We are so happy to welcome happy author-agent pair Adriann Ranta Zurhellen, Folio Literary Management, and author Joslin Brorsen, who created a magical written world specifically for her son. We love hearing how they found each other—how Joslin’s work fits right into Adriann’s #MSWL—and their tips for how to find a happy creative partnership. You can learn more about Adriann, and book a meeting with her (starting May 4, 2023) here: https://manuscriptacademy.com/faculty-members/adriann-ranta-zurh...
Apr 29, 2023•30 min
Starting Tuesday, April 11 (but on your schedule + available for 30 days!): Three Day Workshop: Think Like An Editor, with daily classes, daily interactive workshops (optional homework + exercises), live Q&A and live, interactive feedback panel. Learn more + get your ticket here: https://manuscriptacademy.com/product/think-like-an-editor Get a free class replay, Your Path to Publication, with Shirin here: https://manuscriptacademy.com/your-path-to-publication We are so excited to get to talk...
Apr 09, 2023•43 min
Starting Tuesday, April 11, join our Three-Day Workshop: Think Like An Editor to learn, through classes, workshopping, Q&A and a live panel to be your own best editor–and focus on changing the elements of your work that can get you published, rejected, or an R&R. Learn more here: https://manuscriptacademy.com/product/think-like-an-editor * The world is a lot right now--politically and otherwise. Here at the Manuscript Academy, we started thinking about what it means to be a good literary...
Apr 08, 2023•29 min
We absolutely loved making this episode! We started randomly calling (opted in) writers for pep talks—and the result is an inspiring, uplifting, life-affirming episode that shows the brilliance of our writing community while also soothing some common stressors. We discuss: * When do I need to pivot? * Am I too old to write a debut? * What makes a writer go from unpublished to successful? And much more. Many thanks to our authors for being part of our episode.
Mar 28, 2023•48 min
Join Shirin Yim Leos and Lisa Manterfield for an evening all about choosing YOUR best path to publication. We’ll cover big five, still-big, university, small, self, hybrid, and more—and the rewards and frustrations of each. We’ll look at how your goals, your personality, and your book’s genre can help decide which option is most likely to bring you personal satisfaction. Get your free ticket here: https://manuscriptacademy.com/your-path-to-publication Invite a friend + enter to win a query consu...
Mar 21, 2023•2 min
We had a great question during one of our Manuscript Academy Welcome Tours: How do you personalize a query if you don't know the date of an agent's #MSWL? Is it still relevant? Will you look silly for bringing up something older? Or are they still relevant for years? Here's how to navigate without a date stamp--and still look well-researched, smart, and like the kind of writer an agent would love to work with.
Mar 21, 2023•3 min
We cannot wait for Thursday's panel with Harper Collins senior editor, Stephanie Stein. If you haven't met her yet, she has kind thoughtful, fun, and she'll give you great feedback on your queries and pages. Enter to win one of five giveaway tickets at https://manuscriptacademy.com/enter. We'll draw the winners randomly Wednesday, March 15th at 1:00 PM Eastern. To learn more about Thursday's panel, head to http://manuscriptacademy.com/stephanie-panel. Everything begins LIVE Thursday, March 16, a...
Mar 14, 2023•44 sec
We are so happy to welcome Jill Santopolo, a New York Times bestselling author *and* editor and publisher at Philomel/Penguin Random House. We talk about what it feels like to pitch your book when you’re already in the industry, how to find experts on exactly what you need to know for your world building and historical accuracy, and how to keep tension when half your story is set in the past. We loved this time with Jill, and hope you will too. This was recorded in front of our Member Lounge, ht...
Mar 12, 2023•36 min
If you’ve been following along at home, you know that ManuscriptWIshist.com version 4.0 just launched. And while it’s new, and shiny, and lovely, it’s ten years in the making. This is the miraculous-feeling story about how we got from Tumblr to Wordpress blog to site where agents and editors can login and make their own updates—the only way we’d still exist, because doing everything manually quickly became impossible. We’ll hear from Mike Chen and Sierra Godfrey, now multi-published authors, who...
Mar 03, 2023•40 min
We had the best time with this panel! Many thanks to our amazing agent panelists. Vote for YOUR genre for the next #MSWL panel! https://manuscriptacademy.com/mswl-live These events will turn into video clips for ManuscriptWishList.com profile, and podcasts for everyone to enjoy. They're recorded in front of our Manuscript Academy (http://manuscriptacademy.com/) members. In order of appearance: Bibi Lewis, doing a query critique: https://www.manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/bibi-lewis/ Emmy Nords...
