How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights (Paperback)

The best thing about this writers' guide is that it doesn't sound like any other writers' guide. Gore tells you to do a lot of things that other authors say are either wrong or irrelevant. Sure, you can waste time making yourself a lovely little space to write in, but how's that going to get your name on a published book? What you need to do, Gore says, is just be a writer. If you have a story to tell, tell it, and once you've told it, promote the hell out of it. Publish it yourself, if you have to, and then sell it. Check the local papers, find a spoken-word open-mike night, and go read your material in front of an audience. Send out press releases; publish your own magazine. And, most important, learn real fast that nobody out there will give a damn about what you have got to say until you make them pay attention to you. One of the snappiest, most useful books a writer for hire is likely to read. David Pitt
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This may come as a shock, but brilliant writing and clever wordplay do not a published author make. True, you’ll actually have to write if you want to be a writer, but ultimately literary success is about much more than putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys). Before you snap your pencil in half with frustration, please consider the advice writer, teacher, and self-made lit star Ariel Gore offers in this useful guide to realizing your literary dreams.

If you find yourself writing when you should be sleeping and scribbling notes on odd pieces of paper at every stoplight, you might as well enjoy the fruits of your labor. How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead is an irreverent yet practical guide that combines solid writing advice with guerrilla marketing and promotion techniques guaranteed to launch you into print—and into the limelight. You’ll learn how to:

• Reimagine yourself as a buzz-worthy artist and entrepreneur
• Get your work and your name out in the world where other people can read it
• Be an anthology slut and a brazen self-promoter
• Apply real-world advice and experience from lit stars like Dave Barry, Susie Bright, and Dave Eggers to your own career

Cheaper than an M.F.A. but just as informative, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead is your catapult to lit stardom. Just don’t forget to thank Ariel Gore for her inspiring, hands-on plan in the acknowledgments page of your first novel!