Author Archives: James Scott Bell

About James Scott Bell

International Thriller Writers Award winner, #1 bestselling author of THRILLERS and BOOKS ON WRITING. Subscribe to JSB's NEWSLETTER.

Jack Woodford on Writing For Money

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Jack Woodford (1894–1971)

In the golden age of the pulps there was a writer named Jack Woodford, who also wrote how-to books for writers. What’s refreshing about these is his no-hold-barred advice that eschews all flowery paeans on the romance of being a writer. He gets down to it in a book titled, appropriately, How to Write for Money (1944):

So there you are. A free-lance writer! Oh pitiable wretch! Oh miserable fool! Of all the business you could have gone into—operating a movie theatre, or making guns, running a drug store or learning how to be a tailor or a plumber, a typographer or a hot dog cook—you insist on going into the business of cash-and-carry prose. Well, you know best. As for me, I know there isn’t a so-and-so thing I can do to discourage you or make you change your mind. I admit (reluctantly) I’ve made a pretty good thing out of it myself. But I’ve had some breaks….Can you be sure of getting breaks? Of course you can’t. That’s what a break means—a stroke of luck that nobody expects, all pine for madly, and mighty few ever get. Where would I have been without my breaks? God knows. I don’t!

Do you feel like a “pitiable wretch” sometimes? Welcome to the club called Every Writer. We meet at the bar.

Writing is the most hazardous profession of which I know. It usually carries with it far less rewards than most people think, much more work, and very little satisfaction; since you cannot, ever, say what you really think about anything. Many writers appear to do so but they are always restricted one way or another behind the scenes. The rewards of writing, however, are worth it for those temperamentally suited to such rewards. The freedom it brings from alarm clocks, for instance, is, in itself, not an inconsiderable item; and from time clocks, and other devices of torture invented by people who hold stock in things and milk other people of their labor at usurious rates.

That is a lure, of course. If this gig gets big, you don’t have to “work for the man,” as they used to say. Better, though, to think of your writing as one little stream of income, a side hustle, that may or may not grow into a river. But a trickle is better than nothing at all if you love to write (and you should love it…most of the time, at least).

Woodford, writing in the middle of World War II, offers a military illustration:

In Boot Camp, tough sergeants deliberately try to break the morale of inducted men. Those who break they send back to civilian life, or to some more or less ignominious chore in army life. There are two or three hundred thousand “writers” who “write at” writing in this country. Ninety percent of them make next to nothing. The few who do get by are those who were not “broken” in the “Boot Camp” of their own wills, or lack of same.

Knowing all that:

If you really want to be a writer it is my observation, from a quarter century of association with successful and unsuccessful writers, that the hinges of Hell cannot prevail against you.

In Writer’s Cramp (1953), Woodford quotes the novelist Robert Ruark, who was big at the time:

“To write a book is no simple thing. One needs paper, a typewriter, a certain basic stupidity, and time. Also arrogance. Any bum who sits down and figures he has 300 book pages of importance is an arrogant ass. Nobody has that much to say worth saying. Neither Shakespeare nor Artie Shaw.”

Note: Artie Shaw was a famous big band leader, a clarinetist, who also had a fertile mind. In 1952 he published an autobiography titled The Trouble With Cinderella: An Outline of Identity, which is no doubt what Ruark is referring to.

Woodford’s most influential how-to was Trial and Error: A Key to the Secret of Writing and Selling (1940), cited by no less than Ray Bradbury and Raymond Chandler.

Be glad that it is hard. Wish that it were more difficult than it is; for this is your protection, when you have learned it, from too much competition. Only this I can promise you—that even though you have no gifts whatever ever for writing, no knack, education, knowledge, imagination; no common sense, intelligence, anything, you can still learn to write commercial fiction and sell it, if you have really made up your mind to do so. If you really are a downright simpleton, this very fact may make things easier for you in the free lance commercial fiction racket, for nine-tenths of all stories and novels are in America read by ninnies who may understand you far better if you are a kindred spirit.

You could not learn to write literature, whatever that is, by simply making up your mind to do it; no, not even if you had a will like Mussolini’s.

All I can give you here is a rough idea as to how to go about turning exposition into the various sorts of narrative writing.

Okay, you pitiable wretches, if Mr. Woodford were still around, what would you say to him?

Cook Your Story

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

There’s a legendary diner near my house called Bobby’s Coffee Shop. It’s been here since 1949, when Robert “Bobby” Perkins, a U.S. Navy veteran who had served as a cook during World War II, started slinging hash. The place has not changed much over the years. It still has a few tables, a counter, and a big old flat top and burners for the cook.

