The following is excerpted from June and William Noble’s classic, Steal This Plot: A Writer’s Guide to Story Structure and Plagiarism. (The Write Thought recently republished Steal This Plot in our Classic Wisdom on Writing Series.) There are certain items which become basic to story construction, and we’ve chosen to call Read more…
There’s been quite a ruckus in the book publishing world lately. Amazon.com has recently announced its long-anticipated foray into lending e-books. Kindle owners who are also Amazon Prime members, in addition to getting free two-day shipping on their orders and “unlimited instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows,” can also Read more…
A dozen times a week I’ll stumble upon a news story or an article on the web that I’m interested in but don’t want to take the time to read right then. This happens too when I’m researching material for this blog or the three (!) books I’m writing. Pigs don’t fly. I Read more…
“If you want to see how a society thinks, look at what it searches for.” —George Bernard Shaw Allow me to slightly rewrite Shaw’s wise counsel: “If you want to know what a society is interested in reading about, look at what it searches for.” As writers (and publishers) of nonfiction books, magazine articles—even Read more…
To reuse a couple of ‘graphs from my previous blog, “Book Pricing, Finding the Sweet Spot”: One grand thing about e-books is, since there is no printing involved, once edited, designed, typeset, and formatted, the cost of an e-book is zero. Another is that the retail price a publisher sets can vary day to day. Read more…
At Quill Driver Books we put a lot of thought into the pricing of each title we published. Here is an abbreviated list of things we considered: • How big we anticipated the market for the title would be. A small, concentrated market may support a higher price because there are fewer books for those Read more…
Under the category of “Beware What You Wish For” comes this author-centric video in which the plot device is the plot device. Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo. That was worth nine minutes, wasn’t it? I first saw this on Kristin, the polite agent’s, blog: Pub Rants. BTW, polite literary agents abound, it just Read more…
I’m a fan of James Lee Burke. I thought I’d read every Dave Robicheaux novel he’s written, but just yesterday I found a jacket-less hard cover copy of Crusader’s Cross mixed in with books I’d picked up somewhere and had been meaning to get to. It was like opening a discarded wallet and finding a Read more…
I’m working on the second edition of my book, The Fast-Track Course on How to Write a Nonfiction Book Proposal. It’ll be published in the spring of 2012. Here’s a sidebar I’m thinking of including. Authors Need Platforms Attendees at writer’s conferences often hear that agents and editors want authors with a “platform.” Basically, a Read more…
I don’t subscribe to Vanity Fair, but, like with the New Yorker (To which I also don’t subscribe; I quit my subscription as a minor vice on which I both spent too much time and felt guilty for not spending more—the darn thing comes weekly!), whenever I crack the cover, I find remarkable writing. It Read more…