Self-publishing authors are rocking Hollywood!

22 May, 2017

How do you get known? Consider the example of e-book author Mark Dawson. His first novel sold poorly until Amazon suggested that he offer it for free. BOOM! Fifty thousand downloads in one weekend. That built name recognition and an audience for the second e-book. Pretty neat strategy, eh? The resulting name recognition led to a TV series deal. Read all about it at The Guardian.

Self-publishing authors are rocking Hollywood!

May 22, 2017June 6, 2026

How do you get known? Consider the example of e-book author Mark Dawson. His first novel sold poorly until Amazon suggested that he Read More...

Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Elbert Hubbard

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

If the sex scene doesn’t make you want to do it — whatever it is they’re doing — it hasn’t been written right.

Sloan Wilson

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

Roddy Doyle

I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last.

John Legend

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

In Hollywood, the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Will Rogers

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.