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In September, Erin Morgenstern will publish her debut novel, The Night Circus–a project that began as a National Novel Writing Month manuscript and endured 30 rejections from literary agents. The Wall Street Journal explored Morgenstern’s “high-six-figure advance” and her potential as a successor to J.K. Rowling, but we uncovered some practical advice for aspiring authors.

Here’s more from the WSJ: “In 2005, [Morgenstern] crashed out a manuscript during National Novel Writing Month … Very little from that early draft survived, but she had an idea that excited her. She worked in bursts over the next several years, writing a sprawling, plotless series of vignettes featuring magicians, acrobats, and a pair of psychic twins. Thirty literary agents rejected her.”

Writers can learn two important lessons from this story. Your National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) manuscript is only a first draft and needs months or years of editing before publication. Most importantly, don’t give up–keep trying to find an agent who loves your kind of story.

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This week a jury ruled that Casey Anthony was not guilty in the death of her child and a judge sentenced the young woman to four years in jail for lying to authorities. As the case winds down, analysts keep asking the same question–will Anthony get a lucrative book deal to write about her experience?

The Boston Herald covered the issue in an article today, including this quote from Emerson College professor Gregory Payne: “She will get top dollar for a book … She’s probably going to be with a very fat ATM card.” What do you think?

As mentioned in the article, this GalleyCat editor doesn’t think Anthony will get a book deal. Despite the not guilty ruling, Anthony will face a lifetime of public scrutiny and speculation. The publishing industry learned its lesson after bad publicity canceled O.J. Simpson‘s pulped book, If I Did It–readers get very upset when an infamous celebrity attempts to make money off a murder case.

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Today our Mediabistro Learn department is offering a special one-day $100 discount on the Nonfiction Book Proposal for GalleyCat readers.

Simply follow this link and use the code use the code GCAT100 to get the discount. The course is taught by Ryan Fischer-Harbage (pictured), an agent at the Fischer-Harbage Agency.

Here’s more about the course: “Got a great idea for a nonfiction book but don’t know what to do with it? With a professional and powerfully-written book proposal, you’ll be able to get the attention of busy agents and editors and sell them on your book. In this workshop, we’ll take your idea, develop it, and turn it into something you can write and sell. By the end of the course, you’ll be armed with a fully realized proposal and the knowledge you’ll need to get it to publishers.”

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Even the most famous authors once struggled as aspiring writers.

GalleyCat contributor Jeff Rivera interviewed novelist Nicholas Sparks for mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do? feature. The author shared some candid memories about his early days as a struggling writer.

Here’s an excerpt: “at 28-years-old, I had realized I didn’t want to move my family every couple of years. I also knew at the same time that I didn’t want to be a pharmaceutical rep for the rest of my life. So, I had an epiphany. I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to give writing another shot’ and you know, I came up with the story for The Notebook, and I had two small children at that time. I had from 9 a.m. to midnight to work and so I did, three or four days a week. Six months later, I had finished the novel. Three years prior to that, I hadn’t written a thing.”

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On Wednesday, December 8th, San Francisco authors can pitch a Chronicle Books editor, receive in-person feedback, and raise money for charity at the same time.

The Pitch for Charity event lasts from 3:00–5:00 p.m., and participants should contribute a suggested donation of $10 for Habitat for Humanity. If you need to polish your book proposal, check our Best Literary Agents on Twitter directory for inspiration and advice.

Here’s more about the event: “You arrive at 3:00 p.m. with your materials. A Chronicle employee will check you in and sign you up for a ten-minute time slot. When it’s your turn, be ready to give your pitch in five minutes or less. The editor will use the remaining five minutes to ask you questions about your project and give you constructive feedback.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Today our Mediabistro Learn department is offering a special one-day 25 percent discount off any online or in-person course, workshop, or seminar. That discount applies to the Advanced Nonfiction Book Proposal, a six-week course in New York City.

