Jamie Weiss Chilton, an agent with Andrea Brown Literary, says there are two types of nonfiction.
NARRTIAVE NONFICTION should be engaging like fiction—that fact that it happens to be based on real events is like icing on the cake. It’s often illustrated rather than using photographs. Aurhors may use back matter to offer additional information.
INFORMATIONAL NONFICTION offers the facts with no narravtive elements. It uses information sidebars, indexes, italicized words, glossaries, and other elements to teach the information to readers. It’s more text-heavy.
She says when you think about the nonfiction you’re writing, consider the two categories. Research the market to see if there are other books on your chosen topic, and be sure yours has a unique slant.
There are nonfiction books for various age levels each with its own considerations.
Board books: You need a strong platform and credentials. Doing your homework is important. Often board book creators create the content and they may also create novelty formats. (ROCK AND ROLL COLORS is an example.)
Picture books: Today’s nonfiction picture books are different than they were in the' 80s and '90s. Nonfiction picture book text is now shorter and snappier, more witty, clever and funny. The language is accessible and age-appropriate. A strong story arc is important and there must be dramatic tension. Choose a figure, person or event with a dramatic arc. (DAVE THE POTTER is an example.)
Middle grade: Jamie says research is the key—you’re getting into a tremendous amount of research writing a nonfiction book of this length. It’s important for an author to have a strong platform. Also be aware that the cost of photo permissions is taken out of an author’s advance. Some authors use their own photos. (THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE BARBIE is an example.)
Young adult: Memoirs have been doing well and selling well and, again, must read like fiction. Also young readers adaptations (adult books, like THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA FOR KIDS) done over for younger readers. They are relatable and can be aspirational and light and fun or, on the flip side, depressing.
On the GLA Blog: Agent Kelly Sonnack...
Guide to Literary Agents editor Chuck Sambuchino posted an interview with agent Kelly Sonnack who recently joined Andrea Brown Literary Agency. Here's a snippet:
I’d love to see more well-written and clever middle grade fiction. There’s a need for it right now and I see a lot of potential in this market. I’d also love to see more memoir for kids – especially cultural memoir about growing up in different countries, identity, and living across cultures. We are a colorful world, and I’m not sure that’s reflected adequately in children’s lit quite yet.
Click here to read the full interview.
Blogger of the Week:
Christy Raedeke...
Oregon-based YA author Christy Raedeke is a self-proclaimed "compulsive blogger." Here she talks about starting out, why she blogs, and offers some advice to those just dipping their toes into the blogosphere. Click here to visit her blog Juvenescence (I love the name!)
Why did you start blogging?
I really started blogging about five years ago with a blog unknown to even my husband! I think blogging is a really interesting way to get your writing gears moving every morning. A year ago I started the blog Juvenescence, which gave my blogging a bit of focus. Wait, what’s less than a bit? A smidge? Okay, it’s more like a smidge of focus.
What do you blog about?
I started this blog to connect with other writers, not as a marketing tool. I try to include anecdotal information about the publishing process as I go through it and I’ve started doing interviews with debut authors, but a lot of the time I post about things that are happening in my life. Vignettes, I guess.
What advice would you offer new bloggers?
If anyone is thinking of starting a blog, I’d say go for it! It’s free and it’s incredibly easy to figure out. (It takes literally less than five minutes to set up a blog.) Blogging will quickly become a natural part of your daily writing practice. And there’s something magical about the “Publish Post” button that you click to get a new post on your blog; think of it as your daily commitment to publishing. I had no readers the first month, a handful the second, and then the growth was exponential. Stick with it. Post often, even if it’s a short one. Make friends with other bloggers—there are people I know through blogging whom I would hug like long-lost kin if I met them in person, that’s how much I love them.
Tell me about your upcoming titles with Flux.
This was my deal report from Publishers Marketplace:
Christy Raedeke’s PROPHECY OF DAYS, pitched as a YA Da Vinci Code relating to the Mayan calendar which mysteriously ends in 2012, in which a teen, with the help of a gorgeous Scottish lad, must figure out her role in a cryptic prophecy while trying to outwit a secret society that will stop at nothing to control her, to Andrew Karre at Flux, in a two-book deal, for publication in Summer 2010, by Laura Rennert at Andrea Brown Literary Agency (North America).
Check Out Chuck's Blog...
Guide to Literary Agents editor Chuck Sambuchino recently posted notes from a conference session he attended with agent Jennifer Laughran of Andrea Brown Literary and author Wendy Lichtman. They offered tips and advice for writing for tweens and teens.
Click here's to check it out.
I thought I'd take a second today to talk about a book I LOVE, but that you're unlikely to ever have the chance to read. Since no bookstore near you stocks it.
Because the book, BEAUX, is long out of print, and too historically placed, too offensive on its surface (however well written), for anyone to ever bring back from the dead. Though you might find a first edition on ebay if you hunt.
Written by Evan Commmager (friend to Robert Frost and wife to Henry Steele Commager)) and illustrated by the amazing N.M. Bodecker, Beaux (essentially a smart southern belle's YA novel) was published in 1958. But it came out at just the wrong time for longevity.
Because (obviously) in 1958 the world was about to change in important and dramatic ways that would make topics like escaped black chain-gang members (wrongly accused) with thick caricature-ish dialects into innapropriate fodder for light and humorous storytelling.
But the book is also funny and clever and weird and smart as hell, and so if you're someone (like me) who stumbled on it before you were old enough to understand how little you knew about the complexities of race relations, feminism, etc... then you probably liked this book a LOT, since you didn't yet know better.
It's basically the story of a precocious young narrator (Chris), who wants to grow up to be a writer and "pen trenchant novels" in a garret in New York City. But this narrator is certain that such a life won't lead her to produce children, and so she sets out to keep a "book for posterity" for her sister's offspring. (Her sister is a docile and gentle young woman studying at Sweetbriar) So the narrator not only takes it upon herself to write a book for her sister's posterity, but to help her sister produce that posterity. She sets out to find a series of beaux for her sister, so that she can document their stories.
Along the way, she (along with her best friend Junie) tangles with gender and race, and fat old dogs and fleas. She also gets into trouble, throws up, and becomes a "popular girl" at the book's end.
But what makes the book special is voice. There's a strange quality to Chris' narration. A blend of the old south, and a sideways view of that old south. A recognition of the gender divide, and a subtle resistance of that divide. Chris is willful and snarky and iconoclastic, but she isn't addressing the icons directly, and she isn't aware of her own politics. Yet. Rather, she's a tomboy, a contrarian. And so she walks a fine line between the world she lives in, and the world that we (her readers) imagine she must surely be heading for, a world far removed from big layer cakes and blancmange and chautauqua. New York City. Civil Rights. Intellectual friends.
So in the end, I don't think this book *is* politically incorrect. I think its a rare thing, a book thoroughly of its time, but written by someone with a critical eye and a task beyond indictment.
And I think that we often find this in children's books, because they are not required, as many adult books are, to be self-aware. Children can stumble. Children are allowed. To stumble toward the truth, slowly.
Though readers are expected to be a little more savvy.
(I only wish I could find you an illustration online!)
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0 Comments on Jamie Weiss Chilton: the Current Marketplace for Nonfiction as of 1/1/1900
I'm heading over. (There's a bit of a lull at the conference........)