Leslie Daniels is a great writer whose background as a literary agent serves her well in her craft. Romance, baseball, a dog, small town upstate culture, crime, memoir/creative nonfiction, writing and authors and agents: women’s fiction has a fresh new voice. Daniels mixes it all up so there’s something for everyone. Plus humor, sardonic and ironic. Walking away from a marriage because you don’t know the proper way to load a dishwasher, the story begins with the protagonist losing custody of her kids. The narrator of Cleaning Nabokov’s House (Touchstone/Simon &, Shuster, March 7, 2010) weaves a tale without pity and applies the book business lessons from Lolita which Nabokov wrote while living in the house in Ithaca NY where Leslie Daniels lives. I have only one wish about this book. The fictional name of our community as Onkwedo stinks. This seems too opaque when I live here. Perhaps this is the urbane Leslie who feels at home in the rush of pedestrian street traffic. Everyone who knows Nabokov is hip to Ithaca. And Ithaca has its own character, somewhere between Buck County and Fargo. When a novel’s setting is in New York City, the author generally doesn’t fictionalize it as New Jerk. I say this only because I think she’s captured Ithaca’s spirit …light, dark, and shadows. Red. Not yellow and green. This town bleeds Red and the undercurrents implicating Cornell, not Waindell University, in the plot are as literary and sophisticated in nuance as Nabokov’s Pnin, which my…

While a great first chapter may interest acquisitions editors in reading your full manuscript, your last chapter may determine whether you get a contract offer or not. Reader dissatisfaction with the ending is the kiss of death to book sales. Perhaps you’ve even put down some of these books that have very well crafted first chapters that landed them a book contract but couldn’t sustain your interest. You don’t want that to be your book someone doesn’t finish reading. If your first chapter lures the reader a solid hook and strong premise, builds excitement and trust in the author, then the author needs to deliver on the goods at the end of the book. “The ending didn’t work for me.” If your beta-readers tell you this, then they are doing you a favor. They may not be able to articulate fully why it didn’t work for them as a writer, but what you need to know is that the ending did not satisfy the reader. Reader satisfaction matters to publishers. A lot. Much easier to hear criticism from a beta-reader than in a rejection letter. Endings are embedded in the beginning and the inevitability of the final outcome is structured into the narrative. Wrapping up all the loose ends and resolving all the plot and subplot points is essential to reader satisfaction. “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep,” Anton…