The First Book Market

Presents resources for first-time authors with lists of awards and publishers who deal with unpublished authors and has advice from contemporary writers on how they got their first book published

This is a great resource for anyone with a first book in the can or in the works. Editor Jason Shinder has gathered together a formidable amount of information on awards for first-time authors and publishers seeking first books. Sandwiched between Shinder's lists are all kinds of treasures: contemporary poets and fiction writers talking about their first books; the stories behind the first books of classic American writers; and information about arts organizations, health insurance for writers, and related publications.

Writing a book isn't easy, getting published isn't easy, and staying in print thereafter isn't easy, either. Prose and poetry writer Terese Svoboda reminds us that "the point of it all is not the book party and certainly not the royalty statement, but the wonderful moment when the story or poem comes together." Henry David Thoreau, we learn, paid for the publication of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which was a miserable failure; "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes," he is said here to have written in his journal, "over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." And Anna Monardo relates the 12-year struggle between the time she first started taking notes toward writing her novel The Courtyard of Dreams and its eventual publication; the book was remaindered a mere 15 months later.

But take heart. What we learn from this book--and particularly from Shinder's very thorough Promotional Action Plan Worksheet--is that a writer's work is far from done when the book is done. Take, for instance, Terry McMillan's all-out campaign for her first novel, Mama. Feeling that the book's publicists were not doing as much as could be done, McMillan sent out over 4,000 letters to her publisher's sales reps, bookstores, various organizations, women's studies programs, college librarians, and readings series. She visited bookstores and autographed copies of her book. The upshot? She did 40 readings, 7 television shows, 6 radio shows, and 14 newspaper interviews, and received over 30 reviews. "The day before my publication date," McMillan writes, "I had sold out of my first printing." Granted, this is Terry McMillan we're talking about. But all that legwork certainly couldn't have hurt. --Jane Steinberg