Doug Grad Professional Bio
Doug Grad’s first job in the publishing industry came during the 88-day New York City newspaper strike that lasted from August into November 1978. That was terrible for the book business, which relied on the New York Times bestseller lists every Sunday, and for the publishers, who depended on reviews and ads in the papers to get the word out about new books for the fall season. A book called The Peculiar Truth by Duvie Clark (Atheneum) was coming out at the time the papers went on strike, and her publicist, Betsy Nolan, had a friend of hers get his son and a bunch of his son's friends to help publicize the book. Doug was one of the son’s friends, and ended up walking up and down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan wearing a white shirt, black bow tie, and sandwich board advertising the book. He was sixteen years old. He and his friends also went into the Fifth Avenue bookstores that existed back then—the two Doubleday stores, and Scribner’s, and bought up every copy they could carry to see if they could get the book on the bestseller list of the strike paper, The City News, which was staffed with striking reporters from the Times, the News, and the Post. He has no idea if his efforts were successful, or even what the book was about. His next (and last) sojourn for Betsy Nolan was on the Friday of the Memorial Day weekend in 1980, where he and his friends were given cartons of the paperback of Love Kills by Dan Greenberg (Pocket) to hand out on the Long Island Rail Road trains leaving Penn Station and heading for the Hamptons. He’s sure they were completely out of books before they even got to Massapequa. The job paid $5 an hour.
In the spring of 1986, after spending most of 1985 at the Ladies’ Home Journal as an editorial assistant and part-time muffin taster (and where he first met client Jeff Rovin), Doug temped for Connie Clausen & Associates, a literary agency, working out of Connie’s apartment on 87th Street and 2nd Avenue with Connie’s assistant, Guy Kettelhack. Connie had once written a book called I Love You Honey But the Season’s Over, about her experiences with Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus in the 1940s, which was constantly getting optioned for film but was never made into a movie.
But Doug really started in the publishing business in November 1986, temping for the renowned Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster. Though he was offered the job of assistant to Korda’s assistant, Doug turned it down when he found out it was purely a clerical position, with no chance of advancement through the editorial ranks. For the next six months, he temped in various departments of S&S (international sales, foreign rights, and even Harlequin Romances—then distributed by S&S), until landing the job as the assistant to Bill Grose, the editorial director of Pocket Books in May 1987. Promoted to Associate Editor in 1990, Doug came to oversee the western fiction and military non-fiction categories for the mass-market paperback line. (Remember mass-market paperbacks?) He also acquired and edited golf books for a co-publishing venture with Golf Digest magazine. He edited the 1994 New York Times Notable Book Red Ink by Greg Dinallo, and the Chicago Tribune bestseller Ditka: Monster of the Midway by Emmy Award winning reporter Armen Keteyian, now the Chief Investigative Correspondent for CBS News.
In 1995, Doug joined Ballantine Books as an editor, working for Joelle Delbourgo (who is now an agent herself) and Clare Ferraro. While at Ballantine, Doug published his first New York Times bestsellers--Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure by Jeff Shaara. These Civil War novels are the bookends to the 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, written by Jeff’s father Michael Shaara. Doug also published golf books by the legendary Sam Snead and PGA champion Steve Elkington, creating an innovative flip-book sequence of photos to put their fluid golf swings in motion for readers.
