Ask Us Anything: “The Path to Publication”

Featured Presenter(s)

Beth deGuzman, VP, Digital & Paperback Publisher at Grand Central Publishing: Let me come clean: I am a cliché.  I’ve always been a bookworm.  My favorites when I was growing up were The Arabian Nights and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, and later Agatha Christie’s mysteries, P.G. Wodehouse’s hilarious novels, and E.B. White’s essay collections.  In college, I dreamed of landing a job that would pay me to read.  Lucky for me, that dream job has been mine for decades.  Finding great voices and great stories is as thrilling today as it was back when I was an Editorial Assistant, and how exciting that in my role as Digital and Paperback Publisher, I get to explore a variety of ways to share books with readers.  I work hand in glove with Editorial, Publicity, Marketing, and Sales to whip up enthusiasm for our books, and occasionally I get to say “mid-roll” in ebook meetings. Add my leadership of the Editorial and Marketing/Publicity teams of Forever, our romance and women's fiction imprint, and my own acquisitions in suspense/thiller, women's fiction, historical fiction, and commercial nonfiction categories -- well, like I said, a dream job.

Monique Patterson, VP, Editorial Director, Acquisitions Outreach at The St. Martin's Publishing Group: “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town,” by Leo Tolstoy is one of my favorites quotes, because it immediately sets my mind on fire about all the possibilities of a fantastic story. I have a long-standing love affair with books; libraries and bookstores have always been my home away from home. I adore larger-than-life tales spanning across genres, as well as real-life stories that contribute to our collective edification, empowerment, and growth. Finding books and authors that reach across the breadth of our experiences as humans is important to me. Reading and publishing books that reflect who we are—all of the things that make us wonderfully different and also connect us—can be one of the most powerful accomplishments of a book. We are all searching for that, everyday. Publishing commercial fiction, nonfiction, and a select amount of young adult allows me to explore all of those experiences. Some of my more recent titles have been New York Times bestseller Glory: Magical Visions of Black Beauty by Kahran and Regis Bethencourt, the first in a young adult trilogy and New York Times bestseller Spells Trouble by PC and Kristin Cast, the young adult edition of Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A Hip Hop History by award-winner Jeff Chang and Davey D, as well as the upcoming The Orphan Witch by Paige Crutcher, Single Black Female by Tracy Brown and The Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World by New York Timesbestseller Patrisse Cullors.