Mark Gotmpertz has been a book publisher for more than four decades, working on numerous award-winning, critically-acclaimed and bestselling books. He started his career at The Overlook Press, was a senior editor at Crown Publishers, Publisher of Avon Trade Paperbacks, Executive Vice-President and Publisher at Simon & Schuster and Creative Director, Content Extensions at Hearst Magazines. For the past five years, he has been Group Editorial Director of Skyhorse Publishing. He is also the author of Peleton Hacks: Getting the Most Out of Your Bike.

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Ash Wednesday. The day following Mardi Gras. Or the day that traditionally has been celebrated for centuries, with exuberant indulgence, and over-indulgence, before the letting go of Lent and its forty-day period of restraint. But back up one day, to the day before the ashes: that day of over-the-top celebration, the day of Carnival, parades, magnificent balls, King Cake, and beads, beads, and more beads. In the United States, we tend to connect Mardi Gras, not with the day itself, but with the very city of New Orleans, with its grand and glorious parades, the fantastical floats and costumes, celebratory crowds, and fancy balls.

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A personal essay about how the famed scientist and colleague of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich shaped much of my thinking as a reader and a literary agent in book publishing. Reich was credited as being one of the originators of the term "the sexual revolution," was a proponent of women in the workforce getting equal pay in the 1950s, was a huge force in modern psychology, and was huge influential to William S. Burroughs and Norman Mailer, among many others such as A.S. Neill. Some believe that if it wasn't for the likes of Reich, the 1960s might not have happened as we know it... As a young boy, his books sat of the bookshelves of my parents and I was embarrassed by book titles of his (The Sexual Revolution (FSG), The Murder of Christ (FSG), The Discovery of the Orgasm (FSG), Sex and Sexuality (FSG), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (FSG), etc.), and so I would often turn the spines of the his books around so my friends couldn't see the strange hippie books my parents kept around. I rediscovered Wilhelm Reich much later on, completely by accident while at a bar, drinking a beer by the name of Cloudbuster, which immediately reminded me of one of Reich's scientific inventions and the song "Cloudbusting" by Kate Bush about his life. Suddenly and serendipitously, I was sent on a tailspin back into the world of his books, much later in life, learning much about myself, where I came from and who I wanted to be in the process.

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The article I submitted was written to establish a sense of Ayn Rand’s economic freedom philosophy and depict what the current economy looks like during the pandemic. Ayn Rand and the COVID-19 Economy also illustrates how Ayn Rand’s Objectivism could stall any recession, as well as prove that economic freedom and laissez-faire governments could work in our current climate. Throughout this article I investigate government stimulus packages and how they interact with the economy; recent and historical packages, possible industries with economic freedom and how they operate, and what economic freedom means and how real-life examples can be used for analysis.

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Publishing amidst the pandemic is not just a clever alliteration—it has become a new way of navigating literary life for many authors, literary agents and book publishers. While, in many cases, COVID-19 has resulted in the movement of publication dates, the temporary closure of bookstores and the cancellation of in-person reading and signing events—certain authors have found a way of being creative in how they host their events online and reach their readers through any means possible. In this guest post, three historical fiction authors, who are clients of mine with Blackstone Publishing, share their optimism and positive experiences of debuting as authors this summer—despite the constraints of the coronavirus.

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Dallas Woodburn is the author of the young adult novel The Best Week That Never Happened and the linked short story collection Woman, Running Late, in a Dress. A former John Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing and a current San Francisco Writers Grotto Fellow, her work has been honored with the Cypress & Pine Short Fiction Award, the international Glass Woman Prize, second place in the American Fiction Prize, and four Pushcart Prize nominations. She is also the host of the popular book-lovers podcast Overflowing Bookshelves and founder of the organization Write On! Books that empowers youth through reading and writing endeavors. Dallas lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and daughter.

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Fred Nadis was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in the Public Understanding of Science and Technology program for his book Star Settlers: The Billionaires, Geniuses and Crazed Visionaries Out to Conquer the Universe. He has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has authored two prior books, Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America, and The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer's Amazing Pulp Journey, a Locus Nonfiction Award Finalist. He has published essays in the Atlantic and Vanity Fair online and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Science and Popular Culture.