Here’s more about the course: “In this advanced class, you’ll work closely with an established literary agent and former editor on your completed draft of a proposal. Through lectures and heavy workshopping, you’ll fine-tune your title, subtitle, pitch letter, comparable titles, author bio, table of contents, and sample material to get your proposal ready to submit to agents … Not all proposals are created equal. Come see exactly how twenty of this instructor’s proposal students have published books with major publishers.”

Below, see a list of published books by former students of this class. The class will be taught by Ryan Fischer-Harbage (pictured), an agent at the Fischer-Harbage Agency. He has also worked as an editor at Little, Brown & Company, the Penguin Group, and Simon Spotlight Entertainment.

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Today TechCrunch reported that Tumblr has recorded more than one billion posts. Even more dramatically, the article counted 7.2 million users and 1.7 billion pageviews a month.

To celebrate, we've collected some of the book deals coming out of this creative blog network. In January 2010, the Stuff Hipsters Hate Tumblr blog sealed a deal. In that post, agent Jason Ashlock from Movable Type Literary Group explained the appeal of Tumblr book deals.

In April, the Hipster Puppies Tumblr blog inked a deal, we interviewed founder Christopher Weingarten about the "Natural Tumblr-to-Book Ecosystem."

In May, What I Wore Tumblr blogger Jessica Schroeder scored a book deal.

In July, S*** My Kids Ruined Tumblr blog signed a book deal.

And don't forget, GQ magazine called for an end to Tumblr book deals earlier this year.

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Earlier this year, novelist Tony D'Souza finished a novel that completely broke out of the style of his first two novels, Whiteman and The Konkans.

When he turned the manuscript in to his agent, Liz Darhansoff, they seriously discussed publishing the novel under a pseudonym to avoid confusing his readership base. What would you do?

In the short essay that follows, D'Souza (pictured) explained what happened over the course of the submission process, as he was forced to ask himself a hard question: "What does one do if one and one's agent disagree?'"

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Reading a work of nonfiction, we forget how much work and reporting goes into proposing the book--years before the book is completed. Today's guest on the Morning Media Menu was Peter Heller, author of the memoir, Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life & Catching the Perfect Wave.

Heller spoke about the art of balancing writing and a day job. He also shared his harrowing experiences with the documentary filmmakers behind the Academy Award-winning film, The Cove.

Heller discussed his long book proposal process: "I was keeping at it, keeping the proposal out there. I wouldn't go without a publisher interested in this, I needed to wrangle a publisher. It took two years to line that up. So there's the persistence thing. If you have the dream, keep knocking on doors, keep sending it out, keep trying."

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Travel writing is a tricky field, but one writer explained how he navigated the "egalitarian" world of travel writing and landed a book deal.

Press play below to listen.

Here's an excerpt: "Starting off with smaller magazines is always good ... For those newspaper travel sections that are still buying freelance travel pieces, and there are less every day, one easy way to break into this is write a destination piece with a strong, unique angle and then send it to them. Newspaper travel editors don't really want to get pitched. It's always on spec--you've got to write it up, send it in, and if they like it, they'll publish it. That's how I got my first break in the Chicago Tribune."

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In light of the recent article in The New York Times about Time Magazine and Politico posting the entire Rolling Stone article on Gen. McCrystal without permission, we wondered how this might affect today's writers.

Many writers like to use "snippets" of others' material previously written yet other writers risk using larger portions bordering on the side of plagiarism or under the guise of "remixing" others' works.

But how does a writer do so without disrespecting another writer's hard work or worse yet encountering a law suit? To find out more about this, we asked veteran publishing attorney, Lloyd Jassin about this issue.

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Do you want to write about your workout? One triathlete and vegan turned his fitness passion into a self-published book, eventually landing a book deal with a major publisher.

