How to Get Happily Published: A Complete and Candid Guide, 5th ed.
by Judith Applebaum
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HarperCollins (New York): April 1998. Trade paperback: 336 pages. ISBN-10: 0-06-273509-8 Suggested retail price: $14.00 (US) Tags: Publishing; Writing Tactical strength: [4/10] |
If you have never read any of the "How to write/get published" works, then this one may be as good a guide as any, but as someone who has read numerous works of this genre, this was a waste of my time. Applebaum tries to cover too much material in her pages. Any writing guide that focuses on a target genre would be better -- Applebaum only glosses over the craft of writing. But in all fairness, her book is about publishing and we'll forgive her this point.
The material on publishing does present good strategies for getting oneself into the eye of an editor. But again, there is much more specific advice in books that focus only on this one specific aspect. And that goes for the rest of her major topic areas: self-marketing, selling spin-offs, self-publishing, and financing. There are good ideas in each of these treatises, but none are very comprehensive. And I could barely keep reading. Applebaum's main text is interrupted incessantly with cross references to every other section of the book. This is good if the reader is only going to read one or two paragraphs, but makes a cover-to-cover reading nearly intolerable. And that was not the extent of the parenthetical interruptions; it seems every other sentence needed to be clarified or cross referenced.
Applebaum devotes nearly 100 pages to lists of resources which is touted in the table of contents as a "comprehensive review." I guess in her mind comprehensive means repetition. She divides the resources into five major categories and often cites the same reference -- Literary Market Place (LMP), for example -- in each of the categories. What seemed to be 100 pages of resources, if sorted and had the duplicates removed, would probably only be around 30 or 40 pages.
If you want to learn how to be a better writer, get some other book that specializes in the genre in which you want to write. If you want to learn about publishing, then get a book that specializes in the aspects of publishing. But don't buy this book unless you are really desperate to read from one more source that "you can do it if you try hard enough."