Feb 16, 2023•58 min
For MSWL’s 10th anniversary (we know! We can’t believe it either!) we’ve invited KK Hendin, co-founder, who made us legit within four minutes of the first tweet. ***The next MSWL day is February 16, on Twitter *and* on your favorite platforms*** We talk about how we went from Tumblr to a real life site to a site where agents and editors could update their own wishes (Jessica and KK were updating them manually before that), the stories we’ve heard of how it’s impacted writing life, and the amazin...
Feb 11, 2023•40 min
Sign up for a free pep talk here! https://manuscriptacademy.com/pep-talk Have you ever had a publishing question you couldn't answer with Google? Or maybe you're just stressed out and wondering if it's time to pivot, panic, or be patient? What if you could have a conversation with a person instead of finding more conflicting advice online? Well, now you can. Last week, Julie and I tried an experiment. For months, we’ve had our friend Mary, our Minister of Writing Happiness, make random calls to ...
Jan 30, 2023•3 min
How To Build Rapport With Agents: How Jonathan Roots Found Agent Renee Fountain Twenty years ago at his local pub, author Joshua Roots had been talking for months about his writing ideas—but doing nothing about them. A friend finally turned to him and said, “Oh my goodness, shut up and write something already.” Thus began the adventure he calls “How To Dumb Luck Your Way Through A Writing Career.“ He wrote steampunk, cozy mysteries, YA fantasy—and, most recently, a nonfiction work about bees. He...
Jan 28, 2023•35 min
Welcome to our latest Mystery Agent episode. We asked you, our lovely writers, to send in your query and first page—and asked a wonderful literary agent to choose a lucky writer for a critique. What follows is the joy-filled, insightful consultation and conversation between them. There are wonderful lessons in this episode about pitching, character development, and more. In this episode, listen as Larissa Melo Pienkowski (Jill Grinberg Literary Management) helps author Justine McDaniel with smal...
Jan 21, 2023•50 min
This episode is all about to get the best return on your time investment, boost your book sales, excel at Instagram—and connect with your audience in ways you never knew possible. Join our Three-Day Submission Strategy Workshop here: https://manuscriptacademy.com/product/submission-strategy-workshop Sarah Blair is an author of sexy, snarky, supernatural fiction. She graduated from the University of Tennessee where she earned her B.A. in Creative Writing, summa cum laude. As an enthusiastic fan o...
Jan 13, 2023•37 min
We are so happy to welcome author Amy E. Reichert to the podcast! She has a number of beautiful novels (all featuring wonderful food writing), her latest being Once Upon a December, a holiday romance featuring a magical Christmas market, a steamy romance, and—of course—gorgeous holiday treats. We also talk about food writing and best how to make it work (what book isn’t better with gorgeous food?), world building in (mostly) contemporary settings, and what special elements you need if you want y...
Dec 16, 2022•33 min
We can’t wait! Join us for our SIXTH annual holiday party, December 13, 8:30pm ET. The event is FREE and open to the public, and features agents Kayla Lightner and John Cusick, good vibes expert Thalia Elie, and writer, book coach, and comedian Anna Conathan. Get your free ticket here: https://manuscriptacademy.com/party Invite a friend to our party here: manuscriptacademy.com/invite-a-friend Anna joins us today to talk awkward conversations, how uncomfortable interactions can pay off—and how ge...
Dec 09, 2022•10 min
We are thrilled to speak with Anne Elliott—who always makes us feel like we’re in the best kind of MFA—about how structure and movement in your story can create the kind of reading experience that keeps people up all night with your book. Whether you’re pitching, published, or both, this is exactly (we imagine) what you want as a reader. Join us November 15-17 for a three-day event on this very topic. Daily classes, supportive community, live Q&A and a live feedback panel. Everything comes w...
Nov 08, 2022•13 min
We loved this event! In a cozy, neighborhood potluck-like format, we chatted with agent Paige Wheeler, who talks everything from comps to first pages to how to get your query ready to send--and where to send it. This episode was recorded in earliest autumn, in front of our Member Lounge audience. Learn more about the Member Lounge here: https://manuscriptacademy.com/member-lounge As the founder of Creative Media Agency, Inc., https://cmalit.com/paige-wheeler/, Paige Wheeler has artfully merged h...
Nov 08, 2022•45 min
We love this conversation about a part of the industry few writers know about--script-to-book, or when a writer is hired to novelize a project originally designed for the screen. Both Bethany and Gigi have successful projects in this area--Bethany Baptiste is the author of Izzy Hawthorne: Destiny Awaits, a script-to-book project based on Disney’s Buzz Lightyear movie, and Gigi Griffis is the author of The Empress, a script-to-book project based on Netflix’s series of the same name. We talk about...