Today's guest on the Morning Media Menu was author, vegan, and athlete Brendan Brazier (pictured, via). He told the story of how he self-published a fitness book about living a healthy vegan lifestyle. In addition, he talked about working with Moby on a new collection of essays, Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat).

Press play below to listen.

Here's an excerpt: "In 2004, I wrote and self published a short book about my nutrition plan. I had been racing Iron Man triathlons professionally for seven years--eating a completely vegan diet. I was getting asked all the time where I got my protein, my calcium, my iron, and all these things. It came out in 2004, and did better than I expected. I expanded it and it was published by Penguin Canada."

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Diary of a Wimpy kid has not only blown away cash registers at bookstores but it recently has blown away box office records by racking up over $45 million since its film adaptation's debut.

In our short interview with the director, Thor Freudenthal, GalleyCat had the opportunity to ask him about the challenges of adapting a book into the box office smash.

What were the challenges of adapting the book to the film and still making the fans
happy?

The challenge is that the books are funny but very episodic. They offer a rich collection of loosely connected episodes, you can open the book at any page and find a funny anecdote. But how do you tie these stories together and make a movie? Our approach was to view it as a friendship story between Greg and Rowley. Their relationship creates a through-line in the movie. It's a love story of sorts: Friend takes friend for granted, friend loses friend and realizes what he had, friend has to win friend back. Greg has to put aside his desire for accolades and popularity and learn what friendship really means. Once we had that structure in place, we hung all the favorite episodes of the book onto it.

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Ebook distributor, Smashwords has signed a distribution deal with Apple's new iPad Bookstore. Books accepted in the company's Premium Catalog by March 31st will be eligible and must have an ISBN. However, Smashwords now offers a free ISBN option for those who qualify as well. Smashwords has over 4000 authors who have enlisted in their program and expects many to jump at the chance to be part of Apple's iPad Bookstore.

"The iPad is an important sales platform for indie publishers because the device will introduce millions of new readers to the joys of ebooks," Smashwords founder, Mark Coker told GalleyCat, "We saw this happen with the iPhone and iPod Touch. They weren't really e-reading devices, yet ebooks were one of their most popular uses. With the iPad, Apple is openly embracing ebooks."

Right now Smashwords will not focus on any enhanced books as of yet but will offer traditional ebooks to readers.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

PleaseFireMe.com has just sold the book rights to Citadel Press at auction. Citadel Press is the publisher of the New York Times bestselling book, I Hope They Sell Beer in Hell by Tucker Max.

Acquiring editor, Amy Pyle is said to envision it as a huge franchise. In fact, according to founder and co-author, Adam Chromy, she says, "When I first brought it up at our editorial meeting, our publisher threatened to fire me if I didn't get this book."

The book will be written by Adam Chromy and Jill Morris and will include some of the best posts from PleaseFireMe.com along with funny advice on how to cope or escape malemployment.

Several Hollywood producers are circling the project as a potential sitcom and Chromy is already launching the sequel, PleaseDumpMe.com for all the romantics in the world who are stuck in a love that just can't leave.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Pitching a sports book can seem like a daunting task to an outsider. Yesterday we interviewed Jason Turbow, co-author of the The Baseball Codes--getting a candid explanation of how he pitched the book.

Turbow revealed how his freelance career (he's written for The New York Times, SportsIllustrated.com, and mediabistro.com) helped him find an agent, but also shared his research-intensive pitch writing process.

Here's more about the pitch-writing process: "The pre-preparation in having the idea ready to pitch was key ... the final pitch was enormous. We broke down as many of the rules as we could, did pre-research ... an ex-ball player agreed to sit down with us and have a very candid conversation about the code."

He continued: "That turned into the sample chapter for the pitch. Eventually, it turned into the introduction to the book. He told some great stories. And that helped us give kind of an insider's perspective [in the pitch]. Between a sample chapter and a long explanation of what these rules are--because it gets kind of complex--the pitch was about 40 or 50 pages. Essentially it was all geared toward building excitement."

