Readers prefer a world they can relate to.
If your agent or publisher is jumping up and down at the thought of your novel, it's because they're picturing the movie poster on the side of the bus.
Publishers were ever eager for authors to do their own publicity because nobody else was willing to do it for nothing. But then it became clear that if you want somebody to champion the story, there's nobody better than the person who made it all up.
As we get older, we demand stories that go somewhere. Things must change.
It is easy to force a reader or viewer to interact. The trick is in making them want to interact, and in letting the story unfold hand-in-hand with that.
One of the gamebook series I created, 'Fabled Lands', is also the name of my company, and the reason we named the company after it is that it was pretty revolutionary for its time.
'Frankenstein' is a work rich in possible meanings, so the horror-show interpretation is as valid as any.
You don't get 'The Unfinished Swan' or 'Shadow of the Colossus' or even Telltale's 'Walking Dead' until you've sat through the long, linear infodumps of something like 'Metal Gear Solid'.
Comics have always been storyboards.
Motion comics are just cheap animation. Very cheap animation. And I like animation almost as much as I like comics, but I'm not rushing to pay out for a cheap hybrid of the two.
A very great deal is written about the future of book publishing - much more than on its present or past - and the only takeaway from all these oracles seems to be that a great empire will be destroyed.
'War and Peace' goes down a lot smoother than a Dan Brown novel, let me tell you.
Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.
My advice after thirty years in the business is sign with an agency of reasonable size.
The writer must be a transcendent, not immanent, deity.
