I’ve recently worked through a post-holiday backlog of submissions, and stumbled on some recurring themes and – naturally – some recurring pet peeves. Agents are as diverse in their taste for query letters as they are in their tastes for reading material, so please know my advice comes from personal preference. But I hope these rules will […]
When I relocated part-time to the UK last year, there were many mysteries to figure out: Why so many tea breaks, and how does one brew it in the Orwell fashion? Where does one find canned pumpkin come Thanksgiving? What’s a knees-up, and what does it mean to get trolleyed there? […]
If you’ve never seen Gordon Ramsay in action, think of him as a drill instructor for chefs. His restaurants have earned a total of 16 Michelin stars, he was awarded the OBE, and he’s had eight different television series in the UK and US combined. The guy not only knows food, he knows the business of food. […]
A perfect, real-world example of the power of author brand comes from looking at the sales of a book called The Cuckoo’s Calling by John Galbraith. According to Peter Hildick-Smith, founder of the Codex-Group, when first released in April 2013, the book sold 449 copies. A few months later, after it was revealed that Galbraith was a pen name […]
by Jane Ryder
When I was a kid, my mom — an impressively self-educated poor Tennessean with a high-school education and a fondness for annoying axioms — would say, in a sing-song voice, “Patience is a virtue, and it will never hurt you.” Keeping my mouth shut in the face of such an obvious untruth wasn’t easy, but […]
Sub-genres of any kind can be difficult to nail down, but in the genres of fantasy and science fiction it’s not easy to even get them to hold still. The principle reason for this is that these two genres are often collectively called “speculative fiction” because they deal with the question “What if . . . ?” […]