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Put fiction to one side, and then ask, who are the best writers? Journalists or academics?

I think the answer is … we need a bit of both styles. Start with journalistic writing, too often looked down on by academics. Journalists are people who specialize in communicating complex ideas in a few lines. They are trained to extract the key points, put them into context - and enliven them with quotes. All of these are things any decent non-fiction writer will want to do too. But don’t give up on academics. They are often the originators of newspaper stories, patient researchers who not only sift through the primary sources but discover and in some cases even create them. They are people who will spend a year quite happily to produce one paragraph. You have to admire that.

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The farmhouse where Liza Nash Taylor lives in Keswick, Virginia, with her family and dogs was built in 1825, and it is the opening setting of her novel, The Thin End of the Wedge. She writes in the old bunkhouse, with the occasional black snake and a view of the Southwest Mountains. Taylor has just completed the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Art and was recently named a Hawthornden International Fellow for 2018. In 2016, she won the San Miguel Writer’s Conference Fiction Prize and last year I won second place in the novel excerpt division of the Seven Hills Literary Contest. Taylor’s work has appeared in Bluestem Magazine, Ekphrastic: writing and art on art and writing, Microchondria II, (an anthology by the Harvard Bookstore), Rum Punch Press, the Seven Hills Review, Gargoyle Magazine and is forthcoming in The Four Elements Anthology and 1932 Quarterly.  This novel was longlisted for The Mslexia Magazine Women’s Novel Competition in the UK and was a finalist in the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. An excerpted chapter was published in The Copperfield Review. Taylor’s second novel-in-progress was a semi-finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom competition this year, as well as a finalist for the Tucson Festival Awards.

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John Scognamiglio is a graduate of New York University with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He started his career as a file clerk in the Contracts Department at Pocket Books in 1986 while still a college sophomore before becoming a contracts assistant. After that, he worked for the assistant managing editor before landing where he always wanted to be: editorial. From 1989 to 1992 he worked as an assistant editor in Pocket Editorial. In February 1992, he joined Kensington Publishing as an editor and was promoted to Senior Editor in 1993. In 1998 he was promoted to Editorial Director of Fiction and in 2005 was promoted to Editor-in-Chief.  In February 2017, it was announced that Kensington would be launching his own imprint, John Scognamiglio Books, in 2018.  Among his authors are New York Times bestsellers Lisa Jackson, Joanne Fluke, Leslie Meier and Kevin O’Brien. 

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Kim Taylor Blakemore is the author of the novels The Companion, Bowery Girl, and Cissy Funk. She has been honored with a Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award, a Willa Award for Best YA Fiction, and a Regional Arts & Culture Council grant. She teaches Craft of Fiction and Historical Fiction with PDX Writers in Portland, Oregon.

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My publishing journey was incubated by childhood experiences. My mother, an artistic woman and voracious reader, instilled in me a passion for music, reading, and writing. She bought me loads of books, and she would often sit patiently with me as I read aloud, fumbling through sentences. When I was eight-years-old, Mom created an enduring experience for me on a cold Thanksgiving afternoon. She and my father were preparing dinner while a medley of Tom Jones, Neil Diamond, and Engelbert Humperdinck albums spun on a stereo, and I was getting in the way by playing in the kitchen. To keep me occupied, Mom retrieved an old typewriter, paper, and a bottle of White-Out, and she asked me to write a story. Over the next hour, I typed—using two fingers—a poorly constructed tale. But when my relatives arrived for dinner, I managed to sell my literary masterpiece, damp with correction fluid, to my Uncle John for twenty-five cents. I have my mother to thank for this wonderful memory. And as I look back, I think I could have gotten a better deal if I’d had an agent.

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Christopher Hinz won the Compton Crook award for best first novel and was nominated for the John W. Campbell award for best new writer for Liege-Killer. From a forested realm near Reading, PA, he crafts stories in a range of media: screenplay adaptations, short stories, graphic novels, comics for DC and Marvel. His seventh prose novel, Starship Alchemon, launches in November. 

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