Starve Better
New edition coming November 2025!
Nick Mamatas
Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life makes no promises of turning you into a bestselling author. It won’t indulge aspiring writers’ dreams of fame and fortune. This book is about survival—how to generate ideas immediately when needed, craft dialogue and plot on the fly, and navigate the brutal reality of the slush pile.
For non-fiction writers, Starve Better offers practical techniques: how to land (relatively) high-paying assignments in second- and third-tier magazines, how to handle your first commissioned piece, and how to find gigs that pay—because the final notices are piling up, and the mice have already eaten the last of the pasta.
Humor, essays, and some of the most widely read blog pieces from Nick Mamatas—an author and editor whose fiction has been recognized by some of speculative fiction’s most prestigious awards—come together for the first time in a writers’ guide that won’t teach you how to get rich and famous, but will impart the most valuable skill in the business: how to starve better.
Paperback
Cover and interior design by Ryan Vance
"A survival guide that suggests ways, some of them less than savory, to generate both ideas and income when the rent comes due." - Foreword
"It’s a book that can inspire, instruct, and help you keep the lights on. Not bad for a book shy of 200 pages." - Master Librarian