Oct 28, 2022•46 min
We are so happy to speak with author Rachel Harrison about her new feminist werewolf novel, Such Sharp Teeth! This isn’t horror as you’d normally expect it—the cover is pink, the setting includes Target and Starbucks, and the main character is a twin just trying to get control over her new werewolf tendencies—and her love life. We talk about werewolf metaphors for how we can’t control everything (or even most things) about our bodies, how genre is a loose concept that can have one book shelved e...
Oct 19, 2022•28 min
We loved this episode! We talk with agent Ismita Hussain (Great Dog Literary) about short stories, writers making mistakes with QueryManager, New Adult, and what makes a query work for her—and for the majority of agents. Listen in as she goes over what ten writers did right, did wrong—and how their work can help you present your book in the best possible light. Want to go over your query or first few pages with Ismita? Sign up here: https://manuscriptacademy.com/ismita-hussain Ismita is a Georgi...
Oct 11, 2022•42 min
We love this book! You can hear it in our voices, of course, but it’s worth saying again. This is a beautiful and fun historical work—kind of like a female James Bond—and we love the conversation about history and gender roles, building tough worlds but retaining hope, excelling at pacing—and how to write characters who are tired of being scared. (Which, well, many of us can relate to today.) Learn more at https://christine-wells.com/, and order ONE WOMAN'S WAR here: https://www.barnesandnoble.c...
Oct 04, 2022•32 min
We’re thrilled to welcome Bobby Finger, whose book, The Old Place, is so full of twists and turns—many of them with internal, past, and multi-layered conflict—that we had a terrible time not spoiling the ending for you! (Yes, you’ll hear several shout-outs that will make sense if you read the book.) We also talk about symbols (the potato salad!), towns as characters, and how literary fiction needs different qualities to keep readers hooked. Bobby Finger is a writer and co-host of the popular cel...
Sep 28, 2022•31 min
This episode is also a video! If you'd like to view our agent's screen as she works, click here: https://manuscriptacademy.com/mystery-agent-september We love this experiment! We asked you to send in your queries, pages, and questions--all in the hopes of a meeting with our mystery agent. This month, our mystery agent chose a beautiful, intricate thriller--and spoke with the writer about optimizing for how agents read. The edits include reordering, swapping out descriptions, and making sure she ...
Sep 20, 2022•23 min
We are so excited for this episode! It’s truly a case of good things happening for good people. Sierra Godfrey is part of the team that built ManuscriptWishList.com, and now her very own book is coming out TODAY: A Very Typical Family. We invited Sierra and her agent, Melissa Edwards, to talk about the long road here—and what both learned along the way. We discuss agent squishiness (some are warm and fuzzy, and why both types have advantages), how to write conflict when you’re conflict-avoidant,...
Sep 13, 2022•46 min
We asked our Facebook group (join here! https://manuscriptacademy.com/facebook) how we can help, and the questions that came in were fantastic! We’re happy to answer them here. We talk about how your query is like real estate (and most queries are empty lots with one cactus), how to find your best comp titles (and why we think they’re hard too), and a quick marketing overview to get more traffic to your author site (no advanced SEO knowledge needed!). Coming soon! Our Author Site Audit panel: ht...
Sep 09, 2022•22 min
We love this episode! Emmy Nordstrom Higdon, agent at Westwood Creative Artists, was kind enough to join us for a live coffee break with our members—and we ended up talking about so many things! We cover: *How agenting is a style choice *Why writers should have more confidence *How even the IRS probably can’t figure out royalty statements *How to reverse-engineer your search for agents from editor data *How the people you naturally like are the ones you’re going to work with, so there’s no point...
Sep 01, 2022•46 min
How do you write for graphic novels? How do you collaborate with an artist? And what mistakes do most authors make when starting out--and how can you avoid them? Whatever your genre, join us for this fun, funny episode where we cover how to enter this thriving, creative world. Mat Heagerty is a graphic novel author living in Boise, ID. He's dyslexic and struggled a bunch in school, now he writes rad comics like "Martian Ghost Centaur", "Unplugged and Unpopular" and the forthcoming LUMBRJACKULA. ...
Aug 11, 2022•32 min
I think we can all agree the world has been tough lately. To keep your spirits up, we invited some of our favorite friends–agents Kayla Lightner (Ayesha Pande Literary) and Kaitlyn Sanchez (Context Literary), plus writers Anna Conathan (Anna Conathan Coaching) and Cameron Kelly Rosenblum (author of the award-winning The Stepping Off Place) to choose from YOUR pages–and give only positive feedback. What follows is a delightfully fun, uplifting evening designed to remind you of the power of writin...
Aug 03, 2022•47 min
