The shadow chancellor's new book has come under scrutiny for lifting passages of text from other sources without acknowledgment. Academic writers explore how this can happen
Stephen Aucutt, formerly contracts manager at Hodder & Stoughton, draws on his thirty years experience to provide a contracts checklist when agreeing terms with trade publishers. Read more
I‘ve just signed a publishing contract with Ben Fenton, a Fleet Street veteran and director for creative industries at Edelman. His book is on the concept and practicalities of fairness-and that concept's history, science, law, politics, and morality, as well as an explanation of the number 42.
My independent press Mensch Publishing is to release it in March 2021, all going well. Read more
Many aspects of publishing-including arrangements with authors, agents, illustrators, freelancers, employees, printers, binders, and distributors-involve contracts. The terms of a contract vary depending on the situation, but in every case, the nature of legally binding agreements is the same.
Agents are under increasing pressure from the big corporates to make world rights deals - not because those publishers are suddenly more expert or passionate than we in rights selling - but because the corporate strategy is to spread their risk and to aggregate their profits and losses across multiple territories and activities. Read more
In the UK a new digital publisher called Canelo releases its first titles this week and will discover over coming months whether its bold, innovative approach will work. It is operating in a different way to most publishers in that it is not paying advances, but offering its authors much higher royalties, starting at 50% and going up to 60%. Read more
The Authors Guild has outlined some of the "egregious terms" of current contract boilerplates it plans to address in its Fair Contract Initiative, first announced May 28 during BookExpo AmericaBookExpo America, commonly referred to within the book publishing industry as BEA. The largest annual book trade fair in the United States.
In the first article on magic in fantasy writing we looked at power scaling, plot armour and plausibility. Here we will look at the different types of magic and, more importantly, the cost of magic. Like many other elements in a constructed world, magic is, effectively, a technology; and technology always has a cost. Read more
'I'm very reassuringly honest. It's a job as well as a calling. It's my living - I'm the chief breadwinner in my house. My husband is retired, he supported me through the two decades while I wasn't making enough to live on, and was doing all kinds of things to do with writing to survive - judging competitions, running workshops, appraising manuscripts.
‘My settings of Europe and English visitors weren't really doing it for them, so we decided Scotland would be good. I thought an island would be great, because it's a small community, and it's an opportunity for my main character to get away from it all. The team at HarperCollins have been so supportive and enthusiastic... Read more
For the past five years or so, I've read books on my phone. The practice started innocently enough. I write book reviews from time to time, and so publishers sometimes send me upcoming titles that fall roughly within my interests. Read more
The Guardian calls Irish-Indian poet Nikita Gill "Britain's most-followed poet on social media"-she has 780,000 Instagram followers and 180,000 TikTok followers, and her Instapoetry has been reshared by the likes of Khloe Kardashian, Alanis Morissette, and Sam Smith-and she has published seven volumes of poetry and two novels in the U.K. But she is far less known on this side of the pond. Read more
Nikkolas Smith knows a thing or two about book bans. The illustrator has created five picture books over the last three years-four of which have been yanked off library shelves. There's I am Ruby Bridges, about the civil rights icon; That Flag about the confederate flag; Born on the Water, which explores slavery; and The Artivist which features a child supporting trans kids.
Simon & Schuster has acquired the largest Dutch publishing group Veen Bosch & Keuning, including all of its publishers in the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as sister companies Thinium and Bookchoice.
The Publishers Association (PA) has criticised the government's response to a House of Lords report on AI, saying that it has failed to make "any tangible commitments to protect the creative industries against mass copyright infringement".
'I'm very reassuringly honest'
‘My settings of Europe and English visitors weren't really doing it for them, so we decided Scotland would be good. I thought an island would be great, because it's a small community, and it's an opportunity for my main character to get away from it all. The team at HarperCollins have been so supportive and enthusiastic... Read more