Articles for Writers

Example Of A Book Proposal That Should Have Been Accepted

financialsamurai.com – Tuesday October 24, 2023

So you want to publish the next great book! To do so you first need a book proposal.

Back in late 2011, I spent hours putting together a book proposal for my severance negotiation strategy book, How To Engineer Your Layoff.

After engineering my own layoff three months earlier, I had hoped to get a literary agent, land a book deal, and spend the next year writing the book. Writing a book was always on my bucket list. And what better time to do so than after retiring on a beach in Hawaii?

Alas, fate had other plans. I submitted my book proposal to about 15 agents and didn't get a single reply back. Undaunted, and with the help of my dad and wife, I decided to self-publish my book anyway.

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Salman Rushdie: allow writers to create characters outside of their own experience

theguardian.com – Monday October 23, 2023

Booker prize-winning author said that if ‘only women can write about women and straight people about straight people’ then it signals the ‘death of art’

Salman Rushdie has said that if authors are only allowed to write characters that mirror themselves and their own experiences, “the art of the novel ceases to exist”.

“If we’re in a world where only women can write about women and only people from India can write about people from India and only straight people can write about straight people … then that’s the death of the art,” the novelist said, according to the Times.

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Want to write a novel? National Novel Writing Month celebrates 25th anniversary

eu.news-journalonline.com – Saturday October 21, 2023

On November 1st, hundreds of thousands of people around the world will suddenly start crouching over their laptops, keyboards, notebooks, journals and tablets as they try to destroy and rebuild relationships, craft the perfect murder, create a thrilling adventure, devise a winning courtroom argument, help plucky kids discover their true destinies and find new and unusual ways to dispose of a body.

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, and this year marks the 25th frantic, caffeine-driven year for millions of otherwise perfectly sane people. If you've always wanted to write but lacked motivation, commitment or plot, that pressure has now been replaced with a simple deadline. The event begins at 12:01 on Nov. 1 and it stops at the stroke of midnight, Nov. 30.

Your goal: producing a 50,000-word novel in a frustrating, exhilarating time during which you’ll push yourself to the limit of your endurance and get over the psychological fear of writing a book by whomping out something that at least looks like one.

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