My dad brought me here as a kid. I was fascinated by Bobby. He had a stack of egg crates by the stove and worked several orders at a time. He’d grab an egg in each hand and crack them—at the same time—on both sides of a pan, and in went the eggs. Then in one, swift motion he’d bring his arms down and, without looking, throw the shells into a big container hidden under the counter. He would tend the eggs (flipping or scrambling), bacon, hash browns and pancakes, without pause (he did have an assistant cook so he could take the occasional smoke break).

The place was always packed. Why? Because Bobby knew his routine and what the customers wanted—the same satisfying breakfast every time.

In this way, Bobby was like a great genre writer. Give the folks what they want, with consistent quality.

I’ve also had a meal or two at a fancy-shmancy joint, sometimes featuring a celebrity chef. They’d have their specialties, a signature style making each dish unique.

In this way, they were like great literary stylists.

What both Bobby and the star chefs had in common was that they both worked with formulas.

I’ll sometimes hear a young writer say, “I don’t need to learn all this plot and structure stuff. That’s just a formula. I don’t want to write by a formula!”

I will then ask the whelp if he likes omelets. “Sure.” Then I ask, “Can you make an omelet without eggs?”

“Of course not.”

“Without a hot pan, some butter, some ingredients?”

“What are you getting at?”

“There’s a formula for omelets. You have to follow it, or you have no omelet. What gives it individuality is your mix of spices and ingredients. Same with writing, my friend.”

Thus, I was pleased to run across this recently in Story Physics, by Kill Zone emeritus Larry Brooks:

Equate the writing of a book to a lavish meal: multiple courses, different flavors, all aligning with a theme.

It will require tools—pots, pans, a stove, a butter knife—to prepare. It will require a basic recipe and some sensibility of cooking as a craft (note to self: don’t serve steak that’s as hard as a hockey puck). It will be composed of various ingredients, each with a different role that will add to the outcome.

The courses should be served in a specific order, in certain combinations, and both the ingredients and the recipes need to align with their assigned roles in the dining experience (a little Tabasco in the dessert isn’t gonna work).

Larry goes on to explain about spices, the individuality a chef brings to the formula:

Here’s an example of choosing the right spice for your story: You give your hero an everyday job because he’s an everyday guy—in other words, you give him a boring job—when any number of compelling jobs would better serve both characterization and plot. Why? Because it was—or is—your job, and you know it well. Somewhere in your writing past you’ve been told to write what you know—solid advice, but not always the best advice—so this leads you to unvetted choices in this regard.

Maybe your job fascinates you, but is it inherently compelling to others? Unless the plot depends on the hero’s occupation, in which case the plot defines it, then this is an opportunity to contribute to characterization and context by way of injecting something interesting into the mix. Something that possesses stronger story physics.

Simply put, the great cooks deliver consistent quality, and the great chefs unique tastes and textures, while both provide a satisfying meal. That’s a matter of craft, of knowing what works and what doesn’t, leaving room for your individuality, your “voice” and style.

If you want to sell books—or open up a restaurant—learn how to cook. Honor the craft. Master the seven critical success factors of fiction—plot, structure, characters, scenes, dialogue, voice, and meaning. Get to know your spice rack, which holds ingredients like minor characters. Give others a taste—a good editor, beta reader or crit partner. Keep on cooking. You’ll burn a few things here and there, but that’s how you learn.

Enjoy the process. Bon appétit.

How do you cook your books? (Maybe I should rephrase that…)

News: Sales and Deals

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

A couple of items from the trad side of the business.

Book Sales Down

From Publishers Weekly:

Unit sales of print books had a slow start in 2026, according to data from Circana BookScan. Total unit sales fell 3.1% compared to a year ago for the quarter ending March 28, 2026, dropping to 163.5 million copies sold.

The young adult category had the steepest percentage decline.

This last bit concerns me. Is it phones, tablets, TikTok, or whatever else that keep kids from novel-length fiction? Are parents buying fewere books to give to their kids?

Book Deals Hard to Come By (File this under “New, What Else is?”)

Getting a traditional publishing deal has always been a challenge. Is it harder now? A column in USA TODAY says:

About 81% of Americans feel that they have a book in them, according to an often cited survey reported in The New York Times (from the early 2000s). Many aspire to write and publish a book in their lifetime, but only a small fraction see their work formally acquired and announced each year. A little over 2,000 fiction writers announced deals in 2025 on Publishers Marketplace.

