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The number of new books published in the UK increased by 4% last year to
120,947, with English language books published worldwide increasing by a
whopping 31% to 381,250.
News Review looks at what lies behind these figures.
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Amazon has just delivered some sparkling results against a background of
retail collapsing. What next for the Kindle and what does this domination mean
for the book business? News Review investigates.
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This week's News Review looks at book discounting, actually higher in the
UK in 2008 than 2007 - and asks whether it's a danger or an opportunity.
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So who are the most popular fiction writers across the globe? News
Review looks at a new study which shows that Ken Follett and Khaled Hosseini
feature in more bestseller lists than any other writers in the nine countries
studied.
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Children’s books are still doing well in spite of the recession. News
Review looks at what's working and some publicly-funded UK programmes which
are making a difference.
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'People will compare the fresh, untainted voice of my 29-year old self that
was completely unselfconscious about writing (it) because I didn’t think anyone
was going to read it. It was innocent, it wasn't trying to be anything, it
just was.' Lisa Jewell, author of Ralph's Party, in the Bookseller
on working with a new editor and writing a sequel.
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'Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently,
inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human
inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew
one another.' Carl Sagan
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'Times Books as we know it will be no more, but books themselves,
thankfully, seem shockproof against change. Neither economics nor
e-readers will oust the beloved book. We don't stop reading because we are poor,
any more than book lovers will give up books for their electronic lookalikes.'
Jeanette Winterson, in her final column in Times Books.
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'Through today’s gloom we may discern a spectacularly bright future in
which the rewards to writers and readers and even to publishers will be
unprecedented as world-wide multilingual backlists expand online in a cultural
revolution orders of magnitude greater than Gutenberg’s world-changing
technology generated five centuries ago.’ Jason Epstein, author of Book
Business
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'The heart and soul of any publishing business is its editorial
department, the men and women who, crudely, acquire the 'content' on which the
imprint depends... Gone are the days, with rare exceptions, when an
editor's positive enthusiasm for a new book could trump the negative anxieties
of the sales department, almost the only books that now generate much excitement
among publishers are would-be bestsellers. Robert McCrum in the Observer
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'If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think
there's little point in writing.'
Kingsley Amis
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The seventh set of our new pages of tips for writers deals with the importance
of keeping up to date with what's going on in the book world and how to do
this.
Tips for Writers 1: Improving your
writing
Tips for Writers 2: Learning on the job
Tips for Writers 3: New technology
and the Internet
Tips for Writers 4: Self-publishing - is
it for you?
Tips for Writers
5: Promoting your writing (and yourself)
Tips for Writers 6: Keep up to date
Our annual updated listing of the world's book fairs is now available on the
site.
T S Eliot
Prize for Poetry
Winner announced - an interesting outsider winning with just her second
collection.
Thinking about self-publishing? Chas Jones has updated our page in
WritersPrintShop showing what page sizes and extents are available, what can be
done with pictures and illustrations, and also showing how you can now print
colour books one copy at a time.
Ghostwriter Joanne Phillips shows you how you can market yourself online
through your own website, optimisation, ezines and freelance writing websites.
Essential reading for any writer who wants to promote themself on the web.
See also our more general article on
Copyright in
our Inside
Publishing series and our article Print
on demand and the Long Tail in Changes in
Publishing.
Are you having difficulty deciding which service might be right for you?
This useful new article by Chris Holifield offers advice on what to go for,
depending on what stage you are at with your writing.
Check out this page to find links to the huge number of useful articles on this site,
including Finding an Agent
and Making Submissions.
Our huge section on technology and the web, and how writers can make use of
them.
Our Editorial
Services for writers
Check out the 16 different editorial services we offer, from Reports to
Copy editing, Typing to Rewriting.
If you're thinking
about self-publishing,
this is the place to find out what's
involved. If you're ready to go ahead, our high quality service is second
to none and there's an economy version for those who want to
tackle some of the work themselves. You can
estimate
the cost for yourself.
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New Categories series
This is the third article in a new series by Chris Holifield which will cover
the major writing genres. It looks at romance, which is dominated in the UK and
the US by Mills and Boon Harlequin, which brings out 120 books a month.
Study their guidelines before you get started or at least before you submit to
them.
Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy looks at Science Fiction and Fantasy
and suggests how you should get started, what special considerations you should
bear in mind and what the market's like.
Writing Crime Fiction looks at the international market for crime novels and
shows what is working for this readership and how you can give your own crime
fiction its best chance of getting published.
Some do’s and don’ts if you want to sell a script
If you want to turn your book, dream or idea into a performance script
for film, stage or radio, it is going to be a very tough pitch. There
are a some pretty strict ‘rules’ which you need to follow if you are to
maximise your chance of success. Chas Jones's two part article shows you how
to make a successful pitch. Part 1
and Part 2
Chas Jones looks at a recent success on our self-publishing service,
WritersPrintShop, A Sumerian
Observation of the Kofels Impact Event, an intriguing
book about a clay
tablet on which in 700 BC a Sumerian astronomer
had made a copy of a document about an unusual
event in 3123 BC. For 150 years this enigmatic tablet had puzzled
scholars in the British Museum, now the authors have worked out what the
clay tablet said.
Thanks to the opportunities offered by self-publishing, the authors were
able to bypass traditional publishing and publish their book themselves
through WritersPrintShop, reaching a global audience through the Internet.
Agents' Listings
The new agents' listings are now available on the site. Coming from
the 2009 Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, these listings can be
searched and provide the most up-to-date information about literary agents
across the world:
UK
agents
US
agents
Agents
from the rest of the world
Children's specialist agents
Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2009
Our review of
the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook
This new series by Chris Holifield looks at the book trade and
investigates how fundamental changes in how it works are affecting writers.
The first article is on Bookselling, the second on
Publishing, the third on
Print on
demand, the fourth on Self-publishing - 'really great' or career suicide?, the fifth on
Writers' routes to their audiences, the sixth at at
copyright under pressure and the seventh deals with
Creative
Commons.
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