to an author’s overall career plan).
- Ways to make money writing while you write.
- Identifying long-term goals and interim plans to make money and build your brand.
[Recorded January 19, 2022]
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Chantelle Aimée Osman (she/her) is the editor of Agora Books, an award-winning imprint focusing on socially and culturally unique crime fiction and horror from publisher Polis Books. Since its founding in 2019, Agora titles have won three International Latino Book Award medals, been nominated for Edgar, Dagger, Anthony, Strand Critics, Macavity and Lefty awards, and been featured in NPR, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chicago Tribune and Entertainment Weekly. She was named a Publishers Weekly Rising Star honoree in 2020, she is also a professor at the LIU Brooklyn Polk School of Communication MFA in Writing and Publishing, an instructor at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Authors at Large and LitReactor. The former editor-in-chief of RT Book Reviews Magazine and a freelance editor for over 10 years, and has been a judge for the Phoenix Film Festival, International Thriller Awards and the National Association of Hispanic Publication’s José Martí Awards. Chantelle is the author of the non-fiction series on writing The Quick and Dirty Guides To…, has published numerous works of short fiction, and served as the editor of multiple anthologies, including the upcoming Jewish Noir, Volume 2 from PM Press. She hosts the Words of Prey podcast through the Pipeline Artists Network.