***

[W]hen people ask, “Can anyone get a book deal?” what they’re often asking is something else:

  • Is this still possible for people who aren’t famous?
  • Do I have to know somebody in the industry?
  • And if I do everything “right,” will it still take years?

In short: Yes, no and maybe. A book deal is attainable – to some extent. It’s also not a finish line. 

***

The publishing industry is consolidating, which means fewer imprints (and fewer editors)…When editors are stretched thinner, the time it takes to nurture talent – especially debut authors – shrinks. The industry’s ability to take a slow bet on a writer, to develop them the way record labels develop musicians or sports teams develop rookies, becomes increasingly rare.

***

Even when the book is good, “we have less places to sell things than we have in the past,” Carly Watters, senior literary agent at PS Literary, told USA TODAY. “A lot of things are more predicated on the appetites of a smaller group of people … there might be separate imprints, but they all share an editorial board meeting.”

Quality aside, a novel also has to be “sellable” to stand out in those meetings. “In my experience, (books) that are easily pitchable, meaning we can sum up – hook, line, sinker – in one sentence, that’s something that I can get people’s attention with,” Watters added. There are gorgeous books that are hard to summarize, she said. The kind you want to hand someone and say, “Just read it, then call me.”

Those books can sell. But it’s harder.

The article’s author spoke with a literary agent Eric Smith:

Plenty of his clients come from cold querying (sending an email or form pitch) with no connections in the industry. But also, his inbox – when he’s open to submissions – can reach thousands in a few months. Smith estimated he received around 3,000 submissions over roughly 90 days and signed a handful last year.

That number can seem terrifying until you remember something important: Most of those submissions weren’t “bad writers.” They just weren’t the right fit. Or the timing was wrong. Or the market was saturated. Or an editor had just acquired something similar. Or an imprint closed. Or an editor got laid off. Or the editorial board said, “We already have a slot like this.”

You can do everything right and still lose to the invisible calendar of the industry.

Consolidation makes that sharper. Smith described it plainly: Agents can’t send five projects in a row to the same editor without burning that bridge.

So yes, it can be more challenging now; not because the “gatekeepers” hate writers, but because the gate is servicing fewer lanes.

Comments welcome.

Hawking Your Book in a Crowded Sky

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Obsessive Marketing Disorder (OMD)

Sheesh! With over 4,000,000 books (mostly indie) published last year, how the ever-loving heckfire does an author hope to get noticed, let alone make any lettuce at this gig?

I recall two historical events converging at around the same time—the explosive growth of Twitter and the eruption of indie publishing via Amazon. I got in on both around the same time, and I remember a number of writers who had the idea that millions and millions of people would see their tweets, so the best strategy was repetitive messaging that was a variation on buy my book, really buy my book, really buy my book right nowI

That quickly grew stale. It didn’t take long to discover that social media is not a direct marketing tool. So authors began to use Twitter as part of their brand-building enterprise, which for many included several other platforms. That takes a lot of time and mental energy away from the writing, and can result in an affliction I call Obsessive Marketing Disorder (OMD).

To avoid this malady, let me offer my personal take on where to focus your energies. I invite your take in the comments.

Your primary marketing tool is your books, written with the best craft and care you can bring to them. Because word-of-mouth has always been the most effective way to sell books over the long-term. So spend most of your time doing what you do—producing pages and getting better at your craft.

Set up a website, of course. A full treatment of this subject is beyond the scope of this post, so start off by reading the advice of industry expert Jane Friedman.

Next in importance is the email list. By going direct to a growing base of satisfied readers, you build a career. But how, you may ask, does a newbie create such a list? Well, first, satisfy readers with your books! (See above). Then offer a reader magnet, a healthy chunk of free content in return for an email address. I use BookFunnel for this ($10 a month) offering a free novella.

Now, how do you interact with your list? With pleasant to read emails. What I mean is, offer your list something they’ll enjoy reading on its own merits, not just a sales pitch. One author who does this well, IMO, is a guy who is bound to break out soon. His name is Dean Koontz. One recent email “From the Desk of Dean” begins:

Dear Readers,

It’s been a month of chaos here, with real life intruding into Koontzland in ways that I simply refuse to tolerate. In my frustration, I was dismayed to discover there is no Bureau of Real Life Control to which we can turn. More than one officious federal bureaucrat, hearing my complaints during multiple phone calls (I do not give up easily) said, “You’re on your own, you idiot.”

