About the Author:
As a publishing executive, MARTIN P. LEVIN was involved in publishing books by Stephen King, Erica Jong, Ken Follet, Gay Talese, and many others. After his retirement at sixty-five, he passed the bar and joined a prestigious intellectual property law firm. He is an adjunct professor at the New York Law School, a teaching fellow at the Stanford Professional Publishing Course, and the 1999 American Association winner of the Curtis Benjamin Award for lifetime achievement in publishing. Levin lives in New York and Florida.
From Booklist:
It is becoming the rule these days that first-time authors have little chance of getting published without assistance from an agent. Overworked editors at understaffed publishing companies look upon agent-sponsored projects as a means to "discovering" desirable product and avoiding the tremendous volume of manuscripts flooding their offices. The literary agent plays a major role in evaluating, developing, and marketing practically all fictional works published today. Levin, after a full publishing career at Grosset & Dunlap and the Times Mirror Company, studied law, passed the bar, and is now a counsel to (what is called in the business) an intellectual property firm, representing authors and negotiating contracts; he believes a first-time author can still independently make it to the editor and get his or her work successfully published. Levin shares some of the tools of his trade here, covering the crucial territory the literary agent negotiates so successfully. Some particularly useful material includes Levin's eight-step program for selling a book, a model book proposal with an excellent example of each of its parts, and a discussion on negotiating a contract with a clearly delivered discussion of the poor, fair, and good deals. Leon Wagner
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