Martin Literary Management

Sharlene Martin was born and raised in Connecticut, and began her business career in NYC after graduating from college. She joined American Airlines and quickly worked her way up into management, where she served as a Flight Attendant Recruiter headquartered in Manhattan. There she oversaw the interviewing and selection process for the airline's flight attendants and hired the very first male flight attendants to be employed by American Airlines.

She left the airline industry in 1983 to found the country's first American nanny placement agency, Helping Hands, Inc. The business grew from a one person home-based operation to a staff of seven full time employees and fifty recruiters nationwide. As one of the country's leading advocates and experts on the subject of in-home quality childcare, she was honored with Entrepreneur Magazine's "Home Based Entrepreneur of the Year Award" in 1987 and the CT Chamber of Commerce's "Small Businessperson of the Year" in 1988. In 1989, she sold Helping Hands and moved to California.

From 1990-2002, Sharlene worked in film and television in a number of capacities. She was a partner in Martin/Walker-Lampley Productions, a company formed with Bree Walker-Lampley, a CBS prominent television news anchor in New York and Los Angeles. She also served as an independent producer, a reality television developer, a children's talent agent and Casting Director. Her most challenging casting project for film was the movie "Gods and Generals," with 156 speaking roles.

In 2003, Sharlene realized that she liked working with writers far more than she liked working in the world of TV and film, so she began devoting herself full time to her passion for great stories. Martin Literary Management has experienced extraordinary success in sales and alliances and a quick visit to the company website verifies the well rounded nature of her acquisitions as well as the extensive sales success that her clients' books have enjoyed.

In the five years since that time, her remarkable rise in the publishing industry is demonstrated by a rapidly growing list of non-fiction sales to such renowned major publishers as Ballantine, Crown, Regnery, Rodale, Harper Collins, St. Martin's Press, Penguin Putnam, Grand Central (Warner) as well as a host of boutique publishers for specialized genre books.

She has represented several New York Times bestselling books including "You'll Never Nanny In This Town Again" and many of her other authors have had their books boosted as serial reprints in publications as prestigious as Readers' Digest, People Magazine, and the London Times.

In the past year alone, her clients have made appearances on The Today Show, Oprah, The View, Fox and Friends, Good Morning America, Martha Stewart, The Apprentice, 20/20, Discovery Channel, Court TV, Inside Edition, The 700 Club, Donny Deutsch , CNN News and Fox News, to name just a few.
Her successes have encouraged others to work with her, and she is actively doing business with a host of film and TV companies for the adaptation of her clients' books into screenplay form.

Publishers, editors and writers who deal with her consistently express their joy in working with someone who is such an avid fan of good writing and an enthusiastic guardian and representative of her clients' work. She employs this personal touch to all of her business relationships and credits it with her proven record of success at selling books in a wide range of non-fiction genres.

Sharlene divides her time between Southern California and Bainbridge Island, Washington --just a few miles off the coast of Seattle--with her mate, Anthony, a brilliant author, and their three cats, Hoodie, Woodie and Precious. She is the proud mother of Scott (25) a Systems Engineer with Microsoft by day and food blogger by night, and Jill (21) a Senior at Seattle University.

Considerate Literary Management for the 21st Century is her motto and she tries to honor that daily in her business relationships.