My Favorite Reads of 2020

To say this year was a strange one, is such a wild understatement. There was a lot of loss and pain, and through all of that, I turned to what I usually do. Writing and reading. And goodness, did I read a lot of books this year. Did I write any? Well, depends on what your definition of “a book” is.

I wrote a little over on BookRiot about how in the midst of the pandemic, I turned to romance novels as my escapist fantasy reads. And it’s true. I found a lot of joy in rom-coms, getting lost in meet cutes and disaster filled dates this year. It was also an absolutely outrageous year for Young Adult books, my goodness.

Anyhow, time to share.

Young Adult and Middle Grade: Over on BookRiot, I mentioned how When You Were Everything by Ashley Woodfolk was my favorite Young Adult novel of the year. That still tracks. It’s a spectacularly moving novel about friendship and loss, that I will likely be screaming about for years to come.

Other Young Adult novels I inhaled, and haven’t stopped talking about this year? Not So Pure and Simple by Lamar Giles, We Didn’t Ask For This by Adi Alsaid, I Kissed Alice by Anna Birch, The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper, Yes No Maybe So by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed, Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold, We Are Not From Here by Jenny Torres Sanchez, Cinderella Is Dead by Kalynn Bayron, You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson, and The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow.

From tackling toxic masculinity, to fierce political battles, to beautiful inclusive romances, these books all captured my heart in huge ways. They were novels that I threw at friends all year long, and recommended to my many MFA students writing their own YA novels.

In the Middle Grade space, I didn’t get to read as much as I’d like. I loved Con Quest by Sam Maggs (I even blurbed it) and Ghost Squad by Claribel Ortega, two wildly different novels that both have family right at their hearts. And of course there was Marvel: Avengers Assembly: Orientation by Preeti Chhibber, a heartfelt superhero book all about friendship. Ah! And The Only Black Girls in Town by Brandy Colbert! Okay maybe I did read a fair amount of Middle Grade.

Romances: Ah yes, the books that saved me this year. While attempting my own romantic comedy novel, I’ve been reading plenty of them. Beach Read by Emily Henry was my favorite of the year. I talked a little bit about it on The Writing Cooperative’s podcast last month. It’s the kind of rom-com written just for readers and writers, with two authors writing wildly different stories colliding, and fighting writers block (and feelings!) together.

I also absolutely devoured In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren (I just read this this week!), Get a Life Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert, You Had Me at Hola by Alexis Daria, The Roommate by Rosie Danan, Vanessa Yu's Magical Paris Tea Shop by Roselle Lim, Party of Two by Jasmine Guillory, Well Met by Jen DeLuca, and Undercover Bromance Lyssa Kay Adams.

Literary Fiction & Essays: Goodness, did I adore every single page of Real Life by Brandon Taylor, and I will be anxiously awaiting his short story collection next year. I also really adored A Burning by Megha Majumdar and Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed.

Graphic Novels: I have no words for how much joy Mooncakes by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker brought me. And then there was Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me by Mariko Tamaki and The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang. I read a bundle of graphic novels, finding a lot of comfort in the beautiful art and moving relationships found in so many of them.

And you know, I’m sure I’m forgetting a bundle of books, but here you go. I hope you’ll pick up some of these.

And hi, obviously this doesn’t include the books I worked on in my agent life, each of which are my favorite book of the year. Love ya’ll.

Book Deals: K. Ancrum's Lethal Lit to Scholastic!

When I was a kid growing up in Elizabeth, and the Scholastic Book Fair came around, I’d show up with that paper catalog and a wild amount of change in an envelope, ordering as many of the deeply discounted books as I could. It was like Christmas, every single time. And the way my friends and I would pool together the little bit we had, to order stuff together as a team…

Well, it’s no surprise books ended up part of my career. Right?

This deal is so special to me. Having a project in my agent life on the Scholastic list feels like the culmination of a long journey. And I’m so honored to see the brilliant Kayla Ancrum there at the end of that daydream filled road.

Kayla will be adapting the wildly popular Lethal Lit Podcast, created by Einhorn's Epic Productions (EEP), into a novel for Scholastic. Set in Tig Torres’ world, it’ll hit bookstores in the Fall of 2021.

You tune in and listen to the podcast just about everywhere, and you can even learn about the television show in development here.

So, keep an eye out! 2021 is going to be a busy, amazing year for Kayla, as we’ll also be seeing the publication of Darling, her reimagining of Peter Pan set in Chicago, in June.

Congrats Kayla! I’m so terribly proud.

