Thursday, June 4, 2009

Editor - Krista Marino

Post Western Washington SCBWI Spring Conference 2009 :

These notes are from material I found on-line, a one-on-one critique of one of a work-in-progress, and any other information gleaned from the opening panel of presenters at the conference.

Krista is a San Diego native, where she began her career as an editorial assistant at Harcourt Children's Books, working for Michael Stearns (see post from last week on agents from the Spring SCBWI conference). She continued working at Harcourt in New York, and moved on to became an associate editor at Delacorte Press (part of Random House Books for Young Readers). Her title at Delacorte these days is Senior Editor. Oh, yeah, and there's this little ting about being named SCBWI Member of the Year in 2006...

Krista's just looking to fall in love with a middle grade/young adult story. She doesn't do cute- she's more on the darker edge of fiction (she has not been buying much of lighter fare lately), but she does like works with comedy in them. She prefers quality over quantity. As many of the works she's edited in the last few years are trilogies or series, she is now looking for amazing stand-alone books.

Some acquisitions from the last six to nine months:
Books in the Celebutante series sold by agent Michael Bourret
Kiss My Book sold by agent Michael Bourret
Carrie Ryan's next YA novel by agent Jim McCarthy
Victoria Laurie's next two YA novels by agent Jim McCarthy
Maze Runner series by James Dashner by agent Michael Bourret

Dystel & Goderich Literary Management (both of the above mentioned agents work there) seem to have a lot of success selling Krista what she wants to see.

Some recent or soon to be released books:
Forest of Hand and Teeth by Carrie Ryan (agent Jim McCarthy)

As I type, I have a ticket to a nice warm place for a two week vacation burning a hole in my pocket (although by the time you read this, I will already be there and blogger "scheduled posts" will be posting this for me), and I am running-out of time to aggregate information, so here are the places I found Krista Marino on the web:

From Alice's CWIM blog
A couple of posts including paraphrased notes on the "best way to run a career" from a speaker panel in 2007, and Krista's thoughts on writing for teen boys in 2006.

Shelli's faeriality.blogspot.com:
An interview with Krista in February 2009 on marketing advice and her publishing house.

SCBWI-AZ The Journey interview in 2007:
An interview with Krista from 2007

And, if you are SCBWI International member, you can access the full transcript of a moderated chat by Stephen Mooser with Krista Marino in 2006. It's nice and lengthy with lots of information.

My critique session with her was great. Given that my meeting with her was in the last hour or so of the conference before the last keynote speaker, she was still alert, kind and thoughtful for the ten minutes we had. She has edited a number of YA novels in my general genre with styles that I thought were similar to mine, and I was curious to see how she would react to the voice in the work in progress that I did for NaNoWriMo 2008. I actually did not get a chance to run the piece by my two critique groups until after the deadline to submit the pieces for the manuscript consultations, so what she saw was pre-critique group. Her reaction to the voice and humor were positive, and she provided some excellent criticism that will help guide my revisions, and also showed that my critique pals' suggestions were on the mark and the changes I've already done are in the right direction.

If you get the chance, and your work is in the right arena for what she likes to read and edit, I highly recommend a manuscript consultation with her.

That's it for now, and this concludes my posts on editors and agents from the conference.

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