"I think I would be good at coming up with names for perfumes. Or vacuum cleaners. But when it comes to books, the job feels impossible."

"Beginning – check. Middle – check. End – check. But, hold on a sec, isn’t there something missing? Something rather vital? In fact, couldn’t it be the key to your book’s selling or not? Ah, yes, the title.

Sometimes I think I am going to have to give up and employ one of those companies that do nothing but invent names for things. Usually it’s perfume. Actually I think I would be good at coming up with names for perfume. Or soap powder. Or vacuum cleaners. But when it comes to books, the job feels impossible. Your mission: summarize your entire work in a nutshell. If I could do that (you want to cry out) I wouldn’t have bothered writing the book in the first place!"

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"TAMPA—Sitting in my motel room Thursday on the fringes of Tampa, maybe 20 miles and three weather systems away from the convention site, I am surrounded by enough newsprint to equip a Broadway revival of The Front Page. These are all the newspapers, glossy magazine convention specials and other journalistic handouts that I have meant to read since I arrived on Sunday. Later today, when I arrive at my convention workspace, I will also have my pick of all the major newspapers this side of Le Monde. And (sorry to end this paragraph on a downer) I undoubtedly will read none of them.

Relax. This isn’t another jeremiad about the death of newspapers. At my first convention as a fledgling reporter—Miami Beach in 1968—I was awed to discover that stacks of dailies like the Washington Evening Star and the Chicago Daily News were flown in each morning as a promotional gesture. And sadly I never got around to reading them either..."

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