Claudia Gabel: From House to House--What Makes You Choose a Book

Claudia Gabel is Senior Editor at Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. She's also and author of the YA series IN OR OUT with Scholastic.

She would love to be able to go back in time and publish the Little House on the Prarie books.

She watches a ton of TV and sees lots of movies and reads lots of magazines for inspiration for series ideas. Writers, she says, should do the same things.

For her list, she's looking for writers who can have beautiful prose, but who can also write FAST. In the world of development, she says, they are often riding the coattails of trends, so they have to work quickly.

Her biggest pet peeve--no personality in query letters. She want to see who an author IS in a query. Put some, a lot, ALL of you in your query.