Word Pirates

Word Pirates,

Remember that time I had us do an exercise around the Modern Love column in The New York Times. Well, dig those out and start working on them, because they could get you a book deal.

The New York Observer has an article on how many book deals have come out of that column. Apparently there are lots, including one of the latest books pimped by Oprah, Eat, Pray, Love. And more:

The most recent deals came just last week: Ellen Graf sold a book titled The Thirteenth Horse Won, based on a column she wrote about marrying a Chinese businessman she barely knew at the age of 46; and Melanie Gideon, an Oakland-based writer, sold a book called The Slippery Year, which was pitched “as similar to Elizabeth Gilbert and Nora Ephron, a bittersweet and wise month-by-month account of the year in her life during which, upon turning 43 and confronted with her own mortality, she chooses to wake herself up, embrace the passage of time, identify what matters (and what does not)—and ‘finally decide to live,’” as the industry newsletter Publisher’s Lunch put it.

Good to know there is a method to my madness after all.

~ Joy