Remembering

Today is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. NPR is doing some great coverage. Check it out.

Covert Iterations

This blog post came up on my AOL start page today.

I've never seen a more blatant example of covert book marketing. This recent convert to genre literature is going to chronicle the details of her new interest starting tomorrow. I won't be surprised if all of the books she's read are put out by the same publisher -- an up-and-coming romance imprint or independent press, quite possibly specializing in chick lit. (A phrase which I keep mistaking for "Chiclet," as in gum, in casual conversation.)

I'll monitor this and see what happens next...

This morning on The Today Show, Dr. Mel Levine talked about his new book, Ready or Not, Here Life Comes.

The subject of the book is work-life preparedness -- and how twentysomethings lack it. The book examines why young people in this day and age are so shocked and confused when they exit childhood and enter the working world. More and more young people (and I'm one of them!) live at home for longer periods of time and flounder in a variety of careers before figuring out where in the world they fit.

Something about this book's topic reminded me of Steve Young's book on failure, and made me wonder if there's a natural connection between "work-life preparedness" and learning to benefit from failure and rejection.

It seems to me like adolescence sets children up with a series of very simple trials. You pass a test, you hand in your homework, you make the team, you graduate. For many people, all of these things are relatively easy. Maybe that's why so many of us are so shellshocked when we enter the corporate world. Nothing is quite as cut-and-dry as a Shakespeare quiz.

Perhaps -- just perhaps -- the students who fail out of classes, get cut from the football team and get dumped, repeatedly, by members of the opposite sex are the ones who go on to the greatest successes!

Anyway -- read both books and let me know what you think. Maybe we can design a course where overachieving teenagers are forced to fail, purely from a learning and rejection-preparation standpoint.

Syllabusted!

This post does little to support the clever title, but here goes:

The Wharton Business School at UPenn is teaching a class in which one of our books, Great Failures of the Extremely Successful (I post about it often), is being used on the syllabus. The class is called The Literature of Success, and it sounds like a great topic to me.

Before Clive Cussler Was a Best-Selling Author...

...he worked in jobs he hated -- until he was 43. When he finally published something, he received absymal reviews.

And then he went on to sell millions of copies. Now he's living every writer's dream: supporting himself pretty darned well, and entirely through his writing.

The moral of this story: failure isn't the end of anything -- it's just the start of something new. Somebody out there is looking for the precise thing you're able to provide.

For more inspirational stories of this nature, check out Great Failures of the Extremely Successful. If you fail to learn anything, leave us a comment and maybe, just maybe, we'll send you a free book.

Tsunami of P.R. and Profit

Our author Steve Young (Great Failures of the Extremely Successful) has an article out on how stars are pledging tsunami relief in exchange for instant sainthood. Check it out.

Also, a side note: Steve's book is still on sale. If you order directly through our website, you save 15%.

Another "Write Screenplays" Review

Happy New Year!

And I'm pleased to start it off with yet another glowing review of Hal Ackerman's screenwriting book, "Write Screenplays That Sell."

Here's the full text and a link to the review on the original site:

When I was first asked to convert a novel into a screenplay, I believed that novelists had the market cornered on how-to books, but the abundance of screenplay manuals proved me wrong. Like books for the novelist, many are laden with feel-good fluff and advice that becomes outdated before New Year’s Day. Write Screenplays That Sell is an exception. With arresting prose, Ackerman gives the only lesson that is relevant. He breaks down that peculiar yet beloved sub-genre of storytelling known as the screenplay. His lessons are just as useful for the novice as they are for the journeyman who thinks he knows it all. Write Screen Plays That Sell doesn’t explain how to sell a script. That’s a different animal, but with Ackerman’s instructions and a pile of master scripts, the aspiring writer will be well on his way toward production.

-- Christopher Klim, editor Writers Notes Magazine, author Everything Burns