The Strangest Year of Life and Publishing: Lessons Learned in 2020

I always love looking back and writing these “what I learned” posts, as both an agent and an author. I feel like there’s always something new, even after a decade of being in this business.

This year though… it hits differently.

2020 kicked off on such a high. Don’t Read the Comments published in January. I went on a book tour, up and down the East Coast, out to California, through the Midwest. It was the absolute dream. And then when I flew back from Minneapolis in March, I found out things were grinding to a halt. Everything was.

My coworking space shuttered. I built an in-home office. I’ve barely left my neighborhood these last nine months. And bemoaning losing all of those things, like time and personal space, feels so petty and trite compared to friends who lost loved ones as the world changed. I’ve kept going, working away, in a narrow hallway next to the bathroom in my home.

And I've had a lot of time to think and reflect about this year in writing and publishing, particularly as I started going to therapy for the first time. So let’s chat.

-#-

If Your Self Worth is Tied to Other People, You Can Feel Worthless

Book festivals, conferences, teaching, events… there’s something about being around other people that gives me a lot of energy. Life. Joy. And whether it was my life as a teenager theater / band geek or my career as an author and publishing professional, there’s always been this element of finding my worth from being around other people.

And that’s… not great.

It’s especially not great when you come to that crushing realization in the middle of a pandemic, when all of those things are temporarily gone. Suddenly, the person who should be your biggest fan, yourself, is the only person you’re really spending time with. And when you discover you’re unable to cheer for you, there’s a spiral waiting.

I wish I had a concrete “well here’s the solution to that” moment here, but I don’t. It’s easy to say “well don’t do that.” It’s easy to say “you shouldn’t place your value on what other people think of you.” It’s way less easy to actually enact those feelings.

I’m working through it. I hope if you feel the same way, and have had a similar year, that you are too. My reading list has been decidedly less YA in this space, as I’ve been reading Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change by Maggie Smith, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community by Mia Birdsong, Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed, and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert while journaling.

It helps.

-#-

Burning Out is Easy, Finding Balance is Hard

I’ve always been the sort of person who takes on way too much, but is comfortable with bearing the weight of it. I work as an agent, I write books, I teach in an MFA program… it’s a lot, but I like the juggling game. It’s all books, all the time, and it makes me happy.

But when a traditional 9 to 5 schedule is uprooted, those carefully set hours ripped away, without structure, it’s easy to completely fall apart and burn out. All the conferences I took on went virtual. But so did all my students. Books got shifted and moved. Deadlines for my own writing still had to be met. Suddenly I found myself staying up until wild hours, exhausted. Falling apart. My family only managed to find childcare in the last months of the year, and still, the hours are limited now.

I figured it out as the year wrapped up. Turns out the answer is saying “no” more often.

It’s a simple thing, right? Saying no when you don’t have the time, the energy, the space? But in publishing, in all creative pursuits, really, we’re often programmed to say yes to every single opportunity. Because, what if you don’t get another one? What if this is THAT opportunity that brings you new ones?

If you’re burned out, if you’re exhausted, if you’re unhappy… that opportunity isn’t going to bring anything. Your work will suffer, and the people expecting something from you will notice. Burn out doesn’t lead to growth. It leads to collapse.

Say no.

-#-

Surround Yourself With People Who Want Nothing From You

This year was a big year for “hey it’s been a while, here’s a book idea I’m working on” messages. A big year for it. And I get it. Some folks have found themselves with a surprising amount of time on their hands, and are maybe returning to writing, art, music, you name it. Anything to refill their own personal well.

But that doesn’t mean they’re entitled to drink from yours. Especially if they’ve never offered you a drink before.

Relationships shouldn’t be transactional. This is one of the big reasons I missed my coworking space so much, working with a bundle of people who code and make software and do other things I don’t understand. I miss people reaching out to grab lunch, ask about bad Netflix movies, who frankly did not care about book stuff. I need more of them in my life.

If you’re hinging your self worth (remember what I talked about earlier?) on other people, and those relationships are transactional, it’s even more damaging.

Because there’s a difference between people who care about you, and people who care about what you can do for them.

It’s a hard thing to spot. It takes practice and a bit of heartbreak. And I’m sorry if you’ve experienced it, or if you’re about to. But I hope you’ll come out stronger, with better friends in the end. You deserve them. And I do too.

-#-

Community is a Circle, Not a Straight Line

This might sound odd to all my book people who aren’t quite familiar with my life outside of that space, but every August is a bit of a bummer month for me. I think about the old Philadelphia Geek Awards, a big ceremony I used to throw with my good friends, tied to a popular hyperlocal blog I once ran. It was a lovely affair, and I threw a lot of work into it year after year.

