Rex Pickett

In Hollywood, when you're hired to write, or rewrite, a screenplay, be it for film or TV, you are protected by the Writers Guild of America (WGA). It's a powerful union. In 2008 they shut down the film and television business for eight months. No matter what you turn in,...

The great writer Norman Maclean, whose novella A River Runs Through It is a minor masterpiece, was ruthlessly jerked around by Alfred A. Knopf. When, a few years after his novella was finally published by the University of Chicago Press and became a literary sensation, he was contacted by an...

In the summer of 2005, I signed a deal with Alfred A. Knopf, the literary division of Random House, to novelize The Road Back, a screenplay I had written in 1992. The screenplay was about a young, arrogant, music video director who is forced to confront his family when his...

One would think that after the debacle that was my experience with St. Martin's Press on a book (Sideways) that became a huge sensation as a movie -- winning hundreds of awards, and their not doing any promotion or marketing, leaving tens of thousands, if not millions, on the table...

When people meet me and learn that I wrote Sideways they're shocked to find out I'm not a multimillionaire. Not even close, I inform them. In fact I'm a bona fide member of the 99%. The 99% of authors who were royally screwed over by the traditional publishing world, in...

In my opening broadside, in an apparent clarion call of controversy, I announced that I would never write another novel again. My reason for this has nothing to do with an apostasy about my love of writing novels. I said this (a) because I fear deeply the rapid...

In my last blog I left you with the following: my Sideways novel had been turned down by the publishing industry through my indefatigable Curtis Brown, LTD agent, on a second round of submissions -- even, shockingly, after Alexander Payne had optioned it and it was major entertainment...

The Academy Awards this coming February 26th hold a special place in my heart. I'm somehow miraculously behind two Oscars: the Best Adapted Screenplay for Sideways (based on my novel of the same title) and the writer of the 2000 Oscar for Best Live Action Short, My Mother Dreams the...

In my last blog I left off with the year of waiting dangerously. 16 publishers had turned Sideways down and my book agent had pulled the manuscript, fearing skunk-like saturation. My book-to-film Endeavor agent more or less suffered a nervous breakdown and left Hollywood for distant ports in...

I've spent a decade and a half in the publishing trenches as I wrote in my, admittedly highly opinionated, opening salvo on the current state of all media in the Digital Age, "It's the End of the Word as We Know It." I'd like to journey back in...

So, you want to be an author?

Before I launch into my jeremiad on the publishing industry -- both traditional and self-imprint, from both the perspective of abysmal failure and colossal success -- consider this surreal statistic: more content is pushed to, and churned up on, the Internet in...