Synopses & Reviews
An industry insider's blunt, practical, and laugh-out-loud funny guide for the unpublished, filled with advice that may actually help them get into print.
For the hundreds of thousands who buy writers' guides every year, at last there's one that tells the ugly truth: writers who can't get published are usually making a lot of mistakes. This honest, often funny, book shows them how to identify their own missteps, stop listening to bad advice, and get to work. Drawing on his experience as founding editor of MacAdam/Cage, Pat Walsh gives writers what they need specific, straightforward feedback to help them overcome bad habits and bad luck. He avoids the optimistic, sometimes misleading directions often found in publishing how-to books and presents the industry as it is, warts and all. Here is the first guide that tells writers just what the odds against them are and gives them practical tips for evening them.
Review
"One of the founding editors of MacAdam/Cage, Walsh offers his advice in an acerbic but straightforward manner. An excellent primer on the realities of today's publishing world." Booklist
Review
"Three reasons to buy Pat Walsh's book on getting published: it's a punch in the gut, a slap in the face and a poke in the eye. In other words, a much needed wake up call about the delusions of the literary life. Buy one for every struggling writer you know." Betsy Lerner, author of The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers
Synopsis
Drawing on his experience as founding editor of MacAdam/Cage, Pat Walsh gives writers what they need specific, straightforward feedback to help them overcome bad habits and bad luck. He avoids the optimistic sometimes misleading directions often found in publishing how-to books and presents the industry as it is, warts and all. Here is the first guide that tells writers just what the odds against them are and gives them practical tips for evening them.
Synopsis
For the hundreds of thousands who buy writers’ guides every year, at last there’s one that tells the ugly truth: writers who can’t get published are usually making a lot of mistakes. This honest, often funny, book shows them how to identify their own missteps, stop listening to bad advice, and get to work. Drawing on his experience as founding editor of MacAdam/Cage, Pat Walsh gives writers what they need—specific, straightforward feedback to help them overcome bad habits and bad luck. He avoids the optimistic, sometimes misleading directions often found in publishing how-to books and presents the industry as it is, warts and all. Here is the first guide that tells writers just what the odds against them are and gives them practical tips for evening them.
About the Author
Pat Walsh is formerly a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, a self-proclaimed failed novelist, and a founding editor of the independent literary publisher MacAdam/Cage. In his six years with the company, it has gone from publishing four titles a year to publishing thirty-eight.