Ryan White & Associates

“So, what’s next?” — everyone

It’s nice to be asked. It’s nice that people care. It’s nicest to have answers. Some, anyway. As I told someone the other day, there are irons, whether they go in the fire or brain me remains to be seen.

You might note the name of this blog changed overnight. It’s now home to Ryan White & Associates.

There are no associates. The pay would suck and we don’t believe in unpaid internships.

My pal Peter Ames Carlin has the very cool Carlindustries. The previously mentioned Mr. Todd Snider has his Aimless Inc. I wanted something like that, but couldn’t come up with much of anything. I put it to Facebook.

Ryan White & Associates might not be high on word play, but it has one very big thing going for it: Chelsea Cain suggested it. To be the best of my rough calculations, Chelsea has sold more books than anyone I know.

Since a big part of Next is making a possibly reckless charge at the literary world, where there you go.

Thanks to Mr. Carlin, I’m already at work on one particularly fun project.

Meet Palazzo Editions. They make nice books about big subjects. They recently released one called Bowie: Album by Album. It’s good. I know it’s good because I read it in .pdf form when they sent it to me as we were talking about a similar approach to Bruce Springsteen’s catalog.

I’m writing this on a short break from the “Born to Run” chapter — rock and roll future has been seen! The book should be out in fall 2014, just in time for Christmas.

I owe another debt to Peter. Thanks to him, I have representation. Meet Zachary Schisgal, of the Schisgal Agency. On September’s to-do list is to get him a proposal for the next book so he can do that agent stuff that agents do so well.

Those are the big things. The exciting things. The things that come with uncertainty and great possibility.

Also exciting is the fact that a number of other publications around town have been kind enough to invite me to pitch away. I have, and I will. And I’ll look for whatever else I can do to keep the bills paid.

Friends and strangers alike have been incredibly supportive and interested in what I want to do. We should all be so lucky.