Catherine Fowler is a literary agent with the Redwood Agency. Catherine has more than 20 years of experience in book and Internet publishing having worked for such prestigious companies as Random House, Simon & Schuster, Doubleday, Excite and WebMD. With the inception of Redwood Agency, Fowler is focusing on the core of her expertise: the development of informative and fun products, working with talented writers and editors, and negotiating contracts.
Redwood Agency’s mission is to develop and represent innovative, high-quality nonfiction works for the general consumer market. Representing series of titles as well as single works, Redwood will consider many marketable categories including: health, self-help, popular culture, cooking, gardening, parenting, relationships, travel, home care and design, general reference, humor, photography and cultural technology.
Catherine Fowler spent 14 years working for top New York Publishing houses including Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and Random House. At Doubleday she worked first in the editorial department and then in subsidiary rights where she sold and negotiated right deals for the entire Doubleday list including works by: Isaac Asimov, Bill Cosby, O. Henry, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and Stephen King.
In 1986 she joined the then newly formed Prentice Hall trade division where she built a new department and managed all the rights sales to their prestigious non-fiction lines and titles including: Webster’s New World Dictionaries, The New York Public Library Desk Reference series, Frommer’s travel, Betty Crocker cookbooks, Brady Computer Books. With Brady Computer books her department increased the book club and foreign sales tenfold and certain titles were translated into more than 15 languages. It was at Prentice Hall that she formed the first department at a major book company devoted to pioneering electronic publishing opportunities for traditional publishers with software and online companies. She forged groundbreaking alliances and agreements with the early leaders of the online and CD-ROM business including Sony, Prodigy, Worldview (a.k.a. Travelocity), and The Software Toolworks (a.k.a. Headlands Media).
At Random House, Fowler took on the dual role of associate publisher of the Reference and Electronic Publishing division and for electronic projects company wide. She managed the editorial and production team for Random House dictionaries, encyclopedias and other general reference works and published the first electronic versions of many of those works. She also published the first volume of the Dictionary of American Slang, The Word Menu, and The New York Roadrunners Club Book of Running among other titles. Innovative and groundbreaking electronic projects included the Random House Unabridged Dictionary on CD-ROM, the National Audubon multimedia series, Jurassic Park e-book, many different electronic versions of Fodor’s travel information and the first electronic versions of multiple titles from the Modern Library.
After relocating to California in 1994, she expanded her expertise in the fast-paced world of Internet publishing through her executive positions at Excite and WebMD. During these years Fowler was extensively involved in making publishing decisions, senior management challenges inherent in start-up companies, buying and selling rights to literary works, and negotiating a myriad of new media publishing agreements.