I was further dismayed to discover there is no Bureau, Office, Agency, or Department that will soundly thrash bureaucrats who call model citizens like me an “idiot,” and will not even teleport them to a retraining facility on the moon, which I’d be willing to help fund. It seems that if I am to maintain my quality of life in Koontzland—with its sugar-cake buildings, candy-bearing trees, and herds of unicorns—I will have to take extreme measures, which I am still formulating.

He goes on for a couple of paragraphs, then deftly drops in his pitch:

I am smiling now with true delight when I tell you that the first three Jane Hawk novels—The Silent Corner, The Whispering Room, and The Crooked Staircase will be reissued for the first time in trade paperback by Bantam Books in June and can be preordered as soon as you’re wise enough to do so. The fourth and fifth Janes are coming in September. They all have dazzling new covers.

He finishes off with:

To calm myself, I will go running now in the company of unicorns through the vast meadows of wild orchids here in Koontzland, through the forest of muffin trees, to the great Fountain of Longevity. One drink of that fountain’s flow of cherry cola grants another century of life. It’s another century in real life, but I’m counting on a world run by benign robots that will spare us from the problems and annoyances that now plague us. How could they not?

Warmest regards from everyone here in Koontzland,

Dean Koontz

To see more of Dean’s mailers, go here. Please note, don’t try to imitate Mr. Koontz. It’s his tone. Find your own, one that would be welcome at a party, which means don’t become just another boorish ranter. We have way too many of those now.

As for frequency of mailing, I’d advise once a month. What might you talk about?

  • Your WIP
  • Your process
  • Your research
  • Early look at chapters
  • Cover reveals
  • New deals

If you enjoy writing about a certain subject, you might consider a newsletter. I have one of these via Substack, which you can sample here.

As for paid advertising, I’ve never cracked the CPC or CPM code, and trying to figure it all out while shelling out dough can induce OMD all on its own. I have had some success with promotional services like BookBub and Written Word Media.

My bottom line is, don’t stress about marketing. Keep the main thing the main thing—producing quality fiction. Set up an email list. Move outward from there, watching for signs of OMD as you do. If you feel it coming on, go outside, take a deep breath, come back in and write another chapter.

Comments welcome.

Writing About Experiences Not Your Own

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Memorial Day Weekend. Across this land of ours, barbecues will be firing, grill masters will be grilling, hot dogs and hamburgers will be sizzling, beers will be pouring, flags will be waving, and kids will be playing. I do hope that some of that time will be used to educate our young charges about the meaning of Memorial Day.

Its roots go back to the Civil War, when people honored the dead by decorating their graves with flowers and wreaths. After the war, by proclamation, May 30 was selected as “Decoration Day.” By the end of the 19th century it was also being referred to as Memorial Day. Congress adopted that latter designation and made the last Monday in May the official holiday.

I get choked up about heroic deeds in time of war. The earliest Bell ancestor on these shores was William Bell, born in County Armagh, Ireland. He came to America in the 1760s and settled in Philadelphia, opening a tailor shop. During the Revolutionary War, when Washington’s army was holed up in Valley Forge, William made an officer’s uniform for his brother, John, who was serving with Washington.

But there was a problem. Philadelphia was under British control, with sentinels carefully guarding ingress and egress. This made it almost impossible to get food or clothing to Valley Forge, some thirty miles away.

John Bell’s wife took care of the problem.

As William worked on the clothing, John’s wife established herself as a woman going about her daily business. Dressed in sunbonnet and shawl, she would walk by the British sentinel,  carrying basket of sundries, and return with groceries and other good. When the uniform was finished, she sewed it between her skirts and petticoats. She passed by with her basket once again, without incident, just like it was another day. Only this time she kept on going, walking the thirty miles to Valley Forge, to deliver food and the uniform to her husband.

My great-great grandfather, James Winfield Scott, fought under Sherman during the Civil War. My grandfather, Arthur Scott Bell, was in the Army in World War I. His brother-in-law, my great uncle Frederick Hamilton Fox, was a Marine. He died in the Battle of Belleau Wood, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The book I’m proudest of (because it is the longest book I ever wrote and required the most work) is Glimpses of Paradise. It begins in 1916 Nebraska and ends in 1920s Hollywood. In between is a World War I sequence.

