Got an offer for hundreds of thousands (of yen) for the first book of the Painted Man series today. It’s not huge compared to the Western offers, but it is apparently quite sizeable for Japan.
I know the Japanese tend to be much more literal in their book titles than Americans, and it winds up translating […]

So as I mentioned, the publisher wants to change the name of my book.
I really like the title The Painted Man. Honestly, I think it is the best title for the story I have written.
But the publisher’s point, which I will concede, if not like, is that the title is a marketing tool as much […]

Fucking Jardir.I’m hard at work on the sequel to The Painted Man (soon to be named something else), and it keeps growing. Even as the first book sells all over the Western world, there is universal agreement on one thing: It is a fucking brick. 565 double-spaced pages in MS Word.Your average novel by a […]

Okay, this is getting to be ridiculous.Yesterday, I got two rejections from small publishers in Germany. My agent tells me not to worry about it. “With what’s going on in the US & UK, the ones that can’t afford you will always be the first to refuse,” he says. “The bigger German publishers will either […]

There’s the hard parts, and then there’s the easy parts.
I’ve really been feeling like writing was a chore for the last couple of weeks. I didn’t know if it was performance anxiety over having people suddenly throwing me money from all directions, or stress, or what. I was just missing my writing quota (1,000 words […]

Peat’s Agent: “Now that we have a US sale, we can try to sell the book to other markets, as well.”Peat: “How’s that?”
Agent: “I have sales contacts in the UK, and proxies who will sell to foreign language markets in Europe.”
Peat: “No shit.”
Agent: “Shit. All together, it won’t add up to the advance you got […]