Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st Century Writer
- Author
- Jeff VanderMeer
- Year
- 2009
- Cluster
- the writing life
- Format
- book
Booklife (2009) is built on one load-bearing distinction: your public booklife — the career, the platform, the promotion, the industry — and your private booklife — the practice that actually produces the books. VanderMeer’s argument is that the two run on different fuels, and that a writer who lets the public one set the terms will wake up with a brand and no novel. The book alternates strategy for the first with protection for the second: goals and plans on one side, focus, patience, and creative renewal on the other.
Written at the dawn of the social-media author, some of its tactical references have aged; the framework has not. If anything, the noise it was designed against has grown louder, and the public/private split reads today less like advice and more like triage.
Expect almost nothing here about prose itself — that’s Wonderbook’s department. This is the book for the month when the business of being a writer starts to crowd out the writing, which for most writers is eventually every month.
Publishing noise is eating your writing time — Booklife's public/private split is the sanest framework on this shelf.
You want prose craft. There is almost none here, by design.
The Successful Novelist — the same terrain from a thriller veteran · The Forest for the Trees — what the publishing machine looks like from inside