Lauren Lipton, WSJ columnist and author of the novel It’s About Your Husband, is about to teach her first mediabistro.com workshop —her three-hour seminar on how to get a literary agent will be held this Wednesday night (one of the last classes that’ll be held in mediabistro.com’s SoHo offices, by the way!), and she’s looking forward to the gig, which she landed after recommendations from fellow novelists (and mediabistro.com instructors) Brenda Janowitz and Kristin Harmel.
“I think writers worry about finding an agent as much, if not more, than they fret about the quality of their work,” Lipton emailed me over the weekend. “That’s a shame. When I was looking for representation, I was surprised to find the process far less daunting than I’d imagined it to be. My goal for the seminar is to have people leave feeling calm and hopeful, armed with tools to make their search more efficient. As a special parting gift, they’ll also get the name and phone number of a real, live literary agent who has agreed to let me pass out his contact information.”
Lipton will also be teaching an eight-week advanced workshop on writing chick lit novels starting in mid-May, “though I’m going to call it Advanced Women’s Fiction,” she says. (Still, when somebody from the class sells their manuscript, betcha I know how the cover will turn out…and that’s okay.)