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Earlier this week, novelist Carrie Vaughn (the author who published seven novels in the Kitty Norville Series with Grand Central) wrote a thoughtful essay about why she chose not to extend her publishing contract Grand Central.

According to the essay, Vaughn didn't leave Grand Central over money or exposure. She was frustrated with her contract's non-competition clause. Read the rest of the essay and weigh in--should more authors be reconsidering their contracts?

Here's an excerpt: "I have two stand-alone contemporary fantasy novels I wrote when I was waiting to see if the Kitty series would sell, and I've been trying to get those out there. Grand Central rejected them. I really wanted to sell them elsewhere. Grand Central really didn't want me doing anything under my own name but the Kitty novels. I really wanted to do them under my own name. So, it was an issue of control. I wanted to be able to diversify my career, publish other novels, expand my audience, and so forth. My agent and I offered compromises, which Grand Central did not accept." (Via Colleen Lindsay)

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Debut novelist Allison Pang (pictured, via her Twitter avatar) recently sold her urban fantasy novel, Shadow of the Incubus--along with two sequels to to the book. Pocket Books executive editor Lauren McKenna acquired the book in a four-way auction. The deal was negotiated by Colleen Lindsay from FinePrint Literary Management.

GalleyCat caught up with Pang, getting some exclusive advice about pitching an urban fantasy novel (or any novel, for that matter). "The only real advice I can give is to write the absolute best book you can and don't send it out before it's ready," explained Pang. "Souring an agent on a story can be hard to come back from. Make sure the agent you're submitting to is actively looking for what you've written--Twitter, Google, Facebook and agent blogs are important tools that should absolutely be utilized."

She continued: "Read other urban fantasy books to make sure your vision is as fresh as it can be. In a heavily saturated market of vampires, werewolves and sword-wielding heroines, it can be difficult to appear unique and you want to make sure your book has every possible chance to stand out."

After the jump, Pang offered some advice about writing pitch letters to agents.

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One of the most famous investigative reporters in the world had troubles shopping his most recent book. Despite having co-written All the President's Men and breaking the Watergate scandal, Carl Bernstein initially couldn't find takers for his next book about Congress.

In a wowOwow column by the great gossip journalist Liz Smith, journalist Bernstein (pictured) gave a glimpse into his next book--an investigation into the legislative branch of the federal government.

Here's more from wowOwow.com: "Carl said he was working now on a book about the vagaries, the achievements and the, yes, crimes of the Congress of the United States. He says, 'It's quite a story and here's the funniest thing about it. When I first shopped the idea around to editors and publishers, I couldn't get anybody even to nibble. But now that the Senate and the House of Representatives have made such a spectacle of not governing in the United States, this book idea is hot, hot, hot!'"

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When Tiger Woods confessed to unnamed "transgressions," last December, GalleyCat urged the golfer to write a book. Our advice went unheeded, and now somebody else is writing the book for him.

In May 2010, Da Capo Press will publish a Woods biography by People journalist Steve Helling. It will be edited by editor Kevin Hanover.

Publishers Weekly has the scoop on the deal: "Helling has written about Woods for a number of years at People and, per Da Capo, he will 'draw on intimate sources, many speaking out for the first time, to create a never-before-seen portrait of the golfer.'"

Woods has already stressed that he had no interest in sharing his story, despite the fact he has already written a book, "How I Play Golf." In December, his statement read: "the virtue of privacy is one that must be protected in matters that are intimate and within one's own family."

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

After drafting a cellphone novel about werewolves on TextNovel.com, author Shannon Delany managed to score a book deal with St. Martin's Press for her 21st Century tome.

Over at InkyGirl, Delany explained how the book evolved from a mobile phone creation to the full novel, 13 to Life. The interview featured cellphone novel drafting tips and explained the unusual way Delany met her agent.

