Howard Mittelmark, the backstory
After starting out writing for and later editing art and business magazines, I took a job at a literary agency, where I read dozens of manuscripts a week for a year or two. When I left there, I began reviewing; first for Kirkus Reviews, and later for the New York Times and other newspapers and magazines. Reviewing, though, is no way to make a living and I eventually took a job acquiring and editing fiction for a men’s magazine, which I left for a managing editor job in book publishing. After that, acquiring editor at a different publisher, where after a couple of years I was approached by an agent I’d worked with to ghostwrite a memoir. I did, and it became a bestseller. That same agent asked me to do a book-doctor job on a novel, which sold for an obscene amount of money. I’ve been a full-time ghostwriter/book doctor/editor/collaborator pretty much ever since, working mostly on novels and memoirs.
Throughout, I’ve been writing this and that–essays, short fiction, reviews, etc.–and a few years ago, I thought it was time I had a book under my own name, so I wrote the novel Age of Consent, which was published in 2007. While I was working on that, Sandra Newman and I came up with How Not To Write A Novel, which was published in April, 2008.
Howard Mittelmark guarantees that the above bio is reasonably accurate, although it skips over all the sticky bits.