One of our most popular backlist books, Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell, was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending September 23. Click on the cover to read more about this title.

Writer’s Digest Book Club member Morgan Mandel fell in love with books in the fourth grade and has been reading ever since. First it was Nancy Drew, then Dick Francis, and later Gothic novels and contemporary romances. Her quest to get a book published started eleven years ago after attending a Romance Writers of America program at her local library.

To achieve her goal, Morgan joined writers’ groups, attended conferences, and devoured writing books and magazines. A good portion of her reference library was purchased through Writer’s Digest Book Club where she still buys her books. “Each month I tell myself I don’t have room for another, yet when I see the Bulletin I change my mind.”

Her persistence to continue writing and get published paid off in February 2006 when her mystery, Two Wrongs, was published by Hard Shell Word Factory. It is available in e-book format and in print at www.hardshell.com, through Amazon.com, and by order through most bookstores. Her romantic comedy, Girl of My Dreams, will be available in January 2008. To learn more about Morgan, visit her site at www.morganmandel.com.

One of our most popular backlist books, Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell, was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending September 16. Click on the cover to read more about this title.

For the sixth week in a row, the paperback edition of our 2004 title The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending September 9.

For the fifth week in a row, the paperback edition of our 2004 title The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending September 2.

For the fourth week in a row, the paperback edition of our 2004 title The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending August 26.

Praise was recently spotted over at Crimespace for the new Howdunit book, Police Procedure & Investigation by Lee Lofland.

The star of the show was Lee Lofland. Lee has got a new book out that is flying off the bookshelves …

Read the full blog post here.

Over on The Hemingway Resource Center’s message boards, member Hijo has posted a glowing review of The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz, and Memory in the Book Talk forum. Here’s what Hijo has to say:

Buy it. I mean it. If you value words, and using them to convey anything, get this book and read it cover to cover.
It’s like either hearing your heart telling your mind what you’ve been doing right or wrong with your writing, and why, or your alter ego explaining to others why it is you do what you do and why it works at times or doesn’t.
Read it, then go back over the poetry you know and love. Then go back over the prose you know and love. Then go back over your own work and try and see why you treated it with love, or didn’t.
I swear it is like somehow hearing lessons from the muses that makes all art suddenly blend together and come into crystal clear focus—like seeing Monet as the predecessor to HDTV.

For the third week in a row, the paperback edition of our 2004 title The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending August 19.

For two weeks in a row, the paperback edition of our 2004 title The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending August 12.

Steve Zousmer’s book on writing your life story got a great review from The Frustrated Writer. It begins:

Have you ever thought about writing your own autobiography or in recording personal or family events to pass down to generations to come? If so, you’ll want to peruse You Don’t Have to Be Famous: How to Write Your Life Story, by Steve Zousmer. This engaging book not only helps with the mechanics of writing, but it also provides the inspiration and encouragement to get you started writing - and to help you complete the task you’ve set for yourself.

To read more, check out the link:

http://www.thefrustratedwriter.com/sz_famous.html

Keith Flynn is the featured writer in Unstable Euphony’s 5 Questions series. Blogger Matt Mullins asks Keith how he writes, reads, and works, as well as what he thinks about the teaching of creativity and how he feels today’s poetry stacks up against the “classics.” Here’s a sample:

Do you write the majority of your poems in one sitting?
Never. First thought, best thought is a bullshit conceit. Valery believed that a poem was never finished, but abandoned, the poet having poured all he knows into it, and seeing no other possibilities, releases it into the world. Lowell rewrote his poems until his death. All the writers I admire became professional or published or famous by the force of their will upon the words, unwilling to settle for the first thought or effort and committed to the lifelong process of continually sharpening their tools and allowing the idea of gratification to come from surrendering to the process, “the condensary,” Lorine Niedecker called it, the internal drive to make sentences so tight that “a mosquito couldn’t squeak through,” as Berryman pontificated. This is the infernal chase, to make poems where the artifice of labor disappears and the seams dissolve, where the search, not the arrival, is the whole point. All art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

In the lastest issue of “The Poopdeck”—the International Talk Like a Pirate Day newsletter—Ol’ Chumbucket himself recommends our very own Pirate Primer:

The Pirate Primer is an amazing book, a college-level seminar on how to speak the language of pirates. It has everything—everything—you’d ever want to know about the pirate lexicon. … [I]t’s a delight to dip into and sample. It’s the ultimate smorgasbord of buccaneer banter. It’s also one of the most handsomely produced pirate volumes in a long time, hardbound with lots of nice details. It’s something you’ll read through often, and it’ll look great on the bookshelf when you’re not reading it.
If you’re only going to buy one book to help you learn to talk like a pirate, well, we’ve got to say buy ours, Pirattitude! because – Hey, pirate! But if you’re going to buy two, then by all means pick up a copy of The Pirate Primer. It’s like buying a graduate course in pirate parlance.

