Misses out all of the business side of being, like, a working novelist -- understanding what publishers do and how the retail chain works, marketing and sales, contracts, agents and editors.
Misses out the key point that while the author is the prime creative mover, a manuscript is not a book and it takes a lot of people to make a "bestselling novel", from the clerks in B&N who like it and order in extra copies and tell customers about it, to the editor who believes in it enough to push the P&L sheet as far as it will go and who then goes up in front of a marketing meeting and pitches it hard. And the cover design and the flap copywriter (and if you think that stuff doesn't matter in the age of Amazon you've got a rude awakening due).
None of Pickover's advice is bad, but it's very much Programming 101, here's how we write "hello, world" in Python. (Congratulations! You're a programmer now! So for an encore, you can write an interrupt handler for an embedded controller in assembler ...)
Misses out all of the business side of being, like, a working novelist -- understanding what publishers do and how the retail chain works, marketing and sales, contracts, agents and editors.
Misses out the key point that while the author is the prime creative mover, a manuscript is not a book and it takes a lot of people to make a "bestselling novel", from the clerks in B&N who like it and order in extra copies and tell customers about it, to the editor who believes in it enough to push the P&L sheet as far as it will go and who then goes up in front of a marketing meeting and pitches it hard. And the cover design and the flap copywriter (and if you think that stuff doesn't matter in the age of Amazon you've got a rude awakening due).
None of Pickover's advice is bad, but it's very much Programming 101, here's how we write "hello, world" in Python. (Congratulations! You're a programmer now! So for an encore, you can write an interrupt handler for an embedded controller in assembler ...)