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

She left the airline industry in 1983 and founded 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 Southern 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 spent time as an independent producer, a reality television developer, and a 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 and formed Martin Literary Management. Her agency has experienced extraordinary success in sales and alliances; a quick visit to the pages of 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 seven 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, Sterling Publishing, Grand Central (Warner) as well as a host of boutique publishers for specialized genre books.

She has represented several New York Times bestselling nonfiction books including Jane Velez-Mitchell's IWant, Mary Jo Buttafuocco's Getting It Through My Thick Skull, The Desserich's Notes Left Behind, and Suzanne Hansen's 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 recent past, five of her clients have appeared on Oprah. Other client appearances include The Today Show, The View, Fox and Friends, Good Morning America, Martha Stewart, The Early Show, 20/20, 48 Hours, Discovery Channel, Tru TV, Inside Edition, The 700 Club, Donny Deutsch , ET, The Insider, ABC Nightline, CNN and HLN 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. Hallmark Hall of Fame's acclaimed TV movie in December, 2008 was based on "Front of the Class," one of the very first book sales made by MLM.

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.

Her first book as an author is co-written with Anthony Flacco, titled: Publish Your Nonfiction Book: Strategies for Learning the Industry, Selling Your Book, and Building a Successful Career (Writer's Digest Books, Nov. 2009). In it, she shares many of the secrets of success that Sharlene uses to counsel her own clients on their road to authorship.

Sharlene divides her time between Southern California and Bainbridge Island, Washington --just a few miles off the coast of Seattle--with her mate of 16 years, Anthony Flacco, a brilliant acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction, www.AnthonyFlacco.com and their three cats, Hoodini, Woodie, and Precious. She is the proud mother of Scott (27) a Systems Engineer with Microsoft by day and food blogger by night, www.SeattleFoodGeek.com and Jill (23) a recent honors graduate in Strategic Communications from Seattle University who works as an Event Planner.

The Martin Literary Management motto is: "Considerate Literary Management for the 21st Century." She strives to honor that daily in her business relationships.