The Author Guy Blog

29th January 2025 Hello out there Welcome back. I often refer to the eleven years since I began writing and publishing as “my author journey.” Here’s why. It’s been exactly that – a journey. One that took almost fifty years to materialize. I first realized I had a flair for writing when fulfilling assignments in English classes my junior and senior years in high school. Those teachers, and my librarian mother, encouraged my to pursue writing as either an avocation or as a vocation. I didn’t, and now all these many decades later, I can’t recall why I didn’t. Having said that, my writing skills served me well during my C-suite corporate career. Beginning in college, I thought I wanted to be an author, inspired by the success of Eric Segal with his mega-bestseller  Love Story  that made Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neil household names when the movie was released. I began journaling story ideas, as well as words and phrases that resonated with me, and I continued the practice until I be...

 21 June 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. As I’ve written about previously, in December of last year I signed two-book contract, exclusive in nature with grant of right-of-first refusal on all future manuscripts, with a noted publisher aligned with the powerhouse Simon & Schuster. A brief update on where we are. I agreed without hesitation to the publisher’s request to re-publish and re-release my award-winning  Blue by You  novel that was first released as a self-published book in 2022. I worked for several months with a wonderful Toronto-based editor going word-by-word, line-by-line, to elevate what I (and others) believed was a very good book into a great manuscript. We’ve moved through the first two stages – developmental review and line edit, and we’re close to finishing the copy/detail edit process. From there, we move to cover design before the book actually goes into production and is placed in the hands of Simon & Schuster worldclass marketing and sale...

  2nd February 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Last week, I wrote about my affection for short books and offered several recommendations. But what is worth sharing, I believe, is that for authors penning short manuscripts, they’re swimming against the tide. Actually, more like a tsunami of bias driven by arbitrary (in my opinion) word count thresholds. To be considered “a novel” by agents, editors, publishers and professional reviewers, a manuscript must contain a minimum of 65,000 words, with 120,000 words carrying the author into a danger zone of overkill in terms of acceptability. When the word count fails to chin the bar of 65,000 words, the term “novella” comes into play – and more often than not, derisively. I’ve read and been told that short books “cheat” a reader, somehow lessening enjoyment and not offering good value for the purchase price. Others may think that way, but not me. Last week, among the short books I recommended are  Love Story, Bridges of Madison Co...