Martha Woodroof

Martha Woodroof, author of the upcoming Small Blessings, continues her series about the experience of publishing a first novel. Past posts can be found here.

Perhaps no part of the First Novel Experience is as confusing and overwhelming as figuring out how to balance the demands of social ...

We made playlists of TED Radio Hour stories that will keep you curious about big ideas throughout the summer.

For your next run, bring along some inspiration from the TED Radio Hour: stories about super athletes, a man who can "hear" color, and a solar-powered airplane that flies further than ...

To gauge the practicality of investing the long years of speculative writing that it takes to produce a first novel, I asked my agent, Kate Garrick of DeFiore & Company, to estimate the percentage of the first novels submitted to her she considers saleable. Her answer (like all these answers, ...

This series on first novels continues with a look at the book auction: what triggers one, how one is organized, and what running one is like. Previous posts covered how agents fall in love with books and how editors acquire them.

Book auctions are not all ...

I woke up Wednesday, drank some coffee, and learned (thank you, Frank Morris and Morning Edition) that it was the 100^th anniversary of William S. Burroughs' birth. Burroughs was born in St. Louis and died in Lawrence, Kansas – improbable geographic bookends to his really out-there life.

But ...

Martha Woodroof has been writing about the First Novel Experience. For this post, she reports on her travels to the American Booksellers Association's Winter Institute in January.

The American Booksellers Association Winter Institute was billed as providing independent booksellers with a chance to get together "...in vibrant Seattle for three-plus ...

The first in my series of posts on The First Novel Experience was called "The Romance of Agents." A couple of people wrote me after it was posted and asked if I was going to include in this series any stories of any writers who'd had a bad time ...