The Publishing Contrarian

They poured down RT 27 East in cars, tumbled off the Hampton Jitney and Hampton Luxury Liner buses and disgorged from MTA Long Island Rail Road double-decker trains that ripped past crawling commuter traffic exiting New York City on the Long Island Expressway. Directors, actors, screenwriters, film critics, film lovers, all gaining momentum and numbers as the weekend approached. By Saturday they were everywhere, overrunning the luxury-store-studded sidewalks, cramming into the local Starbuck’s, and queuing up for the lip smackin’ good, international smorgasbord of films.

Luckily, I was able to be in East Hampton for opening night, Wednesday, October 15th, when the Hamptons International Film Festival actually began. My ticket in hand and press pass dangling from around my neck, I stood gamely in the suddenly bone chilling cold in the ticket holders’ line at 7 PM waiting to see the festival’s opening “Spotlight” film and grousing with other ticket holders about the low-slung, nearly-impossible-to-get-out-of Porsche sporting a handicapped sign and parked right in front of the movie theater.

Gentlemen, Start Your Movies!

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Raise your hands!

Is your anger and resentment so all-consuming that you can talk about nothing to friend and family other than how awful your ex is being toward you, how mistreated and marginalized you were at work, or how loathsome and certifiable your neighbor is? Are you cornering virtual strangers in the supermarket and subjecting them to your indignant tirade, when all they wanted was help getting a can of peas off the top shelf? When you saw Charlie Shanian, Tori Spelling’s ex-husband last week on “The Dr. Keith Ablow Show,” did you scream: BOOK ME!

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Lynne W. Scanlon Offers Book Proposal Critique Service

to Help Authors Reach Literary Agents and Editors…and Get Published!

Lynne W. Scanlon, also known as The Wicked Witch of Publishing ™ and columnist for The Publishing Contrarian, announced today that she is offering a new consulting service at www.thepublishingcontrarian.com/getpublished. The service is directed at writers who have been unable to place their fiction or nonfiction manuscripts with literary agents or publishing houses. The Wicked Witch’s new service is designed to help authors tear apart and reconstitute the materials that literary agents and editors first see when a book proposal is submitted. The Wicked Witch’s critique and personal assistance will include

• Targeting the right literary agents, editors and publishing houses.
• Writing a rip-roaring-good query letter to keep out of the slush pile.
• Creating a page-turning book synopsis that stops a literary agent or editor in his or her tracks.
• Developing a marketing plan that proves to a literary agent or editor that this book will sell!

In her March 14th posting on The Publishing Contrarian, the Wicked Witch of Publishing called for email attachments of sample query letters, book synopses, marketing plans and the first few pages of manuscripts—exactly the materials that had been submitted and rejected repeatedly by literary agents and publishing companies. “I wanted to see why people who could obviously write couldn’t get anywhere with their book submissions to literary agents or editors. Whew! One look at the book submission package and I could see why. The query letters were weak, the synopses didn’t sound exciting, and the marketing plans were unfocused—if they existed at all.”

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The Publishing Contrarian is not about literature or book reviews. It is a freewheeling, often irreverent, unique forum created specifically for the exchange of ideas, comments and news about what’s going on in all aspects of publishing today. 

The Publishing Contrarian welcomes comments from readers. Published comments may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that because of the large volume of comments received, we are unable to acknowledge unpublished comments. 

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The Wicked Witch of Publishing ™, Lynne W. Scanlon, the voice of The Publishing Contrarian, has been a publisher and executive in the publishing business for over twenty years. She is also an author of three nonfiction books with sales in excess of 600,000 copies. Publishing houses include HarperCollins, St. Martin’s Press and Berkley Books.

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