Amanda Mecke brings more than 25-years experience in New York book publishing to the literary agency she founded in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Upcoming 2008 Speaking Engagements:

Amanda Mecke will be speaking Sunday, April 13^th in the workshop “Make Your Next Book a Really Big Deal,” as part of the 37th Annual 2008 ASJA Writers Conference Moving On Up! Writing Better and Smarter in Today's Market

Grand Hyatt Hotel 4/11-13
42nd and Grand Central Station, NY, NY; 

For Info about ASJA click here

Prior Speaking Experience:

BEA, Chicago 2004, she spoke on book club rights at PMA meeting for small publishers. She participated in the 2002 Frankfurt Book Messe/AAP International Subsidiary Rights Workshop on electronic rights.  She taught subsidiary rights at the NYU Summer Publishing Program 1987–1989 and in 2003–2004, She has led multiple workshops at AAUP Annual Meetings 1984-94.

Education:

Amanda holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, where she taught composition.   She is a past-president of Women in Scholarly Publishing (WISP) and a former board member of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP). 

Professional Experience:

Beginning at Bantam in 1989, she worked with authors such as Daniel Goleman, Dean Koontz, Stephen Hawking, Christiane Northrup, Bill Bryson, Elizabeth McCracken, Allen Mandelbaum, Tom Levenson, Tami Hoag, and Norman Schwarzkopf. From 1989–1998, in addition to her work for Bantam,  Amanda served as Subsidiary Rights Director for BDD Audio, and from 1995–1998, she was also Subsidiary Rights Director for Broadway Books during its launch.

She was also a founding Member of Random House Corporate Steering Committee (1998-2003) for the in-house RMS software project.  This integrated contracts and royalty payment system continues to set new industry standards for subsidiary rights accounting and statements.

From 1980-1989, Amanda ran the New York marketing office of the University of California Press, an award-winning West Coast publisher. 

While at UC Press, she orchestrated national publicity campaigns for bestselling trade books such as Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks and The California Dante: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso translated by Allen Mandelbaum and illustrated by Barry Moser, Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah, et al, Revolt Against Regulation by Michael Pertschuk, and The Managed Heart by Arlie Hochschild.

Her first job in publishing was at Harcourt (then HBJ) and Helen and Kurt Wolf Books.   At  HBJ, she helped sell rights for new books by the authors Quentin Bell, Jan Morris, Max Frisch, Gunter Grass, Jessamyn West, Ivan Doig, Stanislaw Lem, and brought several classic backlist titles, such as Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co., back into print.