Coaching Staff

Author Coach, LLC was founded in July 2007 by Andrew H. Zack, a veteran book editor and literary agent. Andy began his publishing career on the retail side, as the evening manager of an independent bookstore in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts.

While attending college, he continued working on the retail side at the university's Barnes & Noble bookstore. Later, he served as an editor on several student publications, including two years as the managing editor of the university yearbook.

Andy graduated in 1988 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Political Science and the summer following attended the prestigious Radcliffe Publishing Course at Harvard University, an intensive publishing "boot camp" led by numerous publishing veterans.

In September of 1988, Andy began work at Simon & Schuster's Trade Division as a Foreign Rights Assistant, where he worked with S&S's foreign sub-agents in the licensing of foreign editions.

Not long thereafter, Andy moved to Warner Books as an editorial assistant. While there, he edited a number of titles and began acquiring on his own. He was substantively involved in the editing of several bestsellers, including the Batman movie tie-in and two Headlines titles by Jay Leno.

Andy next worked at Donald I. Fine, Inc., as an assistant editor and rights associate. Within six months, he was promoted to associate editor and rights manager. He acquired numerous titles and also sold subsidiary rights to the entire Fine list, including serial, book-club, reprint, large print, film, & television. He also served as liaison with Fine's British and foreign sub-agents.

Andy next joined The Berkley Publishing Group as an Editor and was eventually responsible for more than forty titles. While there, he brought a number of new first-time authors to the list. He left Berkley during a corporate down-sizing and entered the world of free-lance.

As a free-lance editor, Andy worked with a number of different clients, including several literary agencies, and major publishers such as The Berkley Publishing Group, Donald I. Fine, Inc., Avon Books, Dell Publishing, and Tom Doherty Associates. He also reviewed for Kirkus and the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Andy became a literary agent in September of 1993, joining the then recently formed Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency as a full agent. He was immediately joined by several former authors whom he had edited and proceeded to build his list of fiction and nonfiction authors.

He left Scovil Chichak Galen in March of 1996 and founded The Andrew Zack Literary Agency, which then became The Zack Company, Inc.* in 1997. Recognizing that editors and agents simply couldn’t provide the necessary amount of editorial work sought by authors hoping to be published, he launched Author Coach^™ to provide a new path for authors hoping to fulfill their dreams of being published.

In his free time, Andy is an avid cyclist. He has completed four century or century-plus events with Team in Training and has raised more than $10,000.00 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Jennifer began her editorial career at Kensington Publishing. Hired as an Editorial Assistant, she rose through the editorial ranks to the position of Senior Editor. She then moved to Signet Books, a division of Penguin/Putnam, and finally to Morrow/Avon where she worked both before and after its merger with HarperCollins Publishers. While at Morrow/Avon, she spearheaded the launch and oversaw the publishing program of Twilight Books, a mystery imprint.

In her 12+ years of editing, she edited books in nearly every genre of fiction, as well as numerous nonfiction subject areas. Her areas of coaching include the following:

Ali Bothwell Mancini has over nine years of experience, the last seven with Viking Penguin and Plume, where she rose to full Editor. While there, she was a generalist, editing numerous works of fiction and nonfiction in all subject areas, and working with a wide range of authors, including Jane Ganahl, John Glusman, Padraig O'Malley, C. J. Sansom, Craig Johnson, Mary McGarry Morris, John Mortimer, and Maggie Anton.

She is interested in coaching authors in the following areas:

Jennifer Bright Reich is a writer, editor, copyeditor, and indexer with more than ten years of publishing experience. She has contributed to more than 150 books and published more than 100 magazine and newspaper articles.

Jennifer's credits include writing The Babyproofing Bible (Fair Winds, 2007), contributing writing to twelve books in the How to Survive Guide book series including How to Survive Your Baby’s First Year (Hundreds of Heads, 2004), project editing the New York Times best-sellers The South Beach Diet Cookbook (Rodale, 2004) and The South Beach Diet Good Fats/Good Carbs Guide (Rodale, 2004), copyediting Kitty Bartholomew's Decorating ABCs (Rodale, 2005), co-writing The Outwit Your Weight Journal (Rodale, 2002), and writing more than a dozen articles for Prevention magazine, as well articles for various newspapers.

Jennifer worked for seven years on staff at Rodale before becoming an independent editor.

Jennifer will be working as an author coach in a variety of nonfiction areas including, but not limited to:

Jennifer also has a strong interest in several areas of fiction, including the following:

Jennifer Kushnier is a publishing veteran with more than a decade of experience in academic journals, magazines, and nonfiction books. As an editor at Rodale, she contributed (with research, writing, copyediting, or editing) to more than one hundred titles in the fields of health and wellness, mind/body, cooking, pets, business, general nonfiction and self-help, and relationships. She worked with such authors as Dennie Hughes, Jeff Corwin, Richard Pitcairn, and Jorge Cruise, and in the process garnered some of Rodale's earliest starred reviews and awards.

She took her relationship acumen to the Boston area where she revitalized the Polka Dot Press imprint for Adams Media. During her two-year tenure, Jennifer developed and acquired nearly fifty titles in multiple categories, not limited to self-help/relationships, pets, and cooking, and worked with such authors as Ingrid Newkirk of PETA, Charlotte Reed, Kristina Grish, Yvonne K. Fulbright, and the Culinary Institute of America.

Jennifer's acquisitions have been mentioned or reviewed in Publisher's Weekly, The New York Times, The New York Post, The Washington Post, Newsday, Maxim, Allure, Marie Claire, USA Today, Cosmopolitan, and The Boston Herald, among others. Her interests in editing lie in the following areas:

Women's Self-help
Cookbooks
Relationships
Pop psychology
Narrative nonfiction

Jennifer has both a B.A. and an M.A. in English, and is also interested in reading mainstream women's fiction.

Debra Roth Kane

Debra Roth Kane began her publishing career with Little, Brown and Company, rising from editorial assistant to associate editor in her seven years there. She moved to Zebra Books (now Kensington Publishing) as a full editor and spent two years there before shifting to freelance work. Experienced in editing many genres, she has worked with both bestselling authors and beginners and enjoys the challenge of helping any author create his or her strongest work.

Don't worry. The lists above are not meant to be all inclusive. Simply fill out the information request form and we'll be in touch to discuss how Author Coach can help you reach the finish line, too.

*The Zack Company, Inc. and Author Coach, LLC are entirely separate companies. They are not now nor will they ever be engaged in the practice of referring clients to each other. Author Coach, LLC pays no referral fees of any kind to third parties.

Copyright © 2007 Author Coach, LLCLast modified: 08/21/08

Copyright © 2007 Author Coach, LLC
Last modified: 08/21/08