Who doesn’t want to be a bestselling author? Now you can do it, too. It’s easy. Publish a book on Amazon, give a couple of hundred dollars to each of a few friends, and have them buy your book, one copy every couple of hours, for twenty-four hours

It’s shocking to me how little attention the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster is getting from Canadian media. Neither the business nor the arts desks seem interested. Maybe it’s a lack of reporting resources, which these days is usually the culprit in uncovered stories, or maybe it’s a lack of

The Canada Council is in the midst of devising a five-year strategic plan that will influence its annual distribution of a half-billion dollars to Canadian artists and cultural organizations. Naturally, it held consultations as part of its planning process, as all creatures of government do these days (the council is a crown corporation). A question

I’ve long believed the Nobel committee should bestow its laurel, at least once, on a genre novelist. Someone like Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Anne Rice, Patricia Highsmith, JRR Tolkien, or Elmore Leonard whose work generally takes a recognizable form — say, the detective, horror, scifi, or romance novel — yet at its best transcends that

One of the things they never tell you about the book business is how much sitting is involved. Reading and writing demand immobility, and immobility has consequences. There was a lot of sitting in my last job, too. But there I would leave the house in the morning, drive to work, take the long walk

Ken Whyte’s tips for selling your non-fiction manuscript to a publisher There is no single correct way to pitch a book idea to a publisher. What works for fiction will be different than what works for cookbooks or narrative non-fiction. My expertise is in the latter, so what follows is an approach to pitching narrative

Do You Really Need An Agent? If you\’re a writer, you may wonder whether or not you really need an agent to get your work picked up by a publisher. The short answer is this: agents can be helpful in some circumstances but they are not necessary. Let’s start with what agents do, and keep

I have a recurring dream about books. It takes three forms. In the first, I am walking up a sidewalk towards a large house on the bank of the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton, where I grew up. It is evening. The house, wide and deep and several stories high, is owned by the family of a friend.