By John Gilstrap

Spoiler: It ain’t quick and it ain’t easy.

“Okay Boomer.”

There, we’ve all said it together so now that’s out of the way. I wrote my first published novel when “Lion King” and “The Santa Clause” were the top two new releases of the year, and O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial for murdering his wife dominated the news cycle. Query letters were sent via U.S. mail (don’t forget the self-addressed stamped envelope), and manuscripts, God help us, had to be printed then mailed via Fed-Ex at about $25 a pop. Submission and rejection were expensive. On the positive side, the expense was also a barrier to entry. When there’s expense, I think writers are more careful about their editing in particular and storytelling in general.

Thirty books later, a few of which were bestsellers and fewer of which bombed, I think I’ve got insight worth sharing about how to survive as a working novelist and end up with a decent reliable income. NOTE: Mileage may differ for other writers.

Write a good story that is accessible to a wide audience.

I write thrillers about families in jeopardy. They are emotional roller coasters that are simultaneously heartwarming and violent. I intentionally appeal to as broad an audience as I can.

You write what you write — romance, sci-fi, fantasy, young adult, children’s, whatever. Then there’s romantasy, a genre I didn’t even know existed until I did a joint signing with Jennifer Armentrout and saw that her line was about fifteen times longer than mine. The idea is to embrace the largest possible audience to sell the largest number of books. Even before we get into talking about publicity and marketing, if you’ve written a cross-genre sci-fi vampire romance set on Planet Xanthar where all the characters are ugly, you’ve got to understand that the odds of success are stacked against you.

Sell your work to and through a traditional publisher.

(See Okay Boomer, above). Yes, there are gatekeepers (yay for them!), yes, there’s rejection, delayed gratification and all the blah-blah and yada-yada about self-promotion is true. And yes, you have to have an agent to gain entry to the gatekeepers.

But your stuff is good, right? You shouldn’t be afraid of no stinkin’ gatekeeper. Once you’re through the gate and you’ve become a critical element of the traditional publishing machine, you’ll have access to retail outlets and film agents and foreign agents and subrights opportunities that can pay handsomely. All of these are negotiated by others on your behalf so that you can get on with the business of writing the next book.

NOTE: All the rumors you hear from “experts” who say that the traditional system is closed to new writers are lies. The entire industry thrives on new writers.

ALSO NOTE: The entry gate is also the exit gate. Once you get a contract, the pressure remains to keep producing good stories that are accessible to wide audiences.

To get ahead of the comments I imagine will come, I acknowledge the royalties paid by traditional publishers to their authors is considerably less that that which is paid through online publishers, but you’ve got to consider that trad publishers pay advances and then bear the burden of all production and marketing costs. By my math, 15% of 25,000 sales is better than 70% of 250 sales.

Don’t stop writing.

Whether you make $1,000 from your first book or $100,000, you can’t stop writing if you want to make this writing gig a career. One book per year, minimum — or even more than that if you’ve chosen certain genres. This is a business of numbers and name recognition. By definition, nobody knows who you are when your first book drops, but if readers like the story, a solid percentage of them will buy your next book, too, and then tell their friends about it. The people who first learn about you on your fifth book (or fifteenth) may be inspired to go back and buy your previous works.

So, folks, this brings us to the true secret of how to make a living as a novelist. Never forget that . . .

The backlist sells the front list.

Of my 30 novels, 16 are part of my Jonathan Grave thriller series, with #17 on its way in February, 2026. Every time a new book is released (look for Scorched Earth, dropping on February 24), there’s a big spike in sales for the first book in the series, and smaller spikes in all the books that follow. The backlist lives forever and produces income forever, but for best results, that income pump needs to be primed annually with a new release. Otherwise, the sales curves flatten.

