Quick Answers: Adults, Nuclear Arms, and Movies

My MG manuscript has been rejected by 30 agents (mostly at the query stage, but a handful at the full stage). The only agent who is excited to represent it is a top notch adult agent with only a few sales in children's. Should I be worried? What do you think of adult agents moving into children's in general? Are they as likely to be successful as any other newbie agent on the scene?

An experienced adult agent is probably a bit more likely to be successful than a complete newbie agent. But the current rush into YA by agents who don't know the market and don't read YA doesn't particularly thrill me-- or anyone else who thinks children's books are worth our time as well as our money. I would ask that agent careful questions about what books he/she thinks are competition, and which publishers would be interested and why.

Would there be a market for a book that is 1/2 fiction and 1/2 non-fiction, alternating chapters. Basically, splice together a 40-50k word non-fiction work with a novella about the same subject (i.e., narrative non-fiction about nuclear arms spreads and fiction story about arms dealer that finds himself brokering a North Korean nuke to Al Qaeda).

I don't know what "nuclear arms spreads" means as a topic, but leaving that aside, this sounds like a perplexing problem for a publisher. What title/image do you put on the cover to convey this mixed content to the reader? More importantly, where would such a thing be shelved, when bookstores have sections for fiction and nonfiction? I think you're making things unnecessarily difficult for both of these books by forcing them to cohabit.

Hi, my name is Jennifer and a new writer for children books. Recently, I wrote a couple of them and I am thinking to look for a self publish method (but I have not done anything yet to contact book agents and editors, etc., because I am afraid of a long, awful period of waiting in-line to get attention. ) The reason that I want it faster is because my stories are also a movie script and now I am working with a foreign investment for the production, and I suppose publishing a book is a better way to protect my rights and contents rather than just registered them in WGA. So, is it a good idea? Then I have a second question: if I go to self –publishing first, do I have a chance to go to mainstream publishers later and how?

Self publishing is not the way to protect your rights. You should do some more reading about self publishing: what it does, and what it does not do.
But publishing-- trade publishing, not self publishing-- can be a way of nailing down the content so that a studio doesn't feel they have free license to change everything about your story in production. So I do recommend you choose: which do you want this to be first: a movie, or a book? Once you choose, put your efforts in one direction, rather than in both.