How to Write Your Book: Guaranteed!

by Thomas Williams

Overview

Fail-proof method for generating ideas, organizing ideas, developing ideas and embodying them in a book. Developed by Dr. Tom Williams, it works for non-fiction and fiction writers as well as for writers of theses, dissertations, and business publications

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012172761
Publisher:	Williams & Company, Publishers
Publication date:	01/20/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	132
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

I decided early on that I wanted to earn my living “with words and books.”
I took the usual detour that many aspiring writers take: I became a teacher ofcomparative literature and French literature in the University of North Carolina system. I published the expected scholarly articles in many an obscure journal, but soon discovered that I was far more interested in the writing than anything else.
I decided to branch out. I began sending out queries and sold my first article, “How to Teach about Poetry” to a magazine called Teacher’s Scholastic. Not long thereafter, the University of Georgia Press published my first book, Mallarmé and the Language of Mysticism. Then, in a great stroke of luck (but luck that came about because I was a relentless sender-out of queries) I sold an over-the-transom article to Esquire magazine that managed to be featured on the front cover. With that clip to send out, I was a made man in the freelance business.
But like an actor who itches to try directing, I wanted to try my hand at editing and publishing my own books periodicals. In 1979 I resigned my tenured, full professorship, to buy a weekly newspaper, of which I would be editor and publisher. As it turns out, I was a pretty good at the job. I increased circulation by 400% and ad revenues by an even larger percentage over a three-year period before selling out to one of the newspaper chains. I started and published many magazines, including Tar Heel: The Magazine of North Carolina (a statewide magazine), The New East Magazine, NCEast Magazine (regional magazines) and Washington Magazine (a city magazine). I published Welcome to Wilmington, a newcomer guide, and the North Carolina Travel and Tourism Guide. I wrote extensively for my own magazines, dealing with free-lancers from the other side of the editorial desk. I know what free-lancers need to learn about querying magazines and writing saleable articles because, in my role as editor, I saw so many people doing it wrong.
In order to support myself in the delightfully civilized style to which I have become accustomed, I still write, publish and sell my books, and I do one-on-one consultation and cooperative publishing for a fee. But mainly I “gladly learn and gladly teach” (as Chaucer said of his clerk of Oxenford).
Fellow writer, I am glad to know you, and I wish for you every success.