This year, being fairly cooped up as I’ve been, with a lot of my thoughts, it was harder than others.

When my wife and I left Philadelphia for a spell, a lot of the folks I worked so hard to uplift through that ceremony and that website… quickly forgot about me. And I struggled with it a lot. Where did these friends go? Who I spent so much time trying to help out?

Well, it turns out those people weren’t quite friends. And I’ve noticed a bit of a drop off in my book life too, when Paste Magazine shuttered their books vertical, and I stopped podcasting with BookRiot. It bums me out, but these are lessons, I suppose.

Here’s the thing about what a real community is. It’s not a straight line. It doesn’t start in one place and just abruptly drop things off. It’s a circle. It keeps going. You give back to one another. It doesn’t stop once someone does a favor. It doesn’t end because you got what you wanted.

If that’s your experience in your community, that’s not your community. But there will be others who work in a circle. You just have to look. I promise. This year, a number of authors also working with their kiddos at home, reached out. Writers with autistic children, who I’d never really spoken to before, emailed me, to offer up insight and love as my wife and I navigated our son’s diagnosis.

They didn’t want something from me.

They wanted something FOR me.

And that’s the only kind of relationship I’m interested in now.

-#-

Hm.

Seems like all my lessons this year, had to do with work and relationships. I guess that’s 2020, for you. Navigating new spaces, figuring out old relationships, discovering new ones.

I hope whatever new normal you found this year, that you found some comfort.

I think I did. I’m still trying, but I’m getting there.

Book Deals: Remi K. England's ONE TRUE ME AND YOU to Wednesday Books!

I’m so excited to be writing this post!

I absolutely adored M.K. England’s first two YA novels, The Disasters and Spellhacker. It’s always a joy when you read a novel and feel like that author wrote the book just for you, and that’s been the case with every novel I’ve read by England. Including this one, the first book we got to work on together.

And I’m so excited to tell you about it.

They’ll be writing under the name Remi K. England when it comes to their contemporary romance novels, and I’m so thrilled to introduce you to them with their debut YA rom-com, ONE TRUE ME AND YOU. And it’s been acquired by Wednesday Books!

Here’s a bit more about the book from Publisher’s Weekly:

Alexandra Sehulster at Wednesday Books has bought Remi K. England's YA contemporary novel, The One True Me and You, a joyful, geeky romance where a beloved fanfic author and beauty pageant contestant find love, and learn what it means to be, and stand up for, yourself. Publication is set for Winter 2022. Eric Smith at P.S. Literary did the deal for World English.

Congrats, Remi!

Perfect Pitch: Melody Schreiber's Query for What We Didn't Expect

When it comes to querying, the most popular questions I get tend to be around non-fiction projects and anthologies.

What should my platform look like? How much should be written? How many contributors can I have? Should the pieces be done?

Well, now that Melody Schreiber’s beautiful anthology of essays is out and about (via Melville House), it’s time for another Perfect Pitch post… one that tackles both a non-fiction project AND querying an anthology, in the same query letter. The sheer power of it all. Thank you, Melody, for being willing to share this!

And if this is helpful, please pick up a copy of Melody’s collection, in bookstores now.

Let’s learn how she pitched What We Didn’t Expect.

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Dear Eric,

It feels strange to email you for the first time, after seeing your posts on Facebook and Twitter for so long! I've enjoyed following your journey into fatherhood, and Nena has also been an excellent resource on maternity fashion and surviving sleepless nights. My own experiences as a mother have been quite unexpected at times, and I'd love to serve as a resource for others--which brings me to this query.

WHAT WE DIDN’T EXPECT will be an anthology of creative nonfiction of 90,000 words. It will feature diverse voices and experiences of premature birth, in the form of essays, interviews, letters, poems, to-do lists, and comics. When new parents are sleep deprived and stressed out, reading a whole book can be daunting; but this collection will be a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure for navigating NICU and beyond.

Ten percent of babies are born premature in the United States—that’s 400,000 families who go through this every year. But that one word, “preemie,” encompasses a range of medical and cultural experiences. For example, Black women give birth prematurely 50 percent more than white women—14 percent of African American births happen early, compared with 9 percent of white births. The statistics for Hispanic and Native women and children aren’t much better, at 12 and 13 percent respectively.

Furthermore, babies of color immediately begin facing racial discrimination in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) across the country. Yet there are no books reflecting this diversity of circumstances and experiences around premature birth—from racial discrimination to health and income inequalities; from parental leave policies to adoption; from practical advice on raising a premature baby to approaching loss and grief—in compelling, relatable stories.

