Damn! Why Didn't I Write That?: How Ordinary People Are Raking in $100,000.00... or More Writing Nonfiction Books & How You Can Too! - Softcover

McCutcheon, Marc

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1884956556 ISBN 13: 9781884956553

Publisher: Quill Driver Books, 2006

Synopsis

More nonfiction books are breaking the 100,000-copy sale barrier than ever before. Amateur writers, housewives, and even high school dropouts have cashed in with astonishingly simple best-sellers. This guide, by best-selling author Marc McCutcheon, shows the reader how to get in on the action by identifying lucrative publishing niches and filling them, not once, not twice, but year after year.

About this title

Review:

Forget everything you've heard about the travails of the freelance writer. In Damn! Why Didn't I Write That?, Marc McCutcheon contends that "you can learn the trade and begin making a respectable income much faster than most people think possible." To illustrate, McCutcheon lists 17 pages of bestselling titles, including Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance (150,000 copies sold) and Golfing, a humor book (525,000 copies sold). McCutcheon himself wrote a few well-chosen titles and claims to be "easily support[ing] a family of four, working part-time." How? Think niche, says McCutcheon. Think backlist. Think about perennially hot topics like dieting/weight loss, relationships, parenting, health, low-fat cooking, sex, spirituality, money/finances, cats, career and leadership, and computer and Internet. McCutcheon is quite helpful about things like contract negotiation, agents, proposals, and promotion. He also confers a real can-do attitude on his readers. "In the corporate world," he says, "tall, beautiful people rule. In the writing world, even Yoda can climb to the top of the success ladder." --Jane Steinberg

About the Author:

Former literary agent and best-selling author Marc McCutcheon has thirteen books currently in print, including Descriptionary, The Compass in Your Nose & Other Astonishing Facts About Humans, and Roget's Super Thesaurus, all Book-of-the-Month Club selections.

The editors at Amazon.com recently voted Roget's Super Thesaurus one of the "Ten Best" reference books published in the last several years.

Marc doesn't hide the fact that he is a high school dropout. "I almost invariably get unpublished authors' complete attention when I tell them I dropped out of high school. Something about being an autodidact fascinates people and gives them hope that 'if he can do it, I can do it.'"

He lives with his wife, Deanna, and two children, Kara and Macky, in South Portland, Maine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Quill Driver Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1884956556
• ISBN 13: 9781884956553
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 253