Do the math. Every book is an evergreen revenue generator, and those revenues add up over time. Now, 30 years into this game, I have reliable income from my current book, previous years’ books, foreign versions of all of the above, ongoing renewing movie options, and miscellaneous sources like speaking fees and the occasional short story. All of this in addition to the Social Security payments I’ll start accepting in a couple of years.

As promised, the route to real money is neither quick nor easy. But it is very real.

Final note: If you read this post on the the day it was published, I will be in Las Vegas, hanging out with 65,000 of my closest friends at the SHOT Show. Check my Facebook page for updates.

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By PJ Parrish

You tell a lot about a book from its back cover.

I love reading the backcopy of books. It can be a powerful selling tool, summing up in just a couple paragraphs the soul of a story, giving us a glimpse of the plot and characters, without giving away the guts. When backcopy is good, it’s an art. And when it’s bad…well, I guess we can blame that on some poor editor somewhere. (I’ve had my share). Or maybe the problem runs deeper than that. We’ll get back to that…

Years ago, I did a long detailed post about how to write backcopy. Click here, if interested. But what I’d like to talk about today is what is known as the tagline. In usually one to three sentences, a good tagline — like a newspaper headline — tells you in a glance what the book is, at its true heart. And like a well-rendered headline, a book tagline makes you stop for a second or two and maybe get seduced.

I ran across a good example of this recently when I finally cracked open a novel I had gotten for Christmas. It’s set in France, so the giver was sure I would enjoy it. So was I because the tagline was pretty good:

In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.

I won’t be coy. The book is Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. Now I know this is a hugely popular, even beloved, book. But dang, I just couldn’t get into it, and I gave it about 150 pages. Well written but just not my cup of tea. À chacun son goût.

But as I said, it got me thinking about what makes for good taglines. If you are self-publishing, you need to know about this because it really can make or break a sale for a casually browsing reader. If you don’t believe me, go haunt a (real) bookstore and watch browsers. They pick up a book, drawn maybe by spiffy cover art and then, almost always, they turn it over and read the back.

Movies are really good at taglines, probably because in the good old days, the movie poster was like a carnival barker trying to lure you inside. Here’s maybe my all time favorites:

In space, no one can hear you scream.

Alien, of course. But I like the tagline for the sequel Alien vs Pedator as well:

Whoever wins, we lose.

And then there’s the classic:

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity is a work of noir genius. Every line of dialogue is as sharp as the tagline itself. This should be assigned viewing for every writer.

And just because I watched the movie again the other night:

Okay, intermission! Time out for a short quiz. See if you can tell which movies match these poster taglines. Answers at the end.

1. You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies
2. When he pours, he reigns
3. Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.
4. The first casualty of war is innocence.
5. On every street in every city in this country, there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.
6. He was the perfect weapon until he became the target.
7. If you only see one movie this year … You need to get out more.
8. A man went looking for America, and he couldn’t find it anywhere.
9. Don’t get mad. Get everything.
10. She brought a small town to its feet and a corporation to its knees.

I’ve been lucky to have some great editors over my career who shepherded my books through the backcopy and tagline process. For An Unquiet Grave: Not Every Soul Rests In Peace. And one of my faves from my Thomas & Mercer editor for She’s Not There:

A past she can’t remember.
A killer she can’t recongize.
And they’re both catching up with her.

Just for fun I pulled some books off my shelf in search of good taglines. Some taglines are only one juicy line. Some are puns. Others can stretch on into mini-plot summaries. But all tease and tantylize:

• Yesterday was for youthful indiscretions. Today is for consequences. — Sue Grafton’s Y Is For Yesterday.
• A tough detective follows a lead back to a 1960s Borcht Belt resort to crack an unsolved crime — or was it a crime at all? — Reed Farrel Coleman’s Redemption Street.
• From a helicopter high above the empty California desert, a man is sent free-falling into the night…in Chicago, a woman learns that an elite team of ex-army investigators is being hunted down one by one…and on the streets of Portland, Jack Reacher — soldier, cop, hero — is pulled out of his wandering life by a code that few other people could understand. — Lee Child’s Bad Luck and Trouble.

