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.

A Member of the University of Washington Writing Certificate Program
Advisory Board
http://www.extension.washington.edu/ext/special/popfict/default.asp