|
|
Home | About Us | Clients | Submissions | News | Events | Links |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
Ted Weinstein Literary Management December 2006 Newsletter |
Here
are a few highlights from the past year at Ted
Weinstein
Literary
Management, including recently released books by our clients, new book
deals and other agency news.  Strategy
consultant and visual thinking guru Dan Roam shares
his insights with a wide range of major organizations, including Wells
Fargo, Wal-Mart, the Federal Reserve of New York, News Corp, Time Warner and many more. His groundbreaking book, The
Back
of the Napkin: Solving Problems with Pictures,
offers unique creativity and visual thinking tools to help readers
develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically
improve the ability to share their insights with others. The book sold
to
Adrian Zackheim at Portfolio/Penguin at auction in a six-figure deal. To celebrate the arrival of his first
child, Chuck Acquisto
secretly
began writing
every day to at least one successful person in the world, asking for
advice on achieving success in life to pass along to his son. The
result is Wisdom
to Grow on: Incredible Letters And Inspiring
Advice for Getting the Most Out of Life
(Running Press), a touching,
inspirational collection of letters from a wide range of
sports legends, politicians, beloved entertainers and many other famous
individuals. Chuck
is donating all the book's proceeds to the Good Tidings Foundation. In
a wonderful honor, the cover design for Craig
Conley's One-Letter
Words:
A Dictionary (HarperCollins) was selected by AIGA,
the professional association for design, as one of the top 100
book
designs of the year. Our congratulations to HarperCollins' legendary
art director Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, who designed the book.
 Richard
Whitmire is a USA Today editorial board
member who
has spent the past three years reporting and writing on the crisis in
boys' education. His first
book is Boy
Troubles: Rescuing Boys from Their Academic Slide,
a provocative investigation of boys' downward spiral of worsening
school performance, diminishing college prospects and reduced career
opportunities. It questions the conventional wisdom,
identifies the core reasons for the decline in their educational achievements, and offers solutions that
are already working in schools around the country. The book
sold to Charlie Conrad at Broadway
Books/Random House at
auction in a six-figure deal. All
American mom and Zen Buddhist priest Karen
Miller
published her first book, Momma Zen: Walking
the
Crooked Path of Motherhood (Shambhala/Trumpeter),
an intimate
and
inspiring guide to the Zen wisdom found in the everyday lessons of
early motherhood. Publishers
Weekly said the book was "realized with warmth, engagement and winning
honesty," while Shambhala
Sun magazine said "Momma
Zen is a book you can read again and again." William
Martin, author of The Parent's
Tao Te Ching called Momma Zen "an
extraordinary book of
practical wisdom... which offers the reader
a way of peace and freedom in the midst of fatigue and doubt." William
Nyogen Yeo Roshi, director of the Hazy Moon Zen Center in
Los Angeles, said "I know her book is
about motherhood, but if this is all you see in this book, you cheat
yourself." Karen's book was a big hit among the leading "mommy
bloggers," one of whom called
it
"a gentle reminder that life is all about the practice, not the
perfect," while another said
the book contains
"enough pearls of wisdom to string a necklace."  Linguist
and pop culture maven A.C. Kemp's The
Perfect Insult for Every Occasion is a brassy,
sophisticated anti-etiquette guide, written with the poisoned pen of a
pampered, high society grande dame with anecdotes to share and axes to
grind. It tosses aside fluffy new age sensitivity in favor of embracing
your inner wolverine. Forget about letting those beneath you eat cake -
once you have mastered the hostility, condescension and irony in this
book, they will beg for the crumbs of your mercy. This hysterically
arch commentary on language and foul-mouthed parody of etiquette books
sold to Jennifer
Kushnier at Adams Media. Office
workers everywhere obeyed James Rogauskas' edict:You! Read this poem!and bought his wry and witty poetry collection Office Haiku: Poems Inspired by the Daily Grind (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press). In this spare, refined art form, James takes aim at daydreaming, boredom, co-worker jealousy, and the innumerable little annoyances of 9-to-5 life, with sections including "Monday Mornings Suck," "Paper Cuts, Office Equipment, and Other Maladies," and "Departmental Meetings." For every Dilbert strip taped to a filing cabinet or pinned to a bulletin board, a haiku from this collection now sits alongside.   Stanford mathematician and NPR's "Math Guy"
Keith Devlin teamed up with Gary Lorden, who is
chairman of the Caltech
mathematics department and the principal math advisor to the hit
prime-time TV crime
series
NUMB3RS, to write the official companion book to the show, The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS:
Solving Crimes with Mathematics.