Here's an excerpt: "The Textnovel version of 13 to Life took me five weeks to write (posting two short sections most days, morning and early evening). Then it was an additional month to flesh it out so I was generally satisfied. After copyedits I think the debut novel in the series is right around 370 pages (a far cry from the original cellphone novel which was probably around 50 pages)."

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Friends and foes of MSNBC personality Rachel Maddow will have to wait a little longer to read her book, as the anchor's agent hopes to file the nonfiction book by the end of the year.

The New York Post caught up with Maddow's agent, Laurie Liss from Sterling Lord Literistic. The agent said the book had evolved since the 2008 deal. Here's a quote from Liss, from the article: "'She's been very busy lately,' the agent said. 'Hopefully, she will hand something in by the end of this year.' The topic, she said, has 'changed so many times. It's non-fiction and it's definitely not a memoir.'"

In October 2008, the host of MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" and former Air America host inked a book deal with Crown. According to a Publishers Marketplace (subscription only) the book will examine "how the United States has departed from its constitutional ideals and historical traditions to become a militarist nation, seemingly at peace with perpetual war." (Via Blake Gernstetter)

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Yesterday two blogging journalists, Andrea Bartz and Brenna Ehrlich, landed a book deal for their satirical Tumblr page, "Stuff Hipsters Hate."

After reading the news, this GalleyCat editor contacted the bloggers' agent, Jason Allen Ashlock from Movable Type Literary Group. We asked one burning question: What do these authors bring to the jaded world of blog-to-book deals that we haven't seen before?

Ashlock responded: "The blog to book projects seem tired because so many of them have been one-trick ponies. They're based around a gimmick: They tell a joke and then they tell it again and again. Image, caption, laugh. Image, caption, laugh. Their concepts are thin. The ones that have been really successful, and have a chance of making the backlist, have had a clear editorial voice: there's an honest critique or cultural observation built into the ostensibly humorous project."

He continued: "Stuff Hipsters Hate appealed to me for two reasons. First, it was a Tumblr site, so it had already been formed in a community and so wasn't just being read, but was part of a subculture's conversation about itself. I really think Tumblr is far superior in many ways to other blogging platforms because of this community dynamic."

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Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas just inked a book deal with PoliPoint for a new book with an evocative premise. "American Taliban" will compare the ideologies between the Republican Party and Islamic radicals, ultimately arguing: "progressives hate radical Jihadists for the same reason they hate conservatives--intolerance, militarism, disrespect for democracy, and a desire to impose their regressive mores on the rest of society."

Scheduled for a September 2010 release, PoliPoint plans a 25,000 initial print run for the title. This will be Moulitsas' (pictured, via) third book, joining a growing bookshelf by the prominent blogger: "Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People Powered Politics" and "Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era."

PoliPointPress publisher Scott Jordan had this statement: "With the Teabagger and Birther movements, there has been massive media attention paid to the intolerant radical right, so American Taliban is not only provocative, but also a timely, clear-headed perspective that reveals those who promulgate intolerance, racism, and demagoguery. We're thrilled to be publishing Markos' new book and look forward to helping shape the national dialogue surrounding these domestic threats along with Markos and progressive bloggers nationwide."

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Blogger Eliot Glazer has landed a book deal with Ryan Doherty at Villard Trade Paperback. Entitled "My Parents Were Awesome," the new anthology will feature funny stories and pictures of young parents.

Glazer curates the Tumblr blog, My Parents Were Awesome. The site collects vintage photos of parents, just like that picture of "Vern and Debbie." The deal was negotiated by Hannah Brown Gordon at Foundry Literary + Media.

Glazer was interviewed by NPR about his project, and had these thoughts: "There's so many pictures of, you know, the hippies, the hippy generation just spread out among friends, bellbottoms, flowers in their hair, everything that I know essentially from stories from my parents and books and movies. It existed and it's so cool to see it. You know, the fashion was so different back then and it really comes through in these photos." by

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.