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News Review looks at the latest prize announcements, the Carnegie, won
posthumously by Siobhan Dowd, and the innovative new Michael Marks Awards for
Poetry Pamphlets.
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'Two-thirds of book-buyers in the US are 43 and older.' This stark statistic
was revealed in the recent Book Industry Study Group study. Younger people are
reading less than their parents did. News Review investigates.
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'The announcement of the sixth UK children’s Laureate this week was greeted
with great enthusiasm. Andrew Motion, the Chair of
the Children’s Laureate Panel, said: ‘Anthony Browne is an absolutely distinctive
and extraordinarily skilled artist – someone whose work entrances children and
has influenced an entire generation of illustrators.’ News Review reports
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J D Salinger is suing an author who is publishing a sequel to The
Catcher in the Rye. The notoriously secretive author is charging in
court that this is ‘a rip-off pure and simple’. News Review has the story.
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'This weekend the Javits Center in New York has been thronged with the
thousands of people attending BookExpo, the biggest annual book show in North
America.' But for how much longer will the Fair continue? News Review
investigates.
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'Astonishing new figures just released by Bowker in the States
show that US book production declined by 3% in 2008 but print on demand
publishing almost doubled. ' News Review looks at print on the latest
figures from the States.
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‘Every agent has their own style. Ed Victor goes to a party and
signs up someone. Luigi Bonomi goes and talks to a film company or
football agent. But I like doing it this way (through his website) because
it brings in interesting books, often ordinary people doing extraordinary
things. I love the range and serendipity…' Andrew Lownie in the Bookseller
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‘It's a colossal irony to have the guys and gals of Amazon, Google and
their ilk lusting for free book "content" as premium material on which to stake
their enlarged claims to commercial riches. For these clever mathematicians
and engineers who are shaping the electronic business of our time and the
archives of the future, these baby-faced young entrepreneurs, have risen to
their mercantile eminence without encountering books, and don't think they need
to. Veteran American editor Elisabeth Sifton of Farrar, Straus & Giroux in
The Nation
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'Poetry waves a flower in the face of a highly utilitarian age... But poetry
sings the song of itself, and offers a musical gratuity. Just as no one should
have to justify, in pragmatic terms, playing the piano or listening to Bach, so
no one should have to justify reading Keats or Wallace Stevens.' James Wood, the critic for The New Yorker, at the recent Griffin
Poetry awards
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'A screenplay is really just a set of instructions, it doesn’t actually
have any value of itself. You can read a screenplay and be entertained by
it but unless it’s made, it’s worthless... Writing fiction is inevitably much more personal.' David Nicholls, author of One Day and many TV scripts, in the
Bookseller
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'Should we, who read books and
believe that books and the stories within them contain such power, be surprised
that kids read, that books survive? Of course not. We should be
celebrating these facts.’ David Almond, author of Skellig, in The Times
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'I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not
telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and,
two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to
be a writer.'
Doris Lessing
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Danny found that WritersServices'
Synopsis-writing service
was just what he needed to get his submission package ready to go out to
agents.
Here's our index of
fictionalised stories, which explain how the services work and what
they might be able to do for you. Ranging from the
Editor's Report to
Private Publishing, these
provide a different picture of what the services can do for you.
by Robert J Ray
Maureen Kincaid Speller reviews this new book from the author of The
Weekend Novelist, concluding that:
'For the first-time redrafter, Ray’s methods provide a good foundation,
and most importantly, they use a clear timetable. Over eighteen weekends
(that is, four and a half months), a writer can carry out the work necessary
for an effective rewrite of a novel, and have the manuscript ready to go.'
Chas Jones's final report from the LBF looks at academic publishing,
where the author's wish to publish quickly may conflict with the publisher's
preference for the slow and considered approach.
2nd Report from the London Book Fair
Chas Jones reports
on ebooks, where the focus was
on the adoption of an ebook design standard, which will offer publishers
inter-operability between present and future hardware platforms.
1st Report from the London Book Fair
Reports on
Twenty twenty vision - a view of the future, a future which will be
fundamentally altered by digitisation.
Latest changes in the book trade
Chris Holifield gives an update on recent changes in the bookselling
world, including the effects of recession and an even greater focus on
bestsellers.
Here's our report from the 2009 Masterclass at the London Book Fair,
where a packed audience listened intently to a varied group of speakers in a
session chaired by journalist Danuta Kean. Bill Swainson, senior editor at
Bloomsbury and Simon Trewin, co-head of the book department at new
agency United Agents, were joined by authors Kate Mosse, Lola Joye and
Gareth Sibson.
Two extracts from Linda Strachan's Writing for
Children:
'One of the most exciting things about writing for children is the sheer
diversity. You have different ages to choose from; you can write picture
books, easy readers, short books for more confident readers, or novels –
each quite different in length and often in content.'
Benjamin Zephaniah describes his fascinating route to being published in
an excerpt from the Writers and Artists’ Yearbook 2009.
Check out this page to find links to the huge number of useful articles on this site,
including Finding an Agent
and Making Submissions.
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Our reviewer's view was that: 'This packs a lot of information into its
976 pages and is very good value for money at £12.99... The result is a useful
handbook for any writer, which delivers a great deal of useful information in an
easily accessible form.'
Our book review section
Saving Salt
Publishing
Salt's Just One Book campaign.
'There’s only one difference between published and unpublished writers and it
is this – the first group see their work in print on the shelves of Waterstone’s
or Tesco or online at Amazon; the second group are yet to have physical evidence
of the hours, weeks, years spent fashioning words into their patterns. You are
already a writer.'
From the Foreword to the Writers and Artists' Yearbook 2009.
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
Writing Crime Fiction
Agents' Listings
The agents' listings from
the 2009 Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 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
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
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Our huge section on technology and the web, and how writers can make use of
them, takes you from beginner-level articles to advanced technology.
The
Slush-pile
WritersServices editor Kay Gale has many years of experience dealing with
the slush-pile. Here are her tips on how to get your submission
through it.
Our new series for writers:
Improving your writing
Learning on the job
New
technology and the Internet
Self-publishing - is
it for you?
Promoting your writing (and yourself)
Other kinds of writing
Keep up to date
Submission to
publishers and agents
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.
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