Beginnings are exciting to write. Endings are what you were writing toward. The middle is where most drafts lose their way. In manuscript after manuscript, we see the same pattern: a strong opening, a promising setup, and then somewhere past the first third, the story starts to drift. Readers feel it as boredom. Authors feel …
Point of view is the camera your reader looks through. When it holds steady, readers sink into the story without noticing it at all. When it wobbles, they feel unsettled and often can’t say why. In our editing work, POV problems are among the most common issues we flag, and among the easiest to fix …
A novel and a screenplay can tell the same story, but they ask completely different things of the writer. A novel is a finished experience: the reader gets everything they need from the page. A screenplay is a blueprint. Its first readers are producers, directors, and actors, and its job is to tell them what …
A reader picks up your book, or clicks its listing, and gives it about ten seconds. The cover earned the click. The blurb decides the sale. Yet many authors who spent years on the manuscript write their back-cover copy in an afternoon, and it shows. A blurb is not a summary. It is a sales …
Most authors never get a call from Hollywood. Some decide not to wait. Writing your own adaptation is one of the few moves in the film business that an author fully controls. Whether it’s the right move depends on what you want from it. Here is an honest look at the case for, the case …
You spent years on your novel. You know these characters better than anyone. So when people say “this would make a great movie,” the natural next thought is: could I write the screenplay myself? You can. But a screenplay is not a shorter novel. It is a different machine, built for a different reader, and …
Almost every author who contacts us asks some version of the same question: “What kind of editing do I need?” It matters more than it seems. Hire the wrong edit and you pay to polish sentences in chapters that should be cut, or you pay for a structural critique when all you needed was a …
A tool by Tin House Press Every novelist has had the thought at least once, usually while describing their book to someone at a party: this would make a good film. And then the thought dies there, because the distance between a finished novel and a screenplay a producer will read is about four months …
A phrase that keeps surfacing across industry analysis this year is “direct-to-reader” — not as a marketing tactic, but as a structural strategy independent authors and small presses are increasingly building their entire operation around. It’s worth understanding what this actually means, because it’s a meaningfully different posture than the “post on social media and …
Labor organizing has become one of the more consequential, less-discussed stories in trade publishing this year, and it’s worth understanding — not because it directly changes how any individual author writes or submits a book, but because it says something real about the working conditions inside the houses authors are trying to get published by. …