Doug moved to Penguin in 1998 as a Senior Editor for the NAL imprint under the editorial direction of Carolyn Nichols and publisher Louise Burke. Doug also acquired books for the Dutton, Putnam, and Viking lists. While at Penguin, Doug was proud to publish New York Times bestsellers by historical novelist John Jakes (On Secret Service, and Charleston) as well as repackaging the bestselling Jakes backlist (The Kent Family Chronicles, The North and South Trilogy, etc.). He had another bestseller in publishing the first ever mass-market edition of the incredible non-fiction adventure story South by Ernest Shackleton, an old public domain title first published in 1919. Doug continued to publish military fiction and non-fiction. Among them were The Man Who Flew The Memphis Belle by pilot Bob Morgan in conjunction with Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers (co-author of Flags of Our Fathers), an extraordinarily candid account of Morgan’s life in and out of the cockpit of his beloved B-17 bomber, and the highly acclaimed book about Japan’s kamikaze program entitled Blossoms in the Wind by WWII historian M.G. Sheftall, who became the first Western scholar to gain admittance to the Imperial Japanese records and archives, and who was able to interview surviving kamikaze pilots to gain first-hand insight into the mindset of men who would willingly fly airplanes into enemy ships. More modern military titles were the Times bestseller In the Company of Heroes by Mike Durant and Steven Hartov (Durant was the helicopter pilot shot down in Black Hawk Down), and None Braver by Michael Hirsh, who was embedded with the Air Force pararescue jumpers in Afghanistan in 2002. Another Times bestseller was Ya Gotta Believe! by the late relief pitcher Tug McGraw with accomplished sports journalist Don Yaeger, about Tug’s battle with brain cancer and his struggle to make peace with his illegitimate son, country music superstar Tim McGraw in the final nine months of his life. A favorite author of Doug’s while at NAL was adventure novelist Jack DuBrul, who was so often compared to Clive Cussler that the two now write a series together!
In 2005 Doug went to work for Judith Regan’s imprint at HarperCollins. At ReganBooks, Doug published New York Times bestsellers Brutal by Kevin Weeks and Phyllis Karas (Weeks was partners with Whitey Bulger in the Boston Irish mob, and he literally knew where the bodies were buried), and The Boy of Steel, a children’s book by Ray Negron with illustrations by Laura Seeley about a little boy battling brain cancer who goes on a magical trip back through baseball history to get inspired to always keep battling. It became a #2 New York Times bestseller. He also published the very successful TV show companion volume Nanny 911, and the play-at-home quiz book for the show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Doug is very proud to have published the polemic What Would Martin Say? by Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer, Clarence B. Jones and Joel Engel, a book that tackles some of the tough issues facing us today, using Jones’s personal knowledge of King as well as stellar research to reach opinions that may seem quite controversial. A favorite project at Harper was The Driver by Alex Roy, about the world of illegal car racing and Roy’s quest to break the NY-to-LA speed record. Titles that Doug acquired and edited but were published after Doug’s departure from Harper included: Giant by Plaxico Burress with Jason Cole about the lanky wide receiver’s path to catching the game-winning catch in Super Bowl XLII; Running For My Life by Warrick Dunn (one of the true good guys in the world of sports) and Don Yaeger, the uplifting autobiography of NFL running back Dunn and the story of his battle to overcome the murder of his mother; Gorgeous George by John Capouya, the first biography of the old-time wrestler who influenced everyone from Liberace to Muhammed Ali and from James Brown to John Waters (bought for the movies by WWE); and In the Country of Brooklyn by Peter Golenbock, an oral history of Brooklyn in the 20th Century.
Doug has been a literary agent since 2008. If you want to know what he's done since, take a look at the rest of this website!
In the spring of 1986, after spending most of 1985 at the Ladies’ Home Journal as an editorial assistant and part-time muffin taster (and where he first met client Jeff Rovin), Doug temped for Connie Clausen & Associates, a literary agency, working out of Connie’s apartment on 87th Street and 2nd Avenue with Connie’s assistant, Guy Kettelhack. Connie had once written a book called I Love You Honey But the Season’s Over, about her experiences with Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus in the 1940s, which was constantly getting optioned for film but was never made into a movie.
But Doug really started in the publishing business in November 1986, temping for the renowned Michael Korda at Simon & Schuster. Though he was offered the job of assistant to Korda’s assistant, Doug turned it down when he found out it was purely a clerical position, with no chance of advancement through the editorial ranks. For the next six months, he temped in various departments of S&S (international sales, foreign rights, and even Harlequin Romances—then distributed by S&S), until landing the job as the assistant to Bill Grose, the editorial director of Pocket Books in May 1987. Promoted to Associate Editor in 1990, Doug came to oversee the western fiction and military non-fiction categories for the mass-market paperback line. (Remember mass-market paperbacks?) He also acquired and edited golf books for a co-publishing venture with Golf Digest magazine. He edited the 1994 New York Times Notable Book Red Ink by Greg Dinallo, and the Chicago Tribune bestseller Ditka: Monster of the Midway by Emmy Award winning reporter Armen Keteyian, now the Chief Investigative Correspondent for CBS News.
