Under Cover

W ord count is the almighty criteria by which any book will be deemed finished or worthy of publishing by an agent or book company. At least that’s what a lot of writers think. The word count criteria is important, but it’s not a strict defined limit as either too few or too many words as many seem to understand it. Word count is a bit more critical for a first-time author to a publishing company than the cagy veteran since word count is the quickest way of gauging the understanding of the writing process and coming within a range shows that your manuscript may have the right ingredients to bake a nice soft batch of cookies. Now I’m hungry. What if I’m going to self-publish? If you self-publish you don’t have to live under the fear of rejection due to a book that is too short or long. However, be mindful that word count guidelines exist for a reason. Readers have an expectation of length based on the genre of book they are interested in. Word count guidelines have come through ge...

I t’s finally here! I have published six non-fiction books and had a short story published in an anthology in 2023, but nothing beats my first novel. This book has been in production for many years and was not the first book I had intended to publish. It’s been a long journey from developing the characters and plot and certainly rewriting and editing as well as editing and rewriting and then editing some more and then fomatting for release. My first book idea was about a ghost group in a fictional setting. I developed what I thought was a good story, but the plot fell apart and I got stuck nearly halfway through it. In the book I had created a character that was friends with one of my main characters. His name was Henry Malone and was a motocross rider as well as a cryptozoologist (those who study unknown and undiscovered animals like Bigfoot). My initial idea was to have a character established in this book that could be used in a forthcoming book in a series of the ghost group or eve...

 I have been fortunate to have published both non-fiction and fiction as well as many articles over the years. My first publishing came with non-fiction as I self-published six books before focusing on writing fiction. I’ve been asked this question a couple of times and I want to get my opinion out there before focusing on specific topics. The big difference between these types of books is that one is based on facts and information and is objective and the other is entirely or almost entirely made up and is subjective. At first thought you might think that being able to write about your own characters and plot and making a story up from scratch sounds easier than adhering to writing about facts and information, but both have their easy and hard aspects. Books in the non-fiction genre tend to be shorter than those in fiction depending upon what type of fiction you are writing.  In writing a non-fiction book (I’ll talk about how to write them in a future blog post) there is mor...