But I’ve never been in battle. Which raises a natural question: how do you write about experiences you’ve never had? Here’s what I did: 

  1. Extensive reading. I found some books deep inside the downtown branch of the Los Angeles Public Library that were priceless, first-hand accounts of World War I battles. I also spent hours in the microfiche room, going through newspaper accounts of same.
  2. I connected my emotions. I believe that if we’ve made it past forty or so in this life, we’ve experienced every emotion there is to a greater or lesser degree. While I have never felt the fear that a soldier feels on the eve of battle, I have felt the fear of dying. The same physiological response is there, and by extrapolation I brought it to the characters in the book.
  3. I looked at a lot of pictures of battlefields, soldiers, weapons and so on. I wanted to be soaked in them, so I could write with a “lived” feeling.
  4. I had an expert review it. I showed the battle pages to someone who knows warfare, and got some notes for changes.

I believe a writer should be free to write about any kind of character or experience, so long as they make the effort to get things right. What about you?

Defeating the Next-Book Willies

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

September of 2009 was Dan Brown week in the world of publishing. It had been six years since his mega-hit The Da Vinci Code. There was a lot of excitement about his new book, The Lost Symbol. Doubleday needed a huge hardcover bestseller in the midst of what’s been called “The Great Recession.” They got one.

The book had a first printing of 6.5 million and sold a million in hardcover and ebook the first day. It debuted at #1 on the NY Times list and stayed there for six weeks.

So why did it take Dan Brown six years to write it? He explained:

“The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who’s had success, is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Instead of writing and saying, ‘This is what the character does,’ you say, ‘Wait, millions of people are going to read this.’ It’s sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke—you’re temporarily crippled.”

What happened to Dan Brown on a mega level happens to most writers who publish more than one book. A lot of unpublished writers think things will be just swell once they’re published, and that they can produce book after book with nary a worry. (Insert here the usual jeremiad about AI-slop.)

For those who take writing seriously, who want to keep producing good work, the writing sometimes gets harder, not easier, as some would think. I’ve found this to be true for myself and for many of my published writer friends.

Why should this be? I think it’s because with each book, we know more about the craft and, consequently, where we fall short. We raise the bar because we hope to grow a readership. We want to keep pleasing them, surprising them, delighting them with plot twists, great characters, and a bit of stylistic flair. We keep pursuing that storied “next level.” That can bring on what I call “The Next-Book Willies.”

Dan Brown dealt with TNBW by hanging upside down in “gravity boots.” It seemed to “help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.” But then: “My wife was very concerned that I would pull myself up into these gravity boots and not have the strength someday to get back down. I’d just be hanging there forever. So I now use an inversion table.”

Other writers have similar quirks:

Roald Dahl at least wrote sitting down, but insisted on climbing into a sleeping bag before doing so. Truman Capote (In Cold Blood; Breakfast at Tiffany’s) supposedly wrote lying down, a coffee – then a sherry, then a martini – in one hand and a pencil in another….Philip Pullman can only write in ballpoint on lined A4 paper that has two holes in it (not four)….John Cheever, in a 1978 Newsweek essay, confessed that the publication of a definitive collection of his great short stories was “in no way eclipsed by the fact that a great many … were written in my underwear.”

Victor Hugo (Les Misérables) allegedly asked his valet to hide his clothes and wrote in the nude – or at least, on cold days, wrapped in a blanket – so he could not go outside.

Here are a few, er, more normal practices I would suggest, all of which I’ve employed. Not surprisingly, the first is, WRITE. Start a free-form journal and just go. Begin entries with “I remember . . .” or “I really hate…” or “I wish…” This is not work on your WIP. It’s giving permission to your brain to come out and play. When you are working on your WIP, consider starting each stint with a Sue Grafton-style novel journal.

RE-READ. Pull out a favorite novel and read parts of it at random, or even the whole thing. Don’t worry about feeling even worse because you think you can’t write like that author. You’re not supposed to. You never can. But guess what? They can’t write like you, either.

INCUBATE. For half an hour, think hard about your project, writing notes to yourself, asking questions. Back yourself into tight corners. Then put all that away for a day and do other stuff. Your Boys in the Basement will get to work and good things will start bubbling up. For an advanced session, try going 6 hours without phone, computer, tablet, or TV. (Think that’s easy these days? Just try it!) ! You can use a pen and paper if you like. I recommend doodling.

BLOOD TO BRAIN. If you want to try gravity boots, be my guest. What I do is lie on my back and put my legs up on a chair or bed, and then do some deep breathing and relaxing for 15-25 minutes. This is especially helpful to get through the afternoon blahs.

So what about you? Have you ever had the “next-book willies”? What do you do to overcome this, or other forms of writer’s block?