In 1995, Doug joined Ballantine Books as an editor, working for Joelle Delbourgo (who is now an agent herself) and Clare Ferraro. While at Ballantine, Doug published his first New York Times bestsellers--Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure by Jeff Shaara. These Civil War novels are the bookends to the 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, written by Jeff’s father Michael Shaara. Doug also published golf books by the legendary Sam Snead and PGA champion Steve Elkington, creating an innovative flip-book sequence of photos to put their fluid golf swings in motion for readers.
Doug moved to Penguin in 1998 as a Senior Editor for the NAL imprint under the editorial direction of Carolyn Nichols and publisher Louise Burke. Doug also acquired books for the Dutton, Putnam, and Viking lists. While at Penguin, Doug was proud to publish New York Times bestsellers by historical novelist John Jakes (On Secret Service, and Charleston) as well as repackaging the bestselling Jakes backlist (The Kent Family Chronicles, The North and South Trilogy, etc.). He had another bestseller in publishing the first ever mass-market edition of the incredible non-fiction adventure story South by Ernest Shackleton, an old public domain title first published in 1919. Doug continued to publish military fiction and non-fiction. Among them were The Man Who Flew The Memphis Belle by pilot Bob Morgan in conjunction with Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers (co-author of Flags of Our Fathers), an extraordinarily candid account of Morgan’s life in and out of the cockpit of his beloved B-17 bomber, and the highly acclaimed book about Japan’s kamikaze program entitled Blossoms in the Wind by WWII historian M.G. Sheftall, who became the first Western scholar to gain admittance to the Imperial Japanese records and archives, and who was able to interview surviving kamikaze pilots to gain first-hand insight into the mindset of men who would willingly fly airplanes into enemy ships. More modern military titles were the Times bestseller In the Company of Heroes by Mike Durant and Steven Hartov (Durant was the helicopter pilot shot down in Black Hawk Down), and None Braver by Michael Hirsh, who was embedded with the Air Force pararescue jumpers in Afghanistan in 2002. Another Times bestseller was Ya Gotta Believe! by the late relief pitcher Tug McGraw with accomplished sports journalist Don Yaeger, about Tug’s battle with brain cancer and his struggle to make peace with his illegitimate son, country music superstar Tim McGraw in the final nine months of his life. A favorite author of Doug’s while at NAL was adventure novelist Jack DuBrul, who was so often compared to Clive Cussler that the two now write a series together!
In 2005 Doug went to work for Judith Regan’s imprint at HarperCollins. At ReganBooks, Doug published New York Times bestsellers Brutal by Kevin Weeks and Phyllis Karas (Weeks was partners with Whitey Bulger in the Boston Irish mob, and he literally knew where the bodies were buried), and The Boy of Steel, a children’s book by Ray Negron with illustrations by Laura Seeley about a little boy battling brain cancer who goes on a magical trip back through baseball history to get inspired to always keep battling. It became a #2 New York Times bestseller. He also published the very successful TV show companion volume Nanny 911, and the play-at-home quiz book for the show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Doug is very proud to have published the polemic What Would Martin Say? by Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer, Clarence B. Jones and Joel Engel, a book that tackles some of the tough issues facing us today, using Jones’s personal knowledge of King as well as stellar research to reach opinions that may seem quite controversial. A favorite project at Harper was The Driver by Alex Roy, about the world of illegal car racing and Roy’s quest to break the NY-to-LA speed record. Titles that Doug acquired and edited but were published after Doug’s departure from Harper included: Giant by Plaxico Burress with Jason Cole about the lanky wide receiver’s path to catching the game-winning catch in Super Bowl XLII; Running For My Life by Warrick Dunn (one of the true good guys in the world of sports) and Don Yaeger, the uplifting autobiography of NFL running back Dunn and the story of his battle to overcome the murder of his mother; Gorgeous George by John Capouya, the first biography of the old-time wrestler who influenced everyone from Liberace to Muhammed Ali and from James Brown to John Waters (bought for the movies by WWE); and In the Country of Brooklyn by Peter Golenbock, an oral history of Brooklyn in the 20th Century.
Doug has been a literary agent since 2008. If you want to know what he's done since, take a look at the rest of this website!
