Mary Cunnane

One afternoon some three decades or more ago in a stuffy conference room at W.W. Norton & Company, the New York publishing firm where I then worked, the semi-annual sales conference was underway. Assembled were the national sales reps and the marketing team, members of the editorial board, the publicity director and senior publicists, and our president and chairman. A formidable array for edit ... (read more)

There’s a hashtag used among the publishing Twitterati to denote the laughable efforts of would-be authors whose approach to agents and/or publishers is not up to snuff. #Queryfail appears regularly in the tweets of one Major Publishing Player in particular, signalling the sins of yet another supplicant who failed to contact her in the preferred manner, didn’t read her submission guidelines, o ... (read more)