This Fiction Business
Learn from one of the early Masters from the pulp magazine Golden Years.
H. Bedford Jones routinely wrote over a million words per year and made the equivalent of possibly a 7-figure income in today's money. All by writing and submitting stories to publishers.
Yet he also wrote the handbook for high-speed, high-quality writing production that anyone can follow.
His "This Fiction Business" has been combined with two of his finest novels so you can hear from the "King of Pulps" not only how he did it, but read the results for yourself.
"To the literary snob, who shudders at the word "commercial," and sneers at popular tastes, while starving unknown in a garret, Mr. Bedford-Jones has nothing to say in this volume on fiction writing as a business. But to th ewriter who has no such exalted dignity at stake and frankly wishes to make a comfortable living out of fiction writing, Mr. Bedford-Jones discloses some of the priceless secrets of the trade, gathered from extensive and highly successful practical experience."
"This book is not to be regarded as tyro. Under his own and assumed an authority on story-writing; by no means should it be read by anyone who aspires to literature, for, like Socrates, it will assuredly corrupt them and lead them into the worship of strange gods. It is destined only for those who desire to make a living by writing stories, in the hope that it may be of some benefit to them.
"As may be imagined, the author is superbly assured of his competence to admonish, divert and perhaps assist the names, he has something like forty books, of divers natures, to his discredit, and well over a hundred book-length novels, with as many novelettes and some hundreds of short stories. At one time he even made verse pay him a living wage. With the exception of perhaps half a dozen stories, he has sold all he has written, and he writes prolifically."
This Collection also contains two of his most respected and popular novels:
The Mardi Gras Mystery
The Mesa Trail
(April 29, 1887 – May 6, 1949) was a Canadian historical, adventure fantasy, science fiction, crime and Western writer who became a naturalized United States citizen in 1908.
After being encouraged to try writing by his friend, writer William Wallace Cook, Bedford-Jones began writing dime novels and pulp magazine stories. Bedford-Jones was an enormously prolific writer; the pulp editor Harold Hersey once recalled meeting Bedford-Jones in Paris, where he was working on two novels simultaneously, each story on its own separate typewriter. Bedford-Jones cited Alexandre Dumas as his main influence, and wrote a sequel to Dumas' The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan (1928). He wrote over 100 novels, earning the nickname "King of the Pulps". His works appeared in a number of pulp magazines. Bedford-Jones' main publisher was Blue Book magazine; he also appeared in Adventure, All-Story Weekly, Argosy, Short Stories, Top-Notch Magazine, The Magic Carpet/Oriental Stories, Golden Fleece, Ace-High Magazine, People's Story Magazine, Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine, Detective Fiction Weekly, Western Story Magazine, and Weird Tales.
In addition to writing fiction, Bedford-Jones also worked as a journalist for the Boston Globe, and wrote poetry. Bedford-Jones was a friend of Erle Stanley Gardner and Vincent Starrett.