I chatted with a New York Times Bestselling Author

Myself and Peter V. Brett (black shirt)
Myself and Peter V. Brett (black shirt)

We knew each other in high school, graduated together ….

Peter V. Brett, @PVBrett, author of The Warded Man series and more, tweeted that he was in Orlando for the SFSE2015 conference.

Hmmm ….. that’s only 3.5 hours. It always cool to catch up with people from high school and college. I grew up in New Rochelle, NY and many stayed in that area. Here in Miami, FL it seems to be just me lol.

He mentioned he would be in Author’s Avenue from 10-Noon. So at 630am I was enroute.

We ended up chatting for about 45 minutes and naturally we spoke about being an author and publishing and so forth.

Early on in our conversation he mentioned a specific book that helped set the foundation to getting his stories on the New York Times Besteller list:

Writing to Sell by Scott Meredith

With the things he learned in that book he dusted off his fourth attempt at storytelling, cut 2/3’ds out of it, rewrote and shortened the story.

That fourth book, the one his agent was able to sell to Random House, was The Warded Man.

The Warded Man: Book One of The Demon Cycle

Be sure to check him out. 🙂

My copy of Writing to Sell is already on its way to me. 😀

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Part 3. Surprises in writing a science fiction novel

Word Count.

As I got deeper into my concept of the Chairman and his story I noticed that the manuscript would easily go into the six digit word count.

No problem … to me. I read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising in about 20 hours.

Then I got into studying the publishing business and I discovered The Rule concerning debut authors.

First book = less than 100,000 words (at least for scifi stories).

Hmmmm. Ok.

Some people might immediately see these situations as limitations.

Avoid that. Dwell instead on how this could be an opportunity.

This ‘limitation’ was exactly the thing that gave me the idea for a series.
Suddenly the story opened up much further than I’d originally envisioned.

I’m still writing the series as one continuous outline to maintain my sanity in keeping the details right though lol.

I’m going for 9x,xxx word count in each book.

Easier to work with the system than to fight it 😀

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