Michael Ellsberg has written or done major developmental consulting on book proposals that have garnered a total of over half a million dollars for his author clients. They have lead to book deals from publishers including VikingPenguin, Avery (Penguin), HarperCollins, Union Square Press (Sterling Publishing / Barnes & Noble), Lyons Press (Globe Pequot), Summersdale Press (UK), and New Holland (Australia).

Michael is the author of The Power of Eye Contact, forthcoming from HarperCollins. This is the first-ever complete book on eye contact, from dating and romance to sales and presentations, to soul-gazing and deep connections with your loved ones.

He wrote the proposal and collaborated on Flirting With Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental, with Dr. Marc Gerstein, former professor of management at Columbia Business School, published by Union Square Press. It was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

He wrote the proposal and did major structural editing and consulting on The Man Who Swam the Amazon: 3,274 Miles Down the World's Deadliest River by Martin Strel and Matthew Mohlke. (Martin Strel, one of the most elite athletes in history, holds four Guinness World Records in distance swimming, for swimming the entire Amazon, Yangtze, Mississippi, Danube Rivers.) In his book, Strel acknowledges "Michael Ellsberg, the greatest book editor I have ever seen."

The story this book tells was made into the feature documentary Big River Man, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009. The film received coverage in Variety and on Yahoo. Manohla Dargis said in The New York Times: "The pivotal figure in the excellent American documentary “Big River Man,” from the resourceful young director John Maringouin. . . has so much personality it’s a wonder he fits on the screen."

Michael got his start in the business by doing major developmental editing on his father Daniel Ellsberg's book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (VikingPenguin). It became a national bestseller, won the PEN Center USA's Award for Creative Non-Fiction, the American Book Award, and was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Michael runs an independent press, Ellsberg Books. This press publishes, among others, books by Guggenheim and NEA fellow Thomas Farber, and by Edie Hartshorne. Edie's title through Ellsberg Books, Light in Blue Shadows, garnered rave cover blurbs from Isabel Allende, Jack Kornfield, and Thich Nhat Hanh. It won the 2008 National Indie Excellence Award in the category of Psychology (and was a Finalist in the category of Memoir,) and won a Bronze Medal in the category of Memoir in the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards (the "Ippies,") the most prestigious competition in independent book publishing.

Michael is a master at garnering publicity. He created a series of singles events called Eye Gazing Parties, which attracted feature press coverage from the New York Times, Associated Press TV, CBS News, CNN, Good Morning America, MSNBC, Regis & Kelly, Current TV, Yoga Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco magazine, the BBC, the Times of London, Match.com, Nerve.com, Agence Press France, German and Canadian national television, and in Tim Ferriss’s #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller The Four-Hour Workweek (pp. 60-61). Elle magazine called Eye Gazing Parties "New York's hottest dating trend."

Michael graduated from Brown University in 1999, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, with Honors in International Relations.

Contact Michael at michael@ellsbergediting.com