Month: January 2008

Originality and Freshness

Jonathan Lyons has an interesting post about fresh and original ideas over at his blog. He makes some worthwhile points that all aspiring authors should remember. “I read hundreds of published books a year, hundreds of manuscripts, hundreds of partials, and thousands of queries,” Lyons writes. “I also read numerous book reviews and have conversations with…

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Big League Advances

Bookninja points to an article about Canadian author winning the literary lottery. Perhaps more interesting than this tale of a first-time novelist getting a $1.25 million advance is the rundown of bigtime advanaces at the end of the article.

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Nice Article, Wrong Crucial Fact

Here’s an interesting article on self-publishingby the San Jose Mercury News. Unfortunately, they got the fact about John Grisham and A Time to Kill wrong. As Grisham explained to me in 2006, A Time to Kill was published by Wynwood Press. The company went out of business and he purchased the remaining copies. He then sold…

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Write to Done Blog Launched

Galleycat pointed out that Leo Babauta recently launched a new blog about writing called Write to Done. It’s a neat site with good advice in the few entries already posted. Leo plans to update the site with new articles twice weekly so the helpful writing hints will surely keep coming. Check it out often.

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Banks Profiled

Author Russell Banks is profiled by Reuters. “I thought I was going to be an artist, a painter, not a writer,” Banks tells the news service. “I didn’t have much of a literary bent but I did for painting because I had a visible talent. It’s like music. If you are talented it shows early on…

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