Nick Mamatas sold the nonfiction Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life to Jason Sizemore at Apex Publications. The book is scheduled to be published in Summer 2010.
Sizemore tells us “Starve Better is a writing handbook with a difference—no promises of bestsellerdom, no feeding the dangerous daydreams aspiring writers have. This book is about survival: how to generate ideas when you needed them yesterday, writing dialogue and developing plot on the quick, and most important of all, what the competition in the slush piles of the world looks like. For non-fiction writers, Starve Better offers writing techniques such as how to get (relatively) high-paying assignments in second and third-tier magazines, and how to find gigs that pay now as the final notices pile up and the mice eat the last of the pasta in the cupboard.”
The book will contain “humor, essays, and some of the most widely read blog pieces from Nick Mamatas, award-nominated author and editor… in a writers’ guide that won’t teach anyone how to get rich and famous, but will impart the most valuable skill in the business: how to starve better.”
Mamatas is the author of two novels: Move Under Ground (Night Shade 2004, Prime 2006) and Under My Roof (Soft Skull Press, 2007), two collections: 3000 Miles Per Hour in Every Direction at Once (Prime 2003) and You Might Sleep… (Prime 2009), and the novella Northern Gothic (Soft Skull, 2001). He is also the editor of several anthologies and formerly co-edited the online magazine Clarkesworld. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker awards three times, the International Horror Guild Award, and Germany’s Kurd-Lasswitz Preis for science fiction in translation. Mamatas currently edits Japanese science fiction novels in translation and books associated with Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli for VIZ Media.