St. Martin’s Press

How do I love my publisher? Let me count the ways:

1) They were the only ones to take a chance on me.

2) They are in the Flatiron, perhaps the most inspiring building in New York City.

3) There is an endless supply of kind and talented people who work there. For example:


Mike Flamini: This is my editor who has show remarkable faith in me and has thus far taken me out to two superb lunches. The first was for sushi back in the fall of 2004 when I first signed with St. Martin’s. Even though I was a minnow in the publishing ocean, Mike made me feel like a fair-sized tuna. Yesterday, he took me to BLT Fish, a restaurant governed by this French chef and which offers such delights as cream filled jalapenos. This time he made me feel like a smallish whale. I’m not sure what it means that we ate fish.




Elizabeth Coxe and Vicki Lame: Ahhh, the perks of dropping by your publishers’ office. Elizabeth and Vicki do tremendous work in the publicity department at St. Martin’s, so after my lunch with Mike I stopped in to say hello. As I have more than a hundred hours of driving ahead of me (St. Paul-Calgary and Denver-St. Louis are two of the more daunting stretches), I wondered aloud whether St. Martin’s had any books on tape they could lend me. Elisabeth and Vicki took me to the fourth floor (they are on the 14th) and it was like trick-or-treating, but better because it was audio books instead of little packs of Smarties. In my bag? ‘The World is Flat’ (Thomas Friedman), ‘Running With Scissors’ and ‘Dry’ (Augusten Burroughs), ‘A Year in the Merde’ (Stephen Clarke), ‘Snobs’ (Julian Fellowes), and ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell’ (Susanna Clarke).


Harriet Seltzer: We just randomly bumped into Harriet while waiting for the elevator, which was nice because we emailed a lot when she setting up a very special event in Dayton for me. I would normally not include this picture because I look like a bit of a ninny, but Harriet looks so lovely, how could I exclude it?

There are also many other wonderful people at St. Martin’s, such as Katherine Tiernan, but I didn’t get to take their pictures because my camera ran out of battery.