I’ve written about my son’s prematurity and open-heart surgery for Catapult, and I tapped into personal experience for a story on the booming business of breast milk donation for The Atlantic. Over the past seven years, I have reported on maternal and child health, as well as other topics, for The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Slate, Vice, and others. I am also a contributor to Book Riot. In addition to marquee contributors, I’d also like to give emerging writers a spotlight, with a special focus on writers of color and LGBTQ contributors.

I was inspired by your recent essay about Welcome Home. What I wanted most after having a preemie was to be seen—to have our struggle to survive recognized, to feel a little less alone, to see our experiences reflected wherever I could find them. My hope is that the diverse and wide-ranging stories in WHAT WE DIDN’T EXPECT will help those 400,000 other families through one of the most difficult—and beautiful—times in their lives.

All the best,

Melody Schreiber

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Okay, so there is a lot to unpack here, about why this query is so extraordinary. Let’s dig in.

Personal Hook: So, Melody and I knew each other from bookish social media circles. She opened up with that, which is of course okay. We have some mutual friends in real life (in particular Swapna Krishna, who was instrumental in getting this query to my inbox, thank you Swapna!), have written for a few of the same places… so the warm and personal opening was very welcome here! Are here kinda pals with the agent you’re planning to pitch? Cool. This is fine.

But! If you’re maybe not that close with the agent you’re pitching… I don’t know, there is the possibility talking about their cute family might feel a bit off. So gauge your relationship there accordingly. I’ve known Melody online for YEARS. I loved hearing from her.

Author Platform: We talk a lot about platform in non-fiction and why it’s so important. You want to show a potential agent (and the publisher!) that you are THE person to be writing this story. Gathering these pieces. Investigating this topic. Whatever it happens to be. In Melody’s query, she jumps right into it. She spotlights her piece on Catapult, she brings up her reporting in the Atlantic, and she drops a bunch of impressive, high profile outlets where she has covered maternal and child health.

All too often we hear about platform as social media reach. And while that’s wonderful… platform through publication, establishing yourself as that professional in your space, is just as (if not more) valuable.

The Market and the Why: So Melody’s book is a mix of both literary non-fiction essays and a parenting book! It’s a bit of a category genre blend, which is one of the many reasons a place like Melville House ended up being so perfect for it. They get challenging titles. And one thing Melody did so well here, was explain the why of this book. It’s not just a traditional essay collection or memoir, where the why might be just learning from someone’s story. It’s effectively a sort of guide through this experience.

She shares statistics, news articles, and explains why this kind of book would be so wildly important. This is something I did with Eat to Feed (a cookbook for breastfeeding mothers) and the proposal for that project.

Her Plan Moving Forward: As with most non-fiction, this isn’t a finished project. Melody mentioned her plans for finding an array of diverse and inclusive voices (and if you look at the table of contents, she absolutely did that).

Vision: There’s an interesting bit in here where Melody talked about how she saw the project with poems, comics, etc. It ended up being a straight forward essay collection, a discussion we had moving into the project. Agents (and editors!) will often have a vision for your book. You can push along with it or not, remember, this is your idea. But we agreed and off we went.

Now, one thing we tend to bring up a lot with anthologies and collections like this, are having core contributors that are going to grab an agent or an editor. Full disclosure, the original query here had some names that didn’t make it to the book (this absolutely happens with anthologies, people get busy, life happens!), so I cut that section. I don’t want anyone feeling like they are on the spot here.

But they were names I recognized and were excited about, and the new voices Melody pulled in for the project after I signed her were more than enough to still get the book into the right hands at a publishing house.

The project also ended up being 70,000 words, so remember, queries aren’t set in stone when it comes to your word count estimate!

-#-

And there you have it. Lots to learn here.

And again, if this was helpful, do order yourself a copy of this stunning collection. And stay tuned! I’ll probably post the proposal for the project in the coming weeks or months.

Thanks you Melody!

Work With Foster Youth or Adoptees? Request a Mini Library!

I’ve been really blessed with the team at Flux, and how they’ve kept pushing my books with them.

As regulars know, my adoption-themed anthology Welcome Home, published in 2017 with that team, with a huge roster of authors writing very short stories centering around that theme. I promised back then all my royalties would go towards stocking up on books to send to organizations that work with foster youth and/or adoptees, and since then, I’ve been lucky enough to send nearly a thousand books out and about.

Royalties hit, and we’re doing it again.

