Relaunch Your Novel, by Chris Fox

As the years pass and I’ve been a writer for longer and longer, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of advice for beginning writers, but not much advice for veteran ones.

That makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure how many novels I’ve written (that’s how many books I’ve written – I have to stop and think about it) but it’s in the mid 60s now, with nine nonfiction books and a whole ton of short stories. There are a not that many people who have written 60+ novels, and even fewer who have written more.

The “aspiring writer” market is much larger than the “veteran writer” market, so it makes sense there is more stuff out there for “aspiring” than for “veteran”.

So it was interesting to read Chris Fox’s RELAUNCH YOUR NOVEL, which is aimed at writers with a backlist of published novels. The book had a lot of useful tips for breathing new life into old books, several of which I’ve used to good effect in past. At some point, of course, you have to stop tinkering with old novels and start producing new ones, but giving the old ones a facelift from time to time is a good idea.

But if you’re writer with a few books out and you want to breath some new life into your old books, RELAUNCH YOUR NOVEL has many good ideas and blueprints for doing so. Definitely worth the read.

-JM