Guests at the KaliKo Inn this week include:

Others in town are men and women from pleasure craft out of Chicago and Sheboygan.

The town is in the middle of a summer thunderstorm, the kind that builds from the northwestern plains to hit the lake at high volume.

Sure, there are lots of websites with writing advice (including my own at sfwriter.com), but to sell in this field, you have to know the market inside and out—and the best place to learn about that is in a bookstore. Trivia question: what do the writers Cory Doctorow (Tor), Nalo Hopkinson (Warner), Tanya Huff (DAW), Robert J. Sawyer (Tor), and Michelle West (DAW) all have in common? Answer: we all used to work at Toronto’s Bakka-Phoenix, the world’s oldest SF specialty bookstore, and Michelle still works there, even though she hardly needs the booksellers’ wages—because being in a bookstore keeps her finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the SF&F marketplace.

Forget about online market listings. Rather, you should spend hours looking at actual books, studying what sort of work each publisher puts out. A wannabe author should be able to name not just their five favorite contemporary SF&F authors (and if the best list you can come up with is Asimov, Clarke and Tolkien, you’re not reading enough new stuff), but also instantly be able to name who each of their publishers are—and understand why they were published by that house and not another.

There is a world of difference between a Baen military-SF novel by John Ringo, a Del Rey contemporary-SF thriller by Greg Bear, and a Tor literate fantasy by Gene Wolfe. If you send your manuscript to the wrong editor, you’re wasting not just the editor’s time, but your own—and with editors taking a year or more to respond to an unsolicited submission, it behooves you to do your homework. Because… [to be continued with the next newsletter]

Go to the website and send me a message. If you are close and we can meet, it will be just the $5.00. If they need to be mailed, I will give it to you at the reduced price plus handling charge of $3.00 each. Books are normally $12.50 each. Check it out!

Unsure what to give for a gift? Friend or family member reading the series, and you aren't sure which volumes they have?

Do the next best thing to buying a book. Get a gift certificate! If the book must be mailed, you can add postage to the certificate.

To make arrangements, go to the website and send a message to me.