Professional Media Services is the business side of Janet Berliner. Through it she has worked as an editor, agent, consultant, and primarily a writer. For over 25 years, she's been producing outstanding work and helping others to reach their full potential as well.

• A Brief History of PMS
• Novels
• Anthologies
• Short Stories
• Non-fiction

A Brief History of Professional Media Services

Professional Media Services was founded in 1975 when Janet Berliner, then Janet Gluckman, was asked to help translate an engineering text from German to English. That book, Catalytic Hydrogenation of Coal Tar and Oil Under Pressure, proved to Janet that she could work and make money as an editor and translator, while continuing to raise her two daughters.

In 1980, Janet sold her first novel, Rite of the Dragon, to Donning-Starblaze in hardcover and Leisure Books in paperback. Soon after that, she co-wrote a thriller, The Execution Exchange, with Woody Greer. Due to the vagaries of publishing, however, the latter book was published first.

Shedding the agenting side of the business, Janet moved almost exclusively into writing fiction during the 1980s. She began work on a novel about her parents' and grandparents' flight from Nazi Germany to be called A German First. Due to a chance meeting on a panel at a convention in Oregon with the Nebula-nominated short story writer George Guthridge, her plans for the novel changed. Forming a writing partnership with George, they first wrote a surreal novella, "Song of the Shofar," about a young girl born to Jewish settlers on an island off the coast of Madagascar. They sold that story to Far Frontiers, but it was never published; the editor decided that the subject matter and content was too strong for the magazine's audience.

That novella sparked the fourteen-year effort that resulted in the three volumes of The Madagascar Manifesto, a magic-realist journey from the childhood fantasy of Berlin between the Wars, to the hell that became Nazi Germany, and into the unknown land of mystery and illusion that is Madagascar.

After the initial hardcover publication of Child of the Light, Janet decided she needed a new direction for PMS. She joined with Martin H. Greenberg in developing several major projects. These included work with Peter S. Beagle, David Copperfield, and Michael Crichton.

Following on the successes of Immortal Unicorn, Tales of the Impossible, Beyond Imagination, and The Unicorn Sonata, Professional Media Services began work on many other projects. The first of those is Janet's editorial collaboration with Joyce Carol Oates, now in bookstores across America. She is also working with Kevin J. Anderson, F. Paul Wilson and Matthew J. Costello on Flirting With Death an action-adventure thriller which TOR/Forge plans to publish in late 2001. Watch this space for more up-to-date information on this exciting new project.

Novels

Janet's eagerly awaited next novel, Artifact was published by Forge Books in May, 2003. Co-authored with her bestselling friends Kevin J. Anderson, Matthew J. Costello, and F. Paul Wilson, it follows a year in the lives of the members of the Daredevils Club.

In the mid-eighties, Janet began a long-term collaboration with reknowned educator and short story writer George Guthridge. Beginning with the novella "Song of the Shofar," the story the two created eventually developed into the three volumes of the Madagascar Manifetso, Child of the Light, Child of the Journey, and Children of the Dusk. Also with George, Janet wrote numerous short stories. Most of these are collected in their collection Exotic Locals, available in a limited edition CD-ROM from Lone Wolf Publications.

Janet's first novel, The Execution Exchange, published in 1980 by Leisure Books, was co-authored with Woody Greer. Soon after that, her first solo novel, Rite of the Dragon came out in hardcover from Donning's Starblaze imprint (now sadly out of business) in 1981, and in paperback from Leisure Books in 1982. Not long after, Leisure Books declared bancruptcy and ceased publication (only to reopen several months later, restructured and excused of the debt of royalties owed to authors such as Janet). For these early novels, she wrote under the name Janet Gluckman. If you're lucky enough to find or have a copy of any of these editions, cherish it; they're hard to come by. I've seen signed editions selling for as much as ten times the cover price. For those of you without the earlier editions, Wildside Press rereleased Rite in a 20th anniversary edition.

In 1993, Janet decided she was tired of the long, slow process she had used with the Madagascar Manifesto series, and developed numerous story ideas and proposals, both on her own and with collaborators. The first of these to come to fruition has been The Unicorn Sonata, which Janet created for Peter Beagle to write. In a temper over maltreatment from the New York publishers, Janet cold-called the head of Turner Publishing and in a five minute phone pitch sold him on the concept. Two days later, Janet and Peter‹along with Marty Greenberg who helped with initial financial backing‹were in Turner's offices in Atlanta, solidifying the deal. That beautiful book, published in September 1996, has already been sold and published in over half-a-dozen countries outside the U.S., including Germany, and England.

