Bill Peschel: You Gotta Have A Gimmick

What is this?
It's Bill Peschel's professional and personal home on the web. Welcome. Poke around in the drawers and cupboards. There's a lot of interesting stuff here.
What's the Reader's Almanac?
It's my 2008-2009 nonfiction book project. A year's worth of entertaining and thought-provoking stories and anecdotes about writers and their books, tied to the day they occurred. Published regularly. Here's a list of the essays published so far.
Why is it on the web?
I don't have an agent or a contract, so this is my way of building an audience, and seeing if there's any interest in the book. The daily deadlines don't hurt, either.
Are you going to write anything else here?
Sure. The occasional book review, a collection of links to neat articles and websites, and my opinions. You know, the usual stuff you find on the web.

Recent Reader's Almanac Posts

Neal Pollack Strikes Back (2003)
Capote’s Fatal Vision (1959)
Much Ado About Shakespeare’s Taxes (1597)
Nellie Bly Says Goodbye (1889)
Margaret Wise Brown Kicks Off (1952)
Theodore Roethke’s Walk in the Woods (1935)
‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ (1918)
That Damned Dante! (1315)

Rapunzel's Revenge. Shannon and Dean Hale. Illustrated by Nathan Hale.
Dumbocracy. Marty Beckerman.
Genius and Heroin. Michael Largo.
Forgotten News: The Crime of the Century and Other Lost Stories. Jack Finney.
Mr. Monk Goes to Germany. Lee Goldberg.

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September 18, 2006

You Gotta Have A Gimmick

These days, it's not enough to be published. You got to have a platform, an audience, something that separates you from the rest of the pack.

Or, as Lynn Scanlon puts it at The Publishing Contrarian: A Hook!

If your story has a child with Down's Syndrome as a main character, as in "The Memory Keeper's Daughter," you've got an audience to market to. If you're an Afghan, there's thousands in the U.S. eager to read "The Kite Runner."

In short, put in something that interests a particular group, and you've got potential sales.

And if you can't think of anything, well, you can always fall back on sex.

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