Research Writing

Rand takes listeners step by step through the writing process, providing insightful observations and invaluable techniques along the way. She discusses the psychological aspects of writing and the roles played by the conscious and subconscious mind. She talks about articles and books, explaining how to select a subject and theme, how to identify your audience, and how to write the first draft.

If you've ever published an book before, then you know that writing and publishing it is less than half the battle. If you can't get it in the hands of your potential readers, your book will go unread and you make no money. If you haven't published a book, you're scared of this happening. You need a proven, step-by-step system to write, market, and promote your book in order to get customers and make money from your books.

The craft of writing offers countless potential problems: The story is too long; the story's too short; revising presents a huge hurdle; writer's block is rearing its ugly head. In Help! For Writers, Roy Peter Clark presents an "owner's manual" for writers, outlining the seven steps of the writing process, and addressing the 21 most urgent problems that writers face. In his trademark engaging and entertaining style, Clark offers 10 short solutions to each problem.

In the first major history of crime fiction in 50 years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the 18th century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world’s most popular form of fiction.

Como dice Rosa Montero, las entrevistas añejas son como las fotos antiguas: tiempo remansado, detenido. Leyéndolas, uno no sólo recorre los tiempos vividos, sino que, además, inevitablemente piensa en la inocencia perdida. Con la característica intuición periodística, la inmensa capacidad de análisis y el talento narrativo extraordinario de la autora, este volumen recupera sus entrevistas más emblemáticas publicadas en El País.

When a young student at a military academy mails some of his poetry to the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, seeking advice, he initiates years of correspondence, during which Rilke expresses his most personal insights into the artist's relationship with life, the interior needs of the individual growing towards maturity, and how the impulse to artistic creation can and should be a source of abiding and developing happiness even for those who cannot become artists.

"Martha Gellhorn was so fearless in a male way, and yet utterly capable of making men melt," writes New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford. As a journalist, Gellhorn covered every military conflict from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam and Nicaragua. She also bewitched Eleanor Roosevelt's secret love and enraptured Ernest Hemingway with her courage as they dodged shell fire together.

Why spin your wheels struggling to write bulky, bloated books the traditional publishing way when you can turbo-charge your Kindle author platform with greater freedom, flexibility, and chances for success? This game-changing guide is for aspiring authors and established publishing pros alike who want to shake up their routine and embrace a powerful new approach to self-publishing nonfiction.

Everyone has a story, and helping people tell their stories has been Nancy Slonim Aronie’s life mission. Building on her acclaimed Memoir as Medicine, this new guide tackles the short personal essay. With warmth and humor, Nancy provides prompts, inspiration, and hard-won wisdom to empower you to write an unforgettable narrative. You’ll learn to begin with an irresistible hook (“kill ’em with the first line”) and employ compelling direct quotes, drama, vulnerability, universal themes, and self-reflection to get readers into your corner.

In February 1943, a group of journalists - including a young wire service correspondent named Walter Cronkite and cub reporter Andy Rooney - clamored to fly along on a bombing raid over Nazi Germany. Seven of the 64 bombers that attacked a U-boat base that day never made it back to England. A fellow survivor, Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, asked Cronkite if he’d thought through a lede. "I think I’m going to say," mused Cronkite, “that I’ve just returned from an assignment to hell."

Alexander Chee, an essayist of “virtuosity and power” (Washington Post), selects twenty essays out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.

Be you an established planner, pantser, or unsure new author, this comprehensive guide has you covered. Adopting a "tools not rules" approach, you’ll discover dozens of definitive worldbuilding tricks and strategies, including surveys showing what audiences want; identifying ineffective, effective, and inspired worldbuilding; the ins and outs of immersion; enhancing audience experience with fantasy conceits; and the four Cs of worldbuilding.

Success in life is more than having goals and skills. You need connections. And to get connections, you need to reach out - fearlessly, strategically, and every day of the work week. For many, this is a daunting and confusing task. Reach Out shows listeners how to use social media and simple digital tools to begin building and expanding the number of people they know. Author Molly Beck explains how to: establish and strengthen your digital presence; develop career goals that reaching out can help you obtain; and much more!

Remember the wonderfully romantic book of letters by Beethoven, Byron and Napoleon that featured in the Sex and the City film? That collection never actually existed, but all of the letters referenced in the film were real; so Macmillan decided to create Love Letters of Great Men. . . From the private papers of Mark Twain and Mozart to those of Robert Browning and Nelson, Love Letters of Great Men collects together some of the most romantic letters in history.

Over time, literary agent Elizabeth Kracht noticed that many submissions had similar problems, so she began to make a list of the pitfalls. She knew that even excellent projects could be rejected based on these surmountable issues because those on the receiving end of proposals most often don’t have the time to walk writers through needed adjustments. The checklist Kracht has created helps writers make their manuscripts good to go. It offers short, easy-to-implement bites of advice, illustrated by inspiring - and cautionary - real-world examples.

It's Monday. Time to hit the pause button on your personality and get ready for the next meeting because, for the next five days, we'll be speaking the language of business. And, from bloated jargon and monotonous memos to syrupy slogans and deadly dull presentations, the official language of business is bull. The second we get to work, we join the masses who trade the wit and warmth of their voices for a corporate stamp of approval and the comfort of conformity.

Thanks to comedy writing guru John Vorhaus (author of The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You're Not), writing situation comedy is easier than ever. In The Little Book of Sitcom, you'll find a whole trove of tools, tricks, and problem-solving techniques that you can use - now, today - to be the sitcom writer of your wildest dreams. Ready to write? Ready to have fun? The Little Book of Sitcom is the big little book for you.

Who else wants their dream book written today? If you can speak out loud, then you have what it takes to become a lightning-fast, best-selling author. Most people dream of writing a book, but those manuscripts end up shoved away in dusty drawers, half-finished and abandoned to be eaten by moths. Many of them are great writers, many of them have great ideas. Yet so many people come to the conclusion that they'll never finish their books.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.

Long renowned as one of the smartest writers on the loose, David Foster Wallace reveals himself in Consider the Lobster to be also one of the funniest. In this program, he ranges far and farther in his search for the original, the curious, or the merely mystifying. He discovers the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the Maine Lobster Festival and confronts the inevitable question just beyond the butter-or-cocktail-sauce quandary.