Biography
Carole Blake worked in publishing, combining rights selling and contracts, for 14 years. Eight years with London's first and most successful packager, George Rainbird, led to her becoming the first-ever rights manager for Michael Joseph. Then she moved to W H Allen to start their first rights department. Her final job with a publisher was as Marketing Director for Sphere Books, a mass market paperback imprint.
In 1977 she established the Carole Blake Literary Agency which merged with Julian Friedmann's agency in 1982 to become the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency.
She has been President of the Association of Authors' Agents, Chairman of The Society of Bookmen (then only the second woman to hold this position since it was founded in 1921), and Chairman of the book trade charity, The Book Trade Benevolent Society. She is a member of the advisory board for the City University's post-graduate publishing course, was a judge for the BBC television short story series 'End of Story' in 2004 and has been in Who's Who since 1998. In 2005 she recorded her life story as part of The British Library's oral history project, Book Trade Lives, the only agent to have been invited to do so. She writes a regular 'Agent's Diary' column for the magazine Mslexia.
She is the author of From Pitch to Publication: Everything you need to know to get your novel published, Macmillan, 1999, now in its tenth printing. She is under contract to write a revised and updated edition.
'It's honest and practical, and I know if it had been around when I was young, I'd have published my first novel long before I was 42.' Maeve Binchy