Nick Courage is my real name (actually, it’s Nicholas Stephen Courage)!

I start every school presentation with a big slide of my driver’s license because that’s always the first question I get 🙂

I get a lot of emails from kids and adults asking if I’ll read and blurb their books.

I usually try not to read pre-published works because I don’t want to subconsciously borrow any cool ideas, but if your book is being shopped by an agent or you’re looking for blurbs:

If I’m not on a writing deadline, it’s always an honor to help out a fellow writer (especially if there’s a reason that I’d be a good blurber)!

My goal – when I started skateboarding again in my thirties (I wrote a whole essay about that for The Paris Review Daily!) – was to jump over a trash can.

I never got that quite that high… but if you check out at my Skate Pics page (under “Fun”), you can see that I got pretty close!

I don’t skateboard as much these days because I started to really feel it in my ankles every time I went out, but I still want to write a skateboarding book one day…

I met Lauren Tarshis at the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2015. 

I was asked to moderate a panel with Kazu Kibuishi, George O’Connor, and Lauren – and to prepare, I read all of their books (the entire Amulet series, the entire Olympians series, and the I Survived series – I think it was more than thirty books!). 

Afterwards, I signed copies of The Loudness next to Lauren. 

Her line was around the block, but The Loudness was my first book and nobody knew me yet so I had a lot of time to sit and talk. I loved Lauren’s book on Hurricane Katrina and I just thought she was so super-nice and smart in-person, so when I finished writing Storm Blown, she was the first author I sent it to.

I can’t say enough nice things about the I Surivived series and Lauren Tarshis, I just think she’s the coolest (did you know that she also edits Scholastic’s Storyworks Magazine? So cool). 

This is a long story, but people always ask me what it’s like to be married to my literary agent.

The truth is: Rachel wasn’t my first literary agent, and she wasn’t a literary agent when we first met!

We were both working for different imprints of a publisher called Macmillan in the Flatiron Building in New York City when we met. Rachel was a publicist at St. Martin’s Press and back then, I was basically working in the mailroom (packing boxes full of Advanced Reading Copies for the salespeople who travel around to bookstores telling booksellers about new books). 

We both love books and worked in a bunch of different jobs in publishing, and we’re always helping each other out and talking about our different projects and manuscripts… so when my second book was ready to be shopped around to different publishers, it just made sense to work together.

TL;DR: I didn’t marry my agent, but I did marry my best friend… who decided to become a literary agent a little later down the road) 🙂 

School visits are my favorite! I would love to come to your school (it just takes a little extra budgeting and planning if your school isn’t within driving distance).

You can find more information about that on the Visits page.

Courage Literary is the literary agency my wife founded (I’m not a literary agent, but I’ve worked in publishing for a long time and I’m a partner and Creative Director at Courage Literary).

And the answer is: maybe!

I mostly help out after Rachel has decided to work with an author… but check out the Courage Literary website to see if you think your book would be a good fit. We’re currently closed to queries, but we always like working with authors who have big ideas, a lot of heart, and a great story to tell.

This is a hard question to answer in a couple of sentences.

There are so many ways to write a book – I taught an entire semester-long class about it at the University of Pittsburgh (it was three hours on Wednesday nights – that’s a class that’s longer than The Sound of Music every single week and it still wasn’t enough time to cover everything).

The best brief advice I can give is to do a lot of pre-writing. That’s all the writing you do before you write the first sentence of your novel. 

1) Come up with a big question that you think is interesting (like, “what would happen if the biggest ever blizzard hit the Eastern seaboard?”) 

2) Do a ton of research around your question. Become an expert about your topic – even if you’re writing fantasy or “just making it up,” it always helps to do a little extra reading around your topic.

3) Sketch out all of your settings and characters (know what they look like, what they like, what they want, and what their strengths and struggles are).

4) Once you have a big question, feel like an expert, and know who your characters are and what they want: start writing…

And don’t stop until you’re done!

When I’m writing, I read every sentence and paragraph and chapter out loud to myself (for any writers out there: that’s my best piece of writing advice – read everything you write out loud). 

Which means that by the time I’m finished with a book, I’ve read the entire thing out loud to myself about a thousand times. I’m completely hoarse and ready for the next thing. That’s why I don’t really do readings at events!

So my favorite book is always the one I’m working on now, the one I haven’t read out loud a thousand times yet 🙂  

Publishing is mostly an apprenticeship business, which means you usually have to start in an entry-level position. After graduate school, my first job in publishing was packing boxes full of books for Macmillan Publishers in the Flatiron Building in New York (but these days, you don’t necessarily have to move to New York to work in publishing!). 

Over the course of my “in-house” career, I ended up working in Sales, Editorial, and Marketing for a bunch of different imprints – and I really loved it (I still daydream about it sometimes). And my wife Rachel worked in publicity before she became a literary agent.

My best advice, if you want to get a job in publishing, is to look up the publishers you’d like to work with – the ones that publish the books you love to read –  and see if they have any available internships. When you apply for them, don’t pass up jobs in sales, publicity or marketing!

“Editorial” is the one publishing job that most people have heard about so that’s what they look for, but every job I had in publishing was a lot of fun and it’s a little easier to get your foot in the door if you’re applying for all kinds of jobs.