Agent Obscura

Hi All.

Ok, so I started a new blog... Hopefully you'll all come visit.
I have no "friends" and so the blog feels vaguely naked.
It doesn't have much there, but I'm gearing up for a good long year of blogging.

:)

Come visit me:

www.livejournal.com/~agentobvious

(if you don't think my new blog title is funny, don't tell me - I am still laughing)

Nadia

Bonjour Blogging Community!

I need some help... hoping y'all would come to my rescue as you have in the past. :)

Chris left Firebrand to take a full time position and I'm in desperate need of some help around the office. Please pass this along to anyone you think might be interested? Thank you!!!


Agency Assistant | P/T

Dear Potential Agency Assistant,

We’re looking for someone who can work with us in our Brooklyn-based literary agency. We have a small office, and we work together closely on almost every project (“we” includes interns, agents, etc), so while we aren’t necessarily looking for someone who wants a career in publishing – we definitely want someone who is reliable, resourceful and smarter than everyone else they know. We want someone who can take a to-do list and maul it to death, who has a great sense of humor, doesn’t believe in “drinking the cool aid” and isn’t likely to blog about the weird conversations that happen here.

Some of the things we’d expect from you on a regular basis:
• Managing submissions and responding to inquiries;
• Providing administrative support (managing agency calendar, confirming meetings);
• Tracking contracts, checks and other important paperwork;
• Reading and evaluating requested material;
• Keeping our databases up to date;
• Hire and supervise interns;
• And more!

Hours: 10-15 hours a week to start, Mondays a must, other hours are flexible.

Please sent an email of interest, a resume if you wish, and your “salary requirements” to Nadia Cornier at nadia at firebrandliterary dot com.

Dear Blog Readers,

So, this is different, eh?

I've had this blog for a few years now and it's been great fun. I've made a lot of great friends from it, received tons of fabulous e-mails (received a few not-so-fabulous e-mails), gotten amazing clients and fab queries, got noticed, got linked to, got unfriended and friended (got dumped once because of it...)... it's been wonderful. When I first started this blog there were very few people in publishing doing the blog thing. In fact, I was told more than once that it was a "really bad idea."

I think blogs are a great idea. There can be a share of ideas, you can reach a bunch of people at once, you can market yourself... and plus, I really like writing!

Here's the thing -- sometimes being one of the first people to get into a thing is a good idea. Sometimes being one of the first people to get OUT of a thing is even better.

I'm definitely not abandoning the ideas behind the reason I got a blog to begin with...
But things are changing and I hate the idea of doing the same old thing, just because I've BEEN doing it.

Here is the plan:

I've had one of my FABULOUS interns (Hi Sonia!) cut & paste all the old entries into different files for me, I've been working on editing the better entries (i.e. the ones about publishing and not the ones about my personal life) and have been adding a lot of information and text from handouts that I wrote and used at conferences. I'm going to put all this into an e-book that you can buy and give a chunk of the proceeds to my favorite writer-charity Absynthe Muse which is currently operating (and doing amazing things for young writers) on a virtually non-existant budget. Since I'm on their board (weeeeee!) I'd like to make a dent in their fundraising efforts because they have a lot of amazing programs in the works.

I'm working on a plan to make Firebrand more inclusively book/marketing/media-friendly. If you read my blog with any regularity you might remember me ranting about how I feel the book market is becoming tighter (not a new theory, mind you) and how regular books are going to have to be replaced by "blockbuster" books, with entire campaigns built around them. I finally figured it was time to put my money where my mouth was (blog was?) and set in motion the things I need to do to help my authors succeed in their careers. I'm looking forward to lots of work, but good stuff...

I'm going to be sending updates about books, awards, releases, rights, etc for Firebrand Clients from the Firebrand website. You can sign up through the website for that newsletter, but it's going to be very dry information (mostly for other people in publishing), but feel free to join up.

In two months (or so), I'm going to try something new... It'll probably be blog-esque, but something *different* and I hope you'll come check it out. I'll post about it here, but if you don't want to keep checking back - you can add me to your feed and then you'll be updated! YAY!

Until we meet again...

Wish me luck!

XO
Dia