Helen Chappell is a freelance writer, novelist, and teacher. She is the author of nearly 40 books, including mainstream fiction, non-fiction, Regency romances, mysteries and regional fiction. For nearly a decade, she was a columnist for the Op-Ed page of the Baltimore Sun. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post and many regional magazines, as well as Public Radio.
She says the greatest benefit of working with a major publishing house was working closely with an editor, often over the course of a number of books, and developing a close relationship with the publishing house. “It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked. Things started to fall apart when giant companies like Time Warner and Bertelsmann started buying up publishing houses, firing people, hiring teenage editors and looking only at the bottom line. Any pretense that publishing was the gentleman’s game it had been in the days of Max Perkins was long gone. These days, if you don’t make an unrealistic number of sales, without any support from the public relations people, you’re out. A decade ago, Delacorte simply fired everyone who was a mid list writer or below. Bang. Over and out.” Continue reading “Meet the Author: Helen Chappell”
