When we wrote about Aaron Greenspan‘s decision to self-publish his college memoir, “a true story that sheds light on the American educational system, the immense challenges of coping with autism, and of course, the astronomical growth of The Facebook,” earlier this week, we recalled how his original query letter had gone out to just about every corner of the literary agenting world; “apparently,” we wrote, “none of those 800 agents wanted to represent Authoritas.” Greenspan emailed to inform us that wasn’t true, and that he’d had an agent—”who tied for my number-one pick from the moment I learned that agents existed”—for several months, and that the relationship ended amicably:
“I decided that I would be better off starting my own publishing company because none of the larger publishers were definitively interested,” Greenspan emailed, “and even those few who were said that they’d take at least a year to publish the book. Meanwhile, the headlines related to my story are running now, and I’ve had readers asking me when they could purchase the book for months as it is. It’s just good business sense.”
Jonathon Lazear confirmed his “very good” working relationship with Greenspan in response to an email query, saying “it seems that the publishers to whom we submitted his book really wanted the ‘definitive’ book on Facebook, and, as you know, his book is far more broad than that.”
As long as we’re correcting misleading impressions, yesterday’s reference to Heather Armstrong‘s crash-and-burn book deal neglected to mention that the anthology she agreed to edit after resolving the lawsuit Kensington filed against her is coming out this month. Also, somewhere along the line, she sold a memoir to Simon Spotlight, which is the house to which her original would-be editor at Kensington, Jeremie Ruby-Strauss, had decamped back in 2006. From her post about the book earlier this year, though, it appears that Patrick Price has taken an active role on the project.