Janet's bibliography of novels has further details on each book.

Anthologies

In 1993 and '94, along with her shift in directions in her novels, Janet decided to edit some anthologies. The first project she worked on was with her then German agent, Uwe Luserke, to do a book of women's dark erotic fiction titled Teuflische Lust. While that book provided the core that grew into Janet's first US anthology, Desire Burn: Women's Stories from the Dark Side of Passion, which was published in September 1995 by Carrol & Graf, Teuflische Lust itself was not published by DTV until March of 1996.

While she was working on those two anthologies, Janet also put together several projects with celebrities. The three anthologies among those projects are Peter S. Beagle's Immortal Unicorn published in September 1995, David Copperfield's Tales of the Impossible published in October 1995, and the sequel Copperfield volume, David Copperfield's Beyond Imagination published a year later to coincide with the release of the paperback of the first volume. All three of those books were published by HarperPrism.

The true genius in these books lay not in working with celebrities such as Copperfield, but in selecting top quality authors and accepting only their best work. Eric Lustbader was so taken by Janet's concepts for these books that he insisted she allow him to write a story, not just for one, but for all three!

Joyce Carol Oates was also impressed by working with Janet to perfect her story, "The Hand Puppet," for Tales of the Impossible. So impressed, in fact, that the two agreed to edit an anthology of fiction which grew into Snapshots: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction.

For more information and a complete list of contributors, check out Janet's bibliography of anthologies.

Short Stories

Janet Berliner has written and had published dozens of pieces of short fiction in magazines ranging from Shayol to F&SF, and in numerous anthologies including Ariadne's Thread, Marilyn: Shades of Blonde, Love In Vein II, and in the recently released Past Lives, Present Tense.

Her Story "Amazing Grace: A 'Legs' Cleveland Musical Production" from More Monsters from Memphis earned her another honorable mention in Ellen Datlow's and Terri Windling's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 12th edition.

Aside from her long time collaboration with George Guthridge, which has included over a dozen short stories in addition to the Madagascar Manifesto series, Janet has also written collaborative stories with Dave Smeds (under a psuedonym, so you get to go see if you can find it) and Lawrence Schimel. In addition, she extrapolated three short stories from the novel-in-progress of her long-time friend Jack Kirby. Only one of these stories appeared before Jack's untimely death, but the warm critical reception it received pleased him greatly. He had long struggled to be recognized for his storytelling ability, not just his artwork.

In addition to an up-to-date list of Janet's short fiction, her bibliography of short stories also contains links to sites with reviews and information about the books and magazines in which the stories appeared.

Non-Fiction

Janet has worked on numerous non-fiction projects over the years. For instance, she was the coordinating writer for The Whole Child series from ENRICH, and developmental editor for Don Sherwood: The Life and Times of the World's Greatest Disk Jockey by Laurie Harper (Prima, 1989). As mentioned in her biography, Janet has also been a columnist and/or stringer for numerous newspapers and magazines, including a column called "Dear Jan" in South Africa's Jewish newspaper.

Currently, you can find reviews and interviews by Janet on AudioBooksToday.com, as well as a semi-autobiographical story, "Jenny Kissed Me."

In 1993, she worked with Michael Crichton to create The Michael Crichton Companion which is forthcoming from Ballantine Books. Aside from the extensive bibliography and concordance, the heart of the Companion is the one-on-one interview Janet had with Michael. The interview lasted over five days where 5'2" Janet was "locked in a room" with the 6'9" author of Jurassic Park.

At the request of Richard Dansky, former developer for White Wolf's Wraith: The Oblivion, Janet wrote a foreword to Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah, a Wraith supplemental world book.

Her newspaper and magazine articles are too far-ranging to catalogue here. She started work as a journalist fresh out of high school in South Africa, becoming "Dear Jan" to South Africa's Jewish youth. When the more serious, anti-intolerance side of her nature began to show too heavily in her work, she was forced to sneak out of her own country to avoid governmental reprisals. In the United States, she has worked as a stringer for papers large and small, and written profiles, reviews, and other articles for magazines both regional and national.