Lori Culwell To Be Offered a Publishing Contract from Touchstone Imprint of Simon and Schuster

Media Predict and Touchstone Books, an imprint of publishing company Simon & Schuster, Inc, today announced that Hollywood Car Wash by Lori Culwell is the grand prize winner of Project Publish, a book contest originally launched on May 21. Lori will be offered a publishing contract with Touchstone Books. Senior Editor Amanda Patten will edit.

Hollywood Car Wash is a novel about a young actress who finds herself thrust into the Hollywood machine, where she is reshaped and renamed, and learns the secrets, as well as the price, of celebrity.  The book was originally released in March through iUniverse/ASJA, and has consistently been at the top of their bestseller list, as well as reaching #45 on Amazon.com. Culwell submitted the book to Project Publish after her husband saw a New York Times story on Media Predict.

Several Touchstone senior editors, under the direction of Vice President, Editor-in-Chief Trish Todd, selected the winner from five finalists announced last month.

“I am so thrilled to find a home for Hollywood Car Wash at Touchstone,” said Culwell.  “I’m really looking forward to working with the team, and to bringing the book to a much wider audience.  Also, I really admire and appreciate the innovation of the Media Predict team in demonstrating their vision.   Thanks so much to everyone.”

Contestants for the contest included referrals from well-known literary agencies and bestsellers at print-on-demand sites Lulu and iUniverse. Other contestants were drawn from hundreds of proposals directly submitted via the Media Predict site.

Media Predict congratulates Lori Culwell. And special thanks all of the 50 contestants who took part in Project Publish!

Peter Whitmer’s Navassa Island Murderersis a now finalist in Media Predict’s Project Publish contest with Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. We checked in with Peter for a quick e-mail interview.

Navassa describes some fascinating events. Tell us the story of what you’ve gone through to try to get your book into print.

Trying to get The Navassa Island Murderers into print has proved an odyssey.  The story came to me; I did not seek it out; at times I feel as if I am merely a conduit.  It just appeared:  Vivid; graphic; appalling; human; real, and timeless, after one very long day in Lamont Library, my head stuck in a microfilm machine, reading old newspaper accounts of the riot, something I stumbled over on the Net. 

Fleshing-out the story, I came away amazed at the complex scope of it – a human saga of the world teetering on the cusp of immense change – change in industry, technology, warfare, and territorial imperative. 

I spoke with Tom Robbins, a good friend familiar with the story line.  He said, “Take six months – do the Screenplay; take six years – do the book.  But do it.” 

I usually have real trouble writing without a Contract.  The Screenplay emerged with a Herculean force of its own.  It has been done for quite a while.  Puff Daddy – that’s right – came an inch from optioning it. 

Immediately, I rode that beast of inner motivation, and charged onward with the non-fiction book.  As a ‘Period Piece’ it proved a tough sell.  And yet it holds universal themes, some of which were, when I first began, politically incorrect.  The tectonic plates of world politics have shifted.  Issues of Presidential Powers, Terrorism litigation, individual rights, treatment of detainees, and definitions of American jurisdiction have, recently, been full frontal and in heated debate:  This is what Navassa is all about.

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Jason Clampet’s Dirty Cookbook is a now finalist in Media Predict’s Project Publish contest with Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. We checked in with Jason for a quick e-mail interview.

OK … for starters, tell us the story of what you’ve gone through to try to get your book into print.

Up until my participation in Project Publish, I was taking a very traditional path towards publishing the novel. Over the last few years I had worked with Melissa Chinchillo at Fletcher & Parry to sell a children’s book to Hyperion, as well as on a separate YA project. When I had the Dirty Cookbook idea, I went to her first, chatted about the idea, and then began writing chapters.

Dirty Cookbook has such a catchy hook – guys who learn how to cook to win over women. You can instantly see how this could be a fun read. When did you first think of that basic idea?

In 2006 I was involved in a partnership to create a community website about food. There were five of us and we spent much of our time in kitchens in L.A. and London, pulling together recipes and cooking for one another. The prep and cooking time before each meal was a lot like the Mother’s Day scene in the online excerpt: trash talking, teasing – basically the same boasting and challenging you get on a basketball court or soccer field, but with knives.

The partnership went bad, and I retreated into a bit of a funk. Fortunately, though, my wife and I were living in Paris at the time, and we went for a run every morning that took us past at least one large market. During one of these runs a few days later, my wife told me to snap out of it and suggested that I should write about the positive aspects of the experience. I said that I would if she’d run back and buy some pork chops we just saw. She did, and I took the elements of the partnership that I loved – the camaraderie and friendships – and mixed them with a love story.

With such a good hook, have you had any interest from film companies?

