In this month’s installment of mediabistro.com’s “Book Keeping” series, AvantGuild subscribers learn how Anastasia Goodstein got her book deal for Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online, starting with the way she cold-called ICM agent Kate Lee after reading that Talk of the Town piece back in 2004. But even after scoring an agent, there was plenty of hill left for Goodstein to climb. “I learned quickly that writing a book for parents is tough if you’re not a parent, or a PhD or psychologist,” she tells Rebecca Fox. “I also got feedback that the proposal didn’t offer enough ‘aha’ moments or a strong enough point of view. Finally a young 20-something editor named Becki Heller… ‘got it.’ She had done a lot of music and YA titles, and was a fan of the proposal and the perspective. She felt confident that parents and other Gen Xers would relate to the book.”
Of course, there’s plenty more to the story than that, so if you have an AvantGuild membership, click on through and get all the details…