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A reader sent some interesting questions about royalties, and has given me permission to answer them here: My first novel was published nine years ago and, naturally enough, sales in the first year didn't cover the advance. Since that time...
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I was sad to see this obituary in this morning's Globe and Mail: A behind-the-scenes force guiding books onto shelves. Excerpt:Saeko Usukawa's long hours bent over draft manuscripts and her quietly persuasive work with authors helped guide hundreds of books...
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The other day I found a new paperback in the local library: Into the Storm. It was another spin on a genre I call the Connecticut Yankee novel. In the CY genre, some guy (or bunch of guys) goes back...
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A literary blog called The Second Pass has posted a list of ten books you shouldn't bother to read, regardless of their prestige. I agree with some and strongly disagree with others: White Noise, by Don DeLillo: I can't read...
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"How Many Pages Make a Novel" now has a comment thread several years long, and it's actually awkward for me to track through the thread to try to answer the latest questions. So let me try to re-state some basic...
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The last few months have been decidedly nonfiction for me: I got swamped by the arrival of swine flu, which hugely increased traffic on my site H5N1, and hugely reduced my free time. I was also finishing a new book,...
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Orwell's great novel was published on June 8, 1949. On the eve of its 60th birthday, a number of British authors talk about its influence, and the influence of other books: Orwell's 1984 sixty years on. It's certainly been an...
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What a surprise—last night I got a note from an old roommate at Columbia, Richard Beeson, whom I hadn't heard from in many years. He told me about the long, roundabout path he had to take to his first novel,...
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A commenter asked, a couple of days ago, about how to format dialogue in a manuscript. Much of the answer is in this section of Write a Novel, my online self-guided course. But as long as I'm thinking about it,...
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Ran across a good article in this morning's Globe and Mail: The linguistic divide. Excerpt:A University of Toronto sociolinguistics professor has discovered that those under 40 are much more likely to use the word "like" when narrating a story, than...
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A reader sent an interesting question the other day: What are the rules to numbering pages of a novel? Does every page need a number? If so, top or bottom of each page? I also read somewhere, that last names...
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I've started a blog for a new book just getting under way: Write Your Nonfiction Book Online. After using blogs (including this one) to create and promote three books, it seems natural to do it for a fourth. Blogs make...
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Guy Gavriel Kay has an entertaining item in today's Globe and Mail, about the bad things that can happen to successful novelists who interact online with their readers: Release the fans! Excerpt: George R.R. Martin is the hugely successful purveyor...
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Via today's Globe and Mail, an article worth reading and pondering—even if you haven't published yet: Who gets the biggest piece of the digital pie? Excerpt:There has not been a wholesale overthrow of the traditional book in favour of portable...
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One of the great pleasures of the new century is that Dick Cavett writes a blog on the New York Times. In his latest post, he writes about When Updike and Cheever Came to Visit. Excerpt:What if we could get...
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