The Author Guy Blog

 18 th September 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. I think we’ve all experienced the low hanging fruit of sports analogies to explain or justify all manner of unrelated activity. I heard an interesting one just the other day from a friend of mine – one I thought was worth sharing. We met for coffee because he wanted my input on his first effort at writing then publishing a work of fiction. The conversation, and reading the first draft of his manuscript, took me back eleven years to when I was where he is now before I published four novels and have completed a fifth one yet-to-be-published. The conversation inevitably turned to where he could get help marketing and selling his book. I was as candid as I could be about the frustrations encountered in this area by virtually every author, whether indie or mainstream, novice or established. And I confessed significant commercial success for me remains elusive. He responded with a sports analogy, saying that likely tens of thousands of...

23rd August 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. I made a decision 2 ½ years ago to stop watching television almost entirely, either traditional broadcasts or streaming services. My reasons are my own, and have everything to do with keeping my mind clear of their negative and damaging influence. I yearn for a time when the news was simply the news with no place for partisan “alternate facts.” I can’t change the polarization found across cable channels, so I choose not to be in their audience, but will watch home improvement or cooking shows with my wife. I will occasionally seek movie channels, and even then select away from almost everything except older fare, usually in black and white and more often than not based upon novels. This is because my writing is heavily dialogue-driven, and watching them become learning experiences. During the day, I devote my time to writing, publishing and book marketing and sales endeavors, as well as a myriad of other activities enabled by stepping off...

28th June 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. In my tenth blog, back in January of this year, I wrote about works of fiction that had made an impact on me, and, in fact, inspired me to become a novelist. My focus then was on brief books – what today would be known as a novella – and how some of them gained worldwide reader acclaim and awards such as the Pulitzer and the Nobel. I’ve self-published four novels (word count greater than 40,000 – mine were around 65,000) and my fifth, to be released early next year, will come in at around 75,000 words. But when I began my author journey ten years ago, it was the novella (21,000 to 39,000 words) I envisioned myself writing, and it’s a place I believe I will find myself returning to with my sixth manuscript. An even lesser word count, traditionally topping off at no more than 8,000 words, is the realm of short stories. I recently read of the passing of Alice Munro, a Canadian author who published fourteen collections of short stories over fiv...

17th May 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Today I want to endorse a periodical magazine for your consideration, especially if you are, or aspire to be, an author of works of fiction. That magazine is  Garden & Gun . It’s title gives you a strong indication of what you will find between the covers, and it has a definite ‘southern” focus on hunting, fishing, cooking, dining and travel. It also has articles about music, fiction and non-fiction, the arts … and so much more. It’s extremely high-quality in terms of the actual physical product, and subscriptions are modestly priced. Why do I recommend G&G? Because the writing, the prose, in each of its varied categories is among the best you will read anywhere. The word choices of the various writers are both splendid and splendidly woven together in descriptive and captivating sentences. For me, each monthly edition adds tons of words to my own self-created Word document entitled  Words & Phrases  that I refer to...