Research Writing

Hugh Riminton was a small-town New Zealand teenager with a possible drinking problem and a job cleaning rat cages when a chance meeting with a radio news director changed his life. The news man took a chance on him, and at 17 Riminton became a cadet reporter. Over nearly 40 years he has been shot at, blown up, threatened with deportation and thrown in jail. He has reported from nearly 50 countries, witnessed massacres in Africa, wars and conflicts on four continents, and every kind of natural disaster.

Whether you are a novice writer or a veteran who has already had your work published, rejection is often a frustrating reality. Literary agents and editors receive and reject hundreds of manuscripts each month. While it's the job of these publishing professionals to be discriminating, it's the job of the writer to produce a manuscript that immediately stands out among the vast competition. And those outstanding qualities, says New York literary agent Noah Lukeman, have to be apparent from the first five pages.

This highly respected veteran newsman shares the stories he's long kept under wraps. Schieffer goes beyond the news everyone is familiar with to share the compelling anecdotes only his colleagues were previously privy to. Says the author, "I want to tell you about the parts that didn't get on television or in the paper." The result is an eye-opening glimpse behind the scenes of the news business.

Have you had intimate fantasies or simmering plotlines you've wanted to write but weren't sure how or where to start? Let renowned erotica author and editor Rachel Kramer Bussel show you how to turn those fragments into fully fleshed out erotic stories, novellas, and novels. In this guide, Bussel takes her twenty plus years of experience in the genre and walks writers through the ins and outs of erotic writing.

Over time, literary agent Elizabeth Kracht noticed that many submissions had similar problems, so she began to make a list of the pitfalls. She knew that even excellent projects could be rejected based on these surmountable issues because those on the receiving end of proposals most often don’t have the time to walk writers through needed adjustments. The checklist Kracht has created helps writers make their manuscripts good to go. It offers short, easy-to-implement bites of advice, illustrated by inspiring - and cautionary - real-world examples.

Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement want to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media want a case to drag on as long as humanly possible and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama, drop by bloody drop, in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, and even then break them or find ways to work loopholes into them.

Here are the devastating revelations that triggered a crisis within the Catholic Church. Here is the truth about the scores of abusive priests who preyed upon innocent children and the cabal of senior church officials who covered up their crimes. Here is the trail of "hush money" that the Catholic Church secretly paid to buy victims' silence - deeds that left millions of the faithful in the US and around the world shocked, angry, and confused.

We are in the midst of one of the greatest status revolutions ever, and it's a brave new world indeed. Who better to guide us through it than Michael Lewis, whose subversive, trenchant humor is the perfect match to his subject matter. Here is an audiobook as fresh as tomorrow's headlines, and as entertaining as its best selling predecessors.

The darker and more dystopian the future appears, the more influential public writers become. But with so much content vying for our attention, and so much misinformation and propaganda polluting public discourse, how can writers break through the noise to inform an increasingly busy, stressed, and overwhelmed audience? In Tell It Like It Is, bestselling author, writing coach, and teacher Roy Peter Clark offers a succinct and practical guide to writing with clarity, honesty, and conviction.

"You had better shove this in the stove," Mark Twain said at the top of an 1865 letter to his brother, "for I don't want any absurd 'literary remains' and 'unpublished letters of Mark Twain' published after I am planted." He was joking, of course. But when Mark Twain died in 1910, he left behind the largest collection of personal papers created by any nineteenth-century American author.

In this second edition, Saller adds new chapters, on the dangers of allegiance to outdated grammar and style rules and on ways to stay current in language and technology. She expands her advice for writers on formatting manuscripts for publication, on self-editing, and on how not to be “difficult”. Saller’s own gaffes provide firsthand (and sometimes humorous) examples of exactly what not to do. The revised content reflects today’s publishing practices while retaining the self-deprecating tone and sharp humor that helped make the first edition so popular.

The idea of writing a book may be scary or challenging, but Lauren Bingham is back with a guide for the nonprofessional writer who is somehow drawn to the world of nonfiction.

Write Your Book on the Side will show you how to write your first nonfiction Kindle book while you're working a full-time job, even if you've never written a book before. You'll learn how to come up with a winning topic, how to choose the right title, and how to publish your book in 10 easy steps.

Writing and finishing a novel can feel overwhelming. Especially because if you're like most writers, you need to fit writing around other responsibilities and goals. Maybe you're working at a separate job or profession, raising a family, or pursuing a degree (or all of the above). But there's good news. No matter what else is happening in your life, you can write a novel in a year.

Having played the role of a student, postdoc, researcher, research faculty member, author, reviewer, and editor, Kasthurirangan "Rangan" Gopalakrishnan, PhD, fully understands and empathizes with the struggles and pleasures of academic work. In this book, his goal is to assist you to do what you are already doing more effectively and efficiently with minimal stress and possibly to identify and eliminate those activities and habits that interfere with your academic writing productivity.

Everything you need to run your business as an author. This is not a book on creativity or the craft of writing. This is not a book for hobbyists. This is a book that will take your writing into the realm of actually paying the bills. You will learn how to go from being an author to running a business as an author.

The Anatomy of a Best Seller is a comprehensive guide that will help you break down the best books in your genre, understand how and why they work, and then learn how to do it yourself. By the end of the book, you’ll be armed with the methods you need to deconstruct best sellers, understand the tools those authors are using, and how to implement them in your own work.

The ability to write well is a key part of your professional success. From reports and presentations to e-mails and Facebook posts, whether you're a marketer, customer service rep, or manager, being able to write clearly and for the right audience is critical to moving your business forward. The techniques covered in this book will arm you with the skills you need to write better business communications. Inside you'll find: planning each communication; editing and fine-tuning your copy; building your personal brand with communications; writing bids, proposals, and reports; and more.

Now an insider at The People vs. O. J. Simpson reveals the untold story of the most widely followed trial in American history and the indelible impact it has had on the judiciary, the media, and the public. As the Los Angeles Superior Court's media liaison, Jerrianne Hayslett had unprecedented access to the trial - and met with Judge Lance Ito daily - as she attempted, sometimes unsuccessfully, to mediate between the court and members of the media and to balance their interests.

What does it take to have a long writing life? Drawing on her years of writing, teaching, and practicing Zen, Natalie Goldberg shares the experiences that have opened her to new ways of being alive - experiences that point the way forward in our lives and our writing. The "great spring" of this book title refers to the great rush of energy that arrives when you think no life will ever come again - the early yellow flowering forsythia, for example.