Writing popular fiction

you'd like to correct, things that weren't obvious on the typewritten page. These are your own words you're correcting, not the printer's mistakes, and such changes are known as "author's alterations." This is a good rule of thumb regarding author's alterations: Once you've made changes that require the resetting of twenty-five lines of type, any additional resetting will be charged to you, against future royalties—and at the rate of three or four dollars a line.
    8.
Do editors buy books from sample chapters and outlines
? Yes, but only from writers who are well established, whose work is known to the editor, and whose reliability is also proven. A new writer, until he has four or five novel sales behind him, cannot get book contracts from portions and outlines.
    9.
What is a portion and outline like
? My agent sold my first mainstream novel,
Hanging On
, to M. Evans on the basis of a hundred pages and a three-page outline. This might seem like a huge "sample," but then the book is projected to run at least five hundred manuscript pages and perhaps considerably more. Another book of mine, a suspense novel, was sold to a hardcover house on the basis of one half-page of single-spaced plot summation in a letter I wrote to the editor after I corrected the galleys of the first novel I wrote for that house.
    For the most part, however, if an editor will buy from you on the strength of sample and outline, he will require a first chapter about fifteen pages long and a four- or five-page outline of what follows. This was the sort of package I sent Robert Hoskins, at Lancer Books, when I sold him the science fiction novel
The Haunted Earth
:
Chapter One
     
    Count Slavek, having proposed a toast to his new lady friend's great beauty, tossed off the glassful of red wine. Then, smiling so broadly that he revealed his two, gleaming fangs, he said, "Before long, my dear, we shall drink other toasts together, though none of wine."
    Mrs. Renee Cuyler, dressed alluringly in a thigh-high skirt and a blouse slashed almost to her navel, smiled at the Count's thinly veiled promise of inhuman ecstasy and sipped her wine, which she, more decorously, had not swallowed in one thirsty gulp.
    The Count put his glass down and walked to her, his cape flowing out behind like dark wings, and he touched her lightly, along her slim neck. A small sigh (from both of them) punctuated the caress.
    "Pure Hokum," Jessie Blake whispered.
    He
had
to whisper, for he was sitting in the closet, watching the Count and Mrs. Cuyler through a fisheye lens which he had installed in the door some hours earlier. Neither the Count nor Mrs. Cuyler knew he was in there, and they would both be acutely disturbed when they learned that he was watching. That would just have to be. The important thing was not to let them know they were observed until the crucial, incriminating moment had arrived. So Jessie
whispered
to himself.
    He had bribed the hotel desk clerk into admitting him to the expensive Blue Suite three hours before either Count Slavek or Renee Cuyler arrived for their none-too-private assignation. He had chosen, as his observation post, a stool in the only closet which looked out on the main drawing room of the Suite. Though he knew events would rapidly progress to the bedroom, he suspected that Count Slavek, in his excitement, would choose to chew on Renee Cuyler's neck right here, in the drawing room, before moving to other stimulating but decidedly more mundane, sensual activities. Vampires were notoriously over-eager, especially when, as in the Count's case, they had not made a convert in some weeks.
    Mrs. Cuyler put down her own wine as the Count's hand pressed more insistently at her neck.
    "Now?" she asked.
    "Yes," he responded, rather throatily.
    Jessie Blake, private investigator, got off his stool and put his hand on the inside knob of the closet door. Still bent over to peer through the tiny fisheye lens, he made ready to confront the Count the moment that toothy sonofabitch made a single, legal error.
    The Count gazed into Renee Cuyler's eyes in a manner intended to convey more than mortal longing.
    To Jessie, who was getting a crick in his back, Slavek looked more as if he had suddenly gotten stomach cramps.
    The woman hooked her fingers in the lapels of her already daring blouse and opened it wider, giving the Count a better approach to her jugular and incidentally revealing two full, round, brown-nippled breasts.
    "You look ravishing," the Count