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“Gene Perret is the world’s top authority on comedy writing…thinking…and presentation.” — Phyllis Diller

“My career all started because of this book and my willingness to do every bit of the step-by-step work that Gene Perret has so marvelously laid out in it.” — Joe Medeiros, head writer of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

Three-time Emmy-award winner Gene Perret’s Comedy Writing Step by Step has been the manual for humor writers for 24 years. With this, his first update, Perret offers readers a treasure trove of guidelines and suggestions covering a broad range of comedy writing situations, along with many all-important insights into the selling of one’s work.

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

The title says it all. This combination pep-talk/how-to guide by best-selling author McCutcheon (Roget’s Super Thesaurus) offers encouragement to amateur writers who want to support themselves (and their families) by writing. Demonstrating how lucrative the publishing industry can be for the right idea at the right time, McCutcheon describes the process from idea, research, query letters, and proposals to agents, contract negotiations, and promotion. At each step, he offers insights from personal experience and shares the experiences of several well-known best-selling authors. Chapters provide suggestions to develop habits that will lead to successful full-time writing, with tips like reading trade journals on a regular basis and clipping articles from magazines and newspapers to jumpstart research. The summary of provided is a list of helpful magazines, web sites, and organizations and a descriptive sample of standard formats for manuscript submission. Not much is new here, but the commonsense approach is both upbeat and practical. A worthwhile addition for libraries supporting writing programs. Denise S. Sticha, Murrysville Community Lib., PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

“I plan to recommend Academic Legal Writing to my students, and I recommend it to you too.” — Isthatlegal.org

“I’d recommend it to any law student…who want(s) to polish their writing skills.” — Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law Professor

“If you have a sibling…in law school…buy them a copy of Academic Legal Writing.” — FindLaw’s Writ, August 22, 2003

Designed to help law students write and publish articles, this text provides detailed instructions for every aspect of the law school writing, research, and publication process. Topics covered include law review articles and student notes, seminar term papers, how to shift from research to writing, checking citations in others- work, publishing, and publicizing written works. The book helps everyone involved in academic legal writing: professors save time and effort communicating basic points to students; law schools satisfy the American Bar Association-s second- and third-year writing requirements; and law reviews receive better notes from staff members.