Okay, that last one is not a true tagline, just a good summary. But I really like the tagline for the first Reacher movie: If he’s coming for you, you probably deserve it.

The best taglines distill the core emotional, thematic, or high-stakes essence of your story down into a punchy, memorable phrase. It serves as the HEADLINE above the rest of the backcopy, wherein you can go into more plot and character details. It also hints at the tone of your book — humor, noir, romantic.

Do you really need a tagline? Well, not if you’re famous. A scan of my bookshelf showed me that the bestsellers rarely have them because the big name is lure enough. Sometimes, the space is given over to a blurb from a fellow writer. And if you’re lucky, you’ve hit upon a fabulous title that needs no other help. A few from my bookshelf: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Something Wicked This Way Comes. To Kill A Mockingbird. Midnight In the Garden Of Good And Evil. And David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day because I am still doing my Duolingo French every day.

So, what about it? Can you write a great tagline for your book? Can you boil it down to its purest self and pour it out in one or two pithy lines? It’s hard. It’s an art even.

And at risk of depressing you, let me add a final thought. If you — or your poor overworked editor — can’t come up with a good tagline, well, maybe you’re not really sure, in your heart of hearts, what your story is really about. But that’s a post for another day.

ANSWERS

1. The Social Network
2. Cocktail
3. Interstellar
4. Platoon
5. Taxi Driver
6. Bourne Identity
7. Naked Gun
8. Easy Rider
9. The First Wives Club
10. Erin Brockovich

We shook things up at Casa Wortham this week. We’ve lived here for about seven years in what we call the new house, and felt the kitchen needed a change not long after the Bride’s oven sparked, gagged, and filled the house with the heady aroma of burned chemicals.

But this isn’t about major appliances. Remember when you first moved into your place and beheld empty drawers in the kitchen?

One question always comes up. Where does the silverware go? (In Texas, daily eating utensils are silverware, even though the real silver ((plate)) is in a wooden case stuffed back in a cabinet or under a bed and only comes out on Thanksgiving or when someone dies).

Then there are wooden spoons, cup towels, oversize forks and spoons, tongs, measuring cups and spoons, vegetable peelers, graters, garlic presses, thermometers, kitchen scales, bottle openers, corn cob holders.

They need a home in the shallow drawers.

What’s the proper dispersal method?

And while we’re at it, there’s the (ominous music) junk drawer. Where will that one be, because we know for certain that a drawer will devolve into one of these chaotic black holes that scientists with pocket protectors in their shirts discuss in hushed tones.

I’m sure you have one of these sacred disorganized repositories of migratory odds and ends nestled in a bed of bread ties, old rubber bands, thick blue rubber bands off celery stalks, nuts, bolts, mysterious batters that might or might not be dead (but you can’t throw them out until you know), and mysterious keys you’ve never seen before in your life. Wait. How the hell did my razor get in there? Was someone shaving carrots?

On moving day in the new house, we unloaded boxes marked KITCHEN into random drawers that were probably open and waiting, and have lived with those spur of the moment decisions since.

But there have been problems. The silverware drawer is between the oven and stove. That’s our serving area when we don’t have sit-down meals, which is 95% of the time. And there are usually a lot of people in line.

If someone is filling a plate, they’re in the way of spoons, forks, and knives, which we usually forget. Then we go back and excuse ourselves to open the drawer, or cut in line, which can be deadly with sons-in-law and hungry teens.

On Wednesday of this week, the Bride came home with a couple of classy bamboo dividers to help separate some of the more aggressive utensils. I was between writing projects, and the next thing I knew, we’d emptied all the drawers onto the countertops and forced significant changes in implement and gadget placement.