High praise, indeed. Thanks, Ol’ Chumbucket.

Wonderful reviews are starting to appear for our new title, Police Procedure and Investigation by Lee Lofland, our most recent effort in the new Howdunit series. Mystery author Bill Cameron writes:

I’m a big fan of the original Howdunit series, but Lee has really raised the bar with this book. It’s a fabulous reference on procedure, and a wonderful new entry in the pantheon of crime writing reference.

Read the full review here.

Inspired by our nationwide heatwave, Papercuts blogger Dwight Garner points to a beautiful passage of Paul Theroux’s in The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks:

I have a quite romantic notion of when I was very young. I saw the movie “Picnic” with William Holden. Whenever I think of “Picnic,” I think of hot summers, the picnics, small towns, something dramatic happening. To me, the quintessential American experience is a summer picnic. It’s hot; it’s kind of steamy. It’s very sensual to me. The way the people are dressed, what they say, darkness falling, the crickets, all of that stuff. And I suppose the film was part of it. That moment in middle America when the corn is ripe. Maybe it’s purely fantasy because I’ve never lived in the Midwest, but that is the sense I have. Sometimes you get it in Wright Morris or Willa Cather. I think of the Midwest and then, of course, for New England I think of Robert Frost. So I think a great deal of writing which is purely American literature arouses a lot of emotions in me.

To read the rest of the post and the comments that followed, click here.

WDB author Lee Lofland (Police Procedure and Investigation) is a guest blogger today over at Lipstick Chronicles.

The paperback edition of our 2004 title The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending August 5.

Word is spreading about our newest release in the Howdunit series, Police Procedure and Investigation, by Lee Lofland. Sue Ann Jaffarian, president of the Los Angeles chapter of Sisters in Crime, recently mentioned it on her blog.

Vist the author of Police Procedure over at www.leelofland.com.

The paperback edition of our 2004 title The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending August 5.

You’ve heard all the rules to get yourself to write—work on a schedule, write in a particular place, always write a certain number of works, and so on … all rules based on things that have worked for other writers.

But what works for you? What will get your book written?

Psychotherapist and writing coach Bill O’Hanlon has written a new book that provides NO rules—just principles and methods that you can personalize to your own style and preferences. In Write Is a Verb, you’ll learn that you don’t have to be a natural writer or a good writer to write; you just have to write, and find out what uniquely motivates you to write.

Write Is a Verb is the literary equivalent of Prozac, cattle prods, M&Ms, and whatever else you need to get moving, get writing, and get it done. It also comes with a DVD workshop featuring an hour-long workshop with author Bill O’Hanlon, all worksheets from the book in electronic form, plus four instructional podcasts.

Click here for an exclusive online excerpt from Chapter 1.

The mass-market edition of our very successful backlist title Grammatically Correct by Anne Stilman was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending July 29.

An article in Salon.com, “Let Us Now Praise Editors” by Gary Kumiya, compares editors to Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction (the kind of people who are called in to clean up the mess).

The first half of Kumiya’s article discusses exactly what editors do: “Editors are craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons — sometimes all while working on the same piece.”

The second half of the article discusses the importance of editors in light of self-publishing and blogging trends: “If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It’s edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time.”

A UK publisher, Tank, is releasing a series of literary classics packaged like cigarettes. You flip the top, tear off the cellophane, and let the tales “take your breath away.” … Apparently inspired by the recent UK ban on smoking in public places.

Our Fall 2006 title Unfortunate English by Bill Brohaugh was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending July 22. Visit the author’s site at www.UnfortunateEnglish.com.

Legends of Literature is filled with articles, essays, and interviews from some of the best writers to contribute to Writer’s Digest Magazine. It offers fascinating historical pieces, advice on the craft, and inspiration that any lover of literature is sure to enjoy.

Read an Excerpt

Find inspiration in the story of how Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, nearly didn’t begin a writing career. Click here to view Kesey’s essay—just one of the many written by your favorite literary legends.