Oscar Collier

Oscar Collier (1924 to 1998) was an American literary agent, editor, and the co-author with Frances Spatz Leighton of two of the most widely used first-time-author handbooks of the late twentieth century: How to Write and Sell Your First Novel (Writer's Digest Books, 1986; revised editions 1990, 1997) and How to Write and Sell Your First Nonfiction Book (St. Martin's Press, 1994). The books became standard reading in writers' groups and first-novel workshops and are still cited as foundational references on the working business of getting a debut book sold.

How to Write and Sell Your First Novel is built in two halves. The first half covers craft: choosing the type of novel to write, making characters, dialogue, and plot work together to hold a reader and an editor, deciding how many characters a story needs, establishing a daily writing routine, revising, editing, and preparing manuscripts for submission. The second half covers the publishing business from the agent's chair: when to use an agent and how to represent yourself if you choose, contract negotiation, publicity, and self-promotion. The book closes with Conversations With Five New Novelists, a chapter of interviews with newly published authors about the specific strategies they used to break in. How to Write and Sell Your First Nonfiction Book applies the same dual structure to the nonfiction proposal, covering topic selection, the book proposal, research, writing schedule, and the publishing business as an agent sees it.

Beyond his publishing career, Collier was a serious figure in the postwar New York art world. He was a founding member of the Indian Space Painters, a small mid-twentieth-century American modernist group that synthesized Native American iconography with European modernism, and his paintings are held in museum and private collections. His first wife, the painter Gertrude Barrer, was also a leading Indian Space Painter. Their daughter Greer Fitting was an artist and writer, and Collier's daughter from his second marriage, Lisa Collier Cool, is a journalist who has written for Cosmopolitan, Penthouse, Good Housekeeping, and dozens of other national magazines.