The
book explains the actual mathematical techniques used by
the
FBI and other law enforcement agencies to catch and convict criminals.
It sold at auction to David Cashion at Plume/Penguin Group.Keith's last book was a hit in the U.S. last year. The Math Instinct: Why You're a Mathematical Genius (Along with Lobsters, Birds, Cats, and Dogs) is an entertaining look at the instinctive math used by dogs, cats, birds, bees and, yes, even humans. This year foreign rights were sold to Distribuidora Record in Brazil Cortina Editore in Italy, and Nippon Hyoronsha in Japan.  Wired
News Managing Editor Leander
Kahney's first two books were The Cult of Mac
and The Cult of iPod. His latest, Chairman
Steve's Little White
Book, comes from an idea he and Ted cooked up sitting at
Caffe Centro in San Francisco's South Park, which many consider the
bellybutton
of the tech publishing world. Chairman Steve's Little White
Book is an unauthorized look at Steve Jobs's
principles for building killer products, attracting fanatically loyal
customers and managing some of the world’s most powerful brands,
showing readers how to be a better leader, manager and entrepreneur.
The book sold at auction to Adrian Zackheim at Portfolio/Penguin. While
Leander completes the manuscript, simple Chinese rights have
already been sold to China Renmin
University Press on the Mainland, complex
Chinese rights to Faces Publications in Taiwan, Japanese
rights to Random House Kodansha, and Korean rights to Booksum. Credit expert and frequent TV personal
finance commentator Erica Sandberg regularly shares
her sound guidance in a wide range of regional and national
media outlets, including the PBS series MoneyTrack.
Now she is writing Expecting Money: The Before-Baby
Financial Guide for New Families, the
first complete and authoritative guidebook on the unique financial
issues facing every first-time parent. Designed to help new families
identify and manage their financial concerns in the months before the
baby's birth, the book's comprehensive approach spans the full range of
pertinent topics – from emotional issues such as stay-at-home parenting
decisions to the practicalities of insurance, disability benefits and
debt repayment. This
ultimate personal finance guidebook for every new parent sold to Shannon Berning at Kaplan
Publishing. Microsoft personal finance writer and
finance consultant Sally Herigstad, CPA's
Help! I Can't Pay My Bills: Surviving a
Financial Crisis (St. Martin's Press) was published
the day after Christmas, just in time for overeager holiday shoppers
to confront their overspending. Over a million people will declare
bankruptcy this coming year and many more are struggling to make it
from day to day. Sally's book is a complete guide teaching readers how
to take control of their finances in the worst of times.In other agency news, this past year Ted attended a wide range of writers' conferences and academic programs, conducting one-on-one sessions with authors and teaching his popular workshops on "The Business of Publishing: What Every Author Needs to Know" and "Writing a Nonfiction Book Proposal That Sells." In addition to offering his regular classes for Book Passage and MediaBistro, Ted appeared at events sponsored by the Northern California Science Writers Association, Women's National Book Association, San Francisco Writers Conference, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Writers League of Texas, Willamette Writers, and several chapters of the California Writers Club. A frequent media commentator, he was featured several times this year on Marketplace Radio, in the American Society of Journalists and Authors' ASJA Monthly, and in the San Francisco Chronicle. Thanks for reading this update. Best wishes for a happy, healthy and successful new year. Click here to read the previous newsletter. |
 |
| ©2007 Ted Weinstein Literary Management New York • San Francisco |
|
|