Now it all makes sense, to a small degree, but here’s the problem. We keep returning to the wrong places for wooden spoons, measuring cups, and the scissors which reside in the junk drawer. We’re on a learning curve, and I sent our daughters and sons-in-law a thirty-second video preparing them the new organization.

They were aghast.

The Redhead, mother of two, sent an eye-rolling emoji, and Taz, the youngest and mother of three kids, was verbally displeased. But then again, she even hates it when the Bride replaces accent pillows with new, fresh additions.

But I explained. “Change is good. Remembering where everything is in their new locations is exercise for the brain.”

With that, I needed proof to counter verbal attacks when the all come over Sunday night for out weekly get together.

An exhausting thirty second search on medical databases provided this agreement. “Positive change and new experiences are excellent for the brain, promoting neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to form new connections), boosting cognitive function, improving mood (via dopamine, that’s why it’s called dope, according to my dad) and building mental resilience, even though the brain’s amygdala might initially perceive change as a threat. Varying routines, learning new skills, exploring new places, and engaging in diverse activities build cognitive reserve, helping you adapt and maintain long-term brain health.” 

Now I have to make this relevant to my writing blog post.

With that in mind, I looked up “neuroplasticity and amygdala” before diving into another search to find that it’s beneficial for authors to change genres, or write short stories, or nonfiction articles or books. In other words, shake it up.

While reading those confusing medical evaluations and articles for another fifteen minutes, I learned that changing genres or writing styles introduces new narrative tools, breaks writer’s block (which I don’t believe in), fosters artistic growth, and offers fresh perspectives, though it requires extra time.

Switching genres challenges an individual to think differently, find new solutions, and prevents creative stagnation, leading to broader skills and more diverse ideas that can even enrich their primary genre. 

But wait! Getting out of your writing lane is commonly considered a bad idea in literary circles. One article I read explored and supported Stephen Kings change from his traditional horror novels to write an alternate history with 11/22/63, or Cormac McCarthy’s shift to his post-apocalyptic The Road. I’ve been told only bestselling authors should take those chances.

Some say we should stick to our writing lanes and do what our fans come to expect.

Fine, wait a while after you write something different before submitting it, but there’s nothing wrong with taking a break from your WIP and writing a science fiction or post-apocalyptic short story if only for personal satisfaction.

This mental exercise is a great way to get out of a rut.

When you do that, find a different place to write for a day or two. Such a change just might inspire something different. Many authors write in one location, and edit in another.

You don’t have to sell those new works today, or tomorrow. You can put them in a figurative junk drawer (see the unplanned connection here? I love the subconscious author.) and dust it off sometime in the future when you need it.

I did that way back in 2012, when my first novel was published and my editors wanted the next book. I’d written a three-thousand-word short story in 1986 that sat in my file all that time, but when I needed an idea, I re-read that old experiment and found the foundation of the second novel in my Red River series, Burrows, which was truly a horror story.

Or maybe you’ve read a non-fiction article in a magazine and thought, “I know that much.” Give it a try.

For several years I wrote “hook and bullet” stories for several outdoor magazines. More than one took awards from the Outdoor Writers of America and the Texas Outdoor Writers Association. I’m proud of those stories and the framed acknowledgments from my peers.

One was an informative history of the longbow, and with liberal applications of scotch, the article was quirky and funny.

I’d exercised my creativity and different writing skills, because I like to try different things.

Like moving the silverware drawer.

In Science Explores News, an article about Dr. Nathan Spreng, a neuroscientist at Cornell University, explored how the brain changes as we learn. Much of the article concentrates on new physical tasks, such as hitting a baseball, but a deeper idea comes from pianists who can play complicated musical scores without thinking about where their fingers go. Their minds can wander, and that opens up even more neural pathways.

So if we get out of our writing lane and try something different, can authors open new creative paths to follow?

Some doctors think it does.

Try a short story, or an article, or start a new chapter in a different kind of novel just to see if that old excitement is there, or if a different way of thinking helps your writing. No one has to see it but you.