Who's Behind this Product?

BookProposalPro is the Brainchild of Jody Rein

Jody Rein

...who has spent all of her professional life in book publishing.  Once the youngest executive editor in any major New York publishing house, she's now old....er.   She's, in fact, old school with mad new tricks.  Just like BookProposalPro.  Her philosophy is here.  Her "AuthorPlanet" blog is here.  Her background is below.  

 

Jody Rein knows what editors need to see in book proposals.  During her thirteen years as an acquisition editor in corporate publishing with imprints now at Random House and HarperCollins, she bought and published hundreds of books, and evaluated thousands of proposals. She saw the proposals that New York went crazy for in wild auctions earning sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for their authors, and she saw the others, the ones that somehow sent the wrong messages to editors.


Jody left corporate publishing, consulted for a while helping authors write proposals and ghostwrote, had a couple of kids and opened her now renowned literary agency, Jody Rein Books, with a bang--the first book she represented sold for several hundred thousand dollars and is still in print.  Six-figure proposals are the norm for her agency--that's how she set up her business, so that she could maintain the reputation for a keen understanding of the marketplace she had worked so hard to earn as an editor.  After all, the better the proposal, the more likely the editor is to quickly review the next proposal from the same agency.  That's important, especially now when there are far fewer editors and far more agents eager for each editor's attention.

 

Jody has sold almost all the books she has taken on, for the most part in bidding wars.  Several proposals she has sent out have been used by university postgraduate publishing courses to teach as models. Editors and publishers throughout New York keep proposals from Jody Rein Books in their desk drawers to show writers how its done. 


She is the force behind both the TV series “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter” and the 2011 Fox Studio film, “The Big Year” starring Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson, and directed by David Frankel.


Dubbed an “uber agent” by the Denver Post, Jody has obtained more millions of dollars in advances for her clients.  Many of those clients and former clients have agreed to share their proposals in this product, and she is forever grateful for this.  The proposals she guided her clients to write are the  best in the biz--but then, so are her clients and former clients. You'll see these folks throughout this product, including Dean H. King, Mark Obmascik, Mark Kistler, and Bruce Cameron, Logan Ward, Lucy Spelman, and many others.

Jody is also known for her expertise in gauging the marketability of self-published books, and in successfully representing self-published books for reprint to major publishers.  She has garnered more than a million dollars in advances just for those self-published authors she has represented.

The resume:  Jody began her career in publishing in Chicago as an editorial assistant with Contemporary Books.  She was transferred to New York as Senior Editor, and ultimately was named Executive Editor at Bantam/Doubleday/Dell (now Random House) and, later, at Morrow/Avon (now HarperCollins). She has been awarded several fellowships including the Jerusalem Book Fair's Editorial Fellowship, and is a popular speaker at writers’ conferences from Hawaii to Alaska, and has been a frequent guest lecturer at the University of Denver and the Denver Publishing Institute. Jody ghost-wrote the lauded book A New Prescription for Women’s Health (Viking) with former head of the National Institutes of Health, Bernadine Healy. Jody’s work has been featured in Publishers Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Denver Post, the Rocky Mountain News and lots of other places. 

You can reach Jody at Jodyrein@jodyreinbooks.com (although she is not taking on any new clients; she'll be glad to answer any questions you have about BookProposalPro.)