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The two are somewhat different. There are lots of writing books out there. It seems after a certain number of years writing, each author tries to capture the essence of their craft and art. I first did this in the early 90s, which, yikes, is a while ago. My first draft of the The Novel Writers Toolkit was 11 pages long. And this was after I had published four books traditionally. As the years went by, I added and revised.
The Novel Writers Toolkit was picked up and published by Writers Digest in 2001. It earned out in less than six months. This version was quite a bit longer, needless to say. Once I got the rights back, I continued to revise and update as I learned more. The current version is current. And I just put it in Kindle Unlimited today.
The reason it’s called a Toolkit is I don’t believe you can ever tell a writer: “You can’t do that!” Because I guarantee I can find “That” in a bestselling book somewhere. There are many craft tools. We can only use them wrong.
But that’s how to write the book. What really surprised me in publishing was the lack of books on how to be an author. Every job I’ve held, I end up writing an SOP for it. Standing Operating Procedure. When I first reported to my Special Forces A-Team they had taught me in the Q-Course at Bragg to ask for the team’s SOP. So I arrived at 10th Special Forces, got assigned to a team, and asked for the team SOP. They didn’t have one. They said they knew everything they needed to know.