I’ve always thought of this as a novel first, and I haven’t pursued writing or pitching a screen version. That doesn’t mean, though, that I don’t think there’s a place for the characters and their stories on TV or at the theater. With the exception of buddy-cop flicks, I don’t see many solid friendships between men at the movies, and on TV you have to watch a football game to see guys express any real camaraderie.

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Jan O’Neil’s Think Twice, Click Once is a now finalist in Media Predict’s Project Publish contest with Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. We checked in with Jan for a quick e-mail interview.

First question: tell us the story of what you’ve gone through to try to get your book into print.

I started writing this book over eight years ago.  I was the senior marketing communications manager for a Fortune 500 company and resigned to become a stay-at-home mom.  To keep the brain going between loads of laundry and dirty diapers, writing this book gave me the opportunity to escape to the office with the hope of helping fellow professionals.
Getting the book into print was much more excruciating than I thought.   You not only have to woo an agent — the agent has to woo a publisher.  Media Predict certainly made the process more enjoyable.

You’ve collected some hilarious anecdotes about bad e-mail use, most of which are in the book. What’s the worst example you can think of?

Have you read the news recently?  Bad e-mail stories ar e popping up everyday.  One just occurred recently when an airline CEO responded to a customer complaint issue by pressing “reply all,” which included the customer. The CEO’s response said, “ . . . we owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned.  Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny.” That’s a big oops.

Why does this stuff keep happening?  We all know that e-mail has drastically changed the way we communicate, yet it should never have changed how we communicate.  Only a decade ago, most professionals relied on the “discerning eye” of the secretary to manage the communication tasks of the office.  Today, the assistant has been tragically replaced by the personal computer, giving way to professionals to spew scores of poorly composed e-mails.  Think Twice, Click Once is a handbook that gives professionals the know-how to better manage communication. 

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A best-seller on self-publishing site iUniverse, Lori Culwell’s Hollywood Car Wash is a now finalist in Media Predict’s Project Publish contest with Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. We checked in with Lori for a quick e-mail interview.  

OK: everyone gets this question. Tell us the story of what you’ve gone through to try to get your book into print.
 
Hollywood Car Wash was written last year, after many of friends in the industry told me horror stories and I decided they all needed to be put into a novel.  When I was done I gave it to to my agent, and she sent it around to some publishers.  The main piece of feedback I got was that while they loved the writing, they didn’t think anyone would buy a novel that was based on the inside of the Hollywood industry. Obviously, I disagreed!

So what exactly happens when someone gets the “Hollywood Car Wash”?

Here’s the “Hollywood Car Wash,” in a nutshell.  You can see it on any actress that gets into the business young, and maybe isn’t as aesthetically pleasing as the network might want.  First comes weight loss, then whiter teeth, then blonder hair, then stylish clothes.  Then you start to notice subtle changes, like “Did that person get a new nose?  How come they look so much thinner?”  There are some great before and after shots on my blog, if you’re interested.  Right now, I see this happening to America Ferrerra, which is ironic because she’s in a show called Ugly Betty, but ABC obviously wants to make sure you know she’s NOT REALLY UGLY.

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A top best-seller on self-publishing Lulu.com for the past two years, Jeremy Robinson’s The Didymus Contingency is a now finalist in Media Predict’s Project Publish contest with Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. We checked in with Jeremy for a quick e-mail interview. See his market page and tell us what you think.

MP: Tell us the story of what you’ve gone through to try to get your book into print.

In 2002 I wrote the novel, which was a big change for me as I had written screenplays for years prior. A few months after finishing the first draft I contacted James Rollins, who at the time only had three novels out (Subterranean, Excavation and Deep Fathom). Long story short, he read and loved the novel and provided a blurb. Then…I did nothing with it for three years (while I wrote two more novels and two more screenplays).

I kept in contact with Rollins over the years and he’s read several of my novels to date, and when we spoke about The Didymus Contingency again, we agreed that while it was original and a fun read, the mix of religious and mainstream thriller genres would be a hard sell at the time. So I decided to self-publish the book, having never sent it to an agent or publisher, and prove the book’s worth before bothering to spend a massive amount of time, energy and money only to end of in the frigid land of the submission slush pile.

The book debuted [on self-publishing site Lulu.com] in 2005, and after a slow start, during which I realized I needed to learn a lot about marketing, sales began to pick and have done so since. Sales were close to 6,000 last time I tallied them and may well be beyond that now. My goal for the book has been to sell 10,000 copies (the number of sales agents and publishers look for in self-published books to gauge their worth) and I’m well on my way to reaching that goal. But what has been most interesting about my experience with self-publishing the book is that recognition for it came long before reaching my goal. Just two months after publishing the book I was contacted by my agent, and signed with him a week later. I’ve also been contacted by more than 30 publishers, foreign and domestic, which has resulted in four foreign translation deals and put me in the crosshairs of several U.S. publishers that have taken an active interest in my newest novels. I can’t elaborate on that yet, but I’m expecting news soon.

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