Starve Better by Nick Mamatas is a writing handbook with a difference — no promises of bestsellerdom, no feeding the dangerous daydreams aspiring writers have. This book is about survival: how to generate ideas when you needed them yesterday, writing dialogue and developing plot on the quick, and most important of all, what the competition in the slush piles of the world looks like. For non-fiction writers, Starve Better offers writing techniques such as how to get (relatively) high-paying assignments in second and third-tier magazines, and how to find gigs that pay NOW as the final notices pile up and the mice eat the last of the pasta in the cupboard.
Humor, essays, and some of the most widely read blog pieces from Nick Mamatas, award-nominated author and editor, come together for the first time in a writers’ guide that won’t teach anyone how to get rich and famous…but will impart the most valuable skill in the business: how to starve better.
Starve Better: Surviving The Endless Horror Of The Writing Life is scheduled for release from Apex Publications in summer 2010.
Nick Mamatas is the author of two novels: Move Under Ground (Night Shade 2004, Prime 2006) and Under My Roof (Soft Skull Press, 2007), two collections: 3000mph In Every Direction At Once (Prime 2003) and You Might Sleep… (Prime 2009), and the novella Northern Gothic (Soft Skull, 2001). He is also the editor of several anthologies and formerly co-edited the online magazine Clarkesworld, which was nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards. His fiction has appeared in literary journals, slicks, and genre publications, and has been nominated for the Bram Stoker awards three times, the International Horror Guild Award, and Germany’s Kurd-Laßwitz Preis for science fiction in translation.