So! If you’re an organization that works with foster youth or adoptees, whether you run a youth center or an outreach program, and are interested in getting a small library for your center, give me shout.

This season’s bundle of books include titles by Lamar Giles, Gillian French, Megan Bannen, Michelle Falkoff, Nina LaCour, David Arnold (who was kind enough to blurb the anthology way back when!), Brandy Colbert, Arvin Ahmadi, Joy McCullough, Stephanie Kuehn, Somaiya Daud, Caleb Roehrig, Tanaz Bhathena, Akemi Dawn Bowman, Sandhya Menon, Rachel Lynn Solomon, Kathryn Ormsbee, Danielle Paige, Jennifer Mathieu, and Ashley Woodfolk.

As well as books by Shannon Gibney, Courtney Stevens, Adi Alsaid, and Natasha Sinel, who are in the Welcome Home collection, and honestly, whatever extra books from my agent life I have sitting around.

How do you apply to get one of these boxes? Just shoot me an email, with little details about you, your organization, and the kids you work with. Simple as that, don’t feel like you need to write an essay. I’m just here to give books away. If you’re worried that your organization doesn’t have a proper bookshelf for a little library for your teens, let me know. I will buy you the bookshelves. <3

I’ll choose TWO organizations at the end of December to get these books, likely sent off in early January.

• Name:

• Organization:

• Information:

• Organization Website:

Email me at ericsmithrocks at gmail dot com. Please note, that it takes me a minute to mail these, as it’s hard to carry several boxes of books to the local post office.

And thank you, whoever you are reading this, for the work that you do, helping kids like me. <3

Book Deals: Nita Tyndall's The Song I Sang Uncaring to HarperTeen

Just last month, Nita Tyndall’s heartbreaking and lyrical debut, WHO I WAS WITH HER, hit bookstores (and feelings) everywhere with HarperTeen. And well… Nita’s been busy.

Their second novel, THE SONG I SANG UNCARING, has been scooped up by HarperTeen, and will be in bookstores everywhere in the Summer of 2022.

I’m sorry you have to wait so long to read another stunning work by this brilliant voice, but it will be worth the wait. I promise. Nita dives into historical in this book, and you are going to adore it.

More from the Publishers Marketplace blip, below!

Author of Who I Was With Her and Lambda Literary Writer's Retreat fellow Nita Tyndall’s THE SONG I SANG UNCARING, set during the swingjugend movement in 1930s and 1940s Berlin, centering around a girl who finds herself swept up in the culture and the resistance, while falling for another girl in the middle of it all, again to Catherine Wallace at Harper Teen, for publication in Summer 2022, by Eric Smith at P.S. Literary Agency (World English). Translation: Taryn Fagerness Agency

And there you have it.

Get ready. This one is brilliant. Though that shouldn’t be a surprise. You know the author.

Battle of the Bands Optioned by Playground Entertainment!

Well, here goes some of the biggest news of my author life, that I’ve been keeping secret.

Me and Lauren Gibaldi’s anthology, BATTLE OF THE BANDS, has been optioned by Playground Entertainment. Here’s the blip from Publisher’s Marketplace, and hopefully we’ll have more to share as the project pushes forward:

You might know Playground from their work on a number of television shows, from All Creatures Great and Small to Little Women, Wolf Hall to The White Queen… and plays like Dear Evan Hansen (!!!). Well, they’re eager to develop in the teen space, and Battle of the Bands is now in their capable hands.

We are beyond excited to see what David Stern and his team have planned for bringing Battle of the Bands to your television. And that we get to bring so many of our friends (hi dear contributors!) with us on this journey. If you’re not following them on social media, or haven’t picked up their books, let’s fix that:

• Brittany Cavallaro - A Study in Charlotte

• Preeti Chhibber - Marvel: Avengers Assembly: Orientation

• Jay Coles - Tyler Johnson Was Here

• Katie Cotugno - You Say it First

• Shaun David Hutchinson - We Are the Ants

• Ashley Poston - Heart of Iron

• Jenny Torres Sanchez - We Are Not From Here

• Sarah Nicole Smetana - The Midnights

• Jenn Marie Thorne - Night Music

• Sarvenaz Tash - Virtually Yours

• Jasmine Warga - Other Words for Home

• Ashley Woodfolk - When You Were Everything

• Jeff Zentner - The Serpent King

• Justin Courtney Pierre - Stream his solo album In the Drink anywhere!

Battle of the Bands is due out with Candlewick in September 2021, and we look forward to sharing more as this book’s journey continues. For now, maybe add it on Goodreads, and keep an eye out. We’ll have more to share soon.