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Copyright ©
2001-11
WritersServices.com
| |
Check what's changed and when:
 | The site is normally updated every Monday (London dateline). |
The email newsletter keeps you informed about what's new
in the WritersServices site.
| If you 'subscribe' - it's free -
we send you the update and links each week. |
| This month's online Magazine
is another way of catching up with what's new on the site |
20 May 2013
| 'A reading campaign based around Premier League footballers has been
a resounding success, according to the report released today by the National
Literacy Trust. 'Reading Stars', with UK Premier League footballers such as
Theo Walcott, is a huge success, inspiring more children to read and raising
library attendance and literacy. The involvement of 20 Premier League
football players was key...' News Review
on literacy programmes. |
|
Our fictionalised stories show
how our eighteen services have helped writers give you some idea of what they can do.
Screenplay assessment
fictionalised story - 'Sarah had always been fascinated by the
cinema. As a little girl going to see a film was her favourite treat and
she was also interested in how movies got to be made. Her own favourites
were the films with really good stories, like Titantic and Avatar, but she also liked the ones which were based on books, like
Lord of the Rings and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...' |
| 'I'm writing for myself. I'm writing the book that
I want to read and I have come to know that there is a broad spectrum of the
population that like to read what I like to read. What I do, I do very
intentionally and it takes a lot of time and energy. And it's funny to me that
there are critics who say, "Oh, it's a lazy style." I believe that the purpose
of language is to convey an idea and I personally don't like language getting in
the way.' Dan Brown in the Sunday Times, quoted in our
Comment column.
|
| Our
Health Hazards
series is a unique 7-part series warning about the
dangers to writers of Carpal Tunnel syndrome, eye problems and your working
environment. |
| 'As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know
what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have
never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish
torture.' Fyodor Dostoevsky in our
Writers' Quotes. |
13 May 2013
| 'This week’s publishing sensation is James Oswald, Scottish farmer
and writer, who has achieved his current success because of single-minded
determination to publicise his work. Through his own efforts he reached the
top of the Kindle bestseller lists in the UK and has used this
self-publishing success to find a publisher...'
News Review |
|
Getting your manuscript copy edited
- if you are
looking for copy editing online, it is difficult to ensure that you are getting
a professional copy editor who will do a good job on your manuscript. WritersServices has now made its copy editing
service unique, as it will offer as standard TWO versions of your script, one
prepared using 'track changes' and one with all the changes accepted.
Our copy editing service. |
| Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world:
The digital truths traditional publishers don't want to hear
- the choices offered by digital publishing can only be good news for
writers, says Barry Eisler. So why are traditional publishers so angry? |
| Our
Writing Opportunity of the
week is the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting,
the UK’s biggest national competition for playwriting,
which closes on 3 June. |
| 'Video games
influence our narrative structures; people are telling stories in the way we
never had before. I think people can be snobby about that, but people used
to be snobby about the influence of cinema on literature. But if you look at
Source Code that movie is essentially a structured video game as you keep
reloading and trying again.' Christopher Bookmyre, author
of Bedlam,
in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment
column.. |
| Our
Tips series is an
8-part series which starts with Improve your writing and ends with
Submission to agents and publishers. |
| 'The worst thing that ever happened to
writing is that it became a business, The purpose of business is to make
money, and to achieve that end it is necessary to please as many people as
possible, to amuse them, to entertain them - in short, to do everything that
will help increase the volume of sales.' Dagobert Runes in our
Writers'
Quotes. |
6 May 2013
| 'Bestselling author James Patterson has taken the unusual step of speaking
out about the changes going on in the industry. He's gone for a novel way of
doing this, with full-page ads in Publishers' Weekly and the New York Times Book
Review, asking the government to bail out bookshops...'
News Review
looks at how a
bestselling author can take a stand. |
| Our
Inside
Publishing series provides a helpful introduction to publishing for
authors. This extremely useful 19-part series has been revised to take
account of changes in the publishing world.
Advances
and royalties, The Relationship
between agents and publishers, Subsidiary rights,
The
English-speaking publishing world,
The Marketing department and
The Financial relationship
between writers and publishers can all be found on the site. |
| Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world:
Surprise warning from Waterstone's passionate founder: 'I wouldn't dream of
starting a book shop now!' and With Bookselling in Deep Turmoil, Book Sales Are on the Rise
|
|
‘While I'm sure that some of the many available
writing courses now on offer are worth the time and their fees, I do worry that
so many people and companies are looking for ways to profit from the
never-ending queues of unpublished writers wanting to be published. It's an
ever-hopeful, never-diminishing number, with few ever questioning their own
talent, so they are vulnerable, and ripe for exploitation.'
Carole Blake of agency Blake Friedmann in our
Comment
column. |
| From our Archive,
Suzanne Joinson, who was
just about to publish her first book, offers her tips to writers in advance
of her session at the Writers and Artists How to Get Published conference. |
| 'Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can
do anything really good.' William Faulkner in our
Writers' Quotes. |
22 April 2013
| 'Amazon was one of the major talking-points at last
week’s London Book Fair. Earlier in the month the internet retailer had bought
the book recommendation site Goodreads. Apple had been discussing with Goodreads
the possibility of integrating its content into the iBookstore, when suddenly
things went quiet, then Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads was announced. Amazon is also rumoured
to be preparing its own phone, which would bring a direct challenge to Apple’s iPhone.'
News Review |
| Links of the week:
At the London Book Fair, Authors Encouraged to Think Like Entrepreneurs
and 5 Ways Publishers Can Be More Like Start-Ups. |
|
Writing Memoir and
Autobiography - if you want to write a memoir you’re in good
company – lots of writers want to try their hand at this category. Chris Holifield looks at how to set about
writing your memoir and how to publish it. |
| 'In his essay
Politics and the English
language George Orwell set out a series of rules for writing that
are worth repeating in full: 1 Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of
speech that you are used to seeing in print. 2 Never use a long word where a
short one will do. 3 If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out...'
'Damian Whitworth in The Times, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Our Writing Opportunity this
week is The TLM Young Poets Competition, which is open to young people between
the ages of 16 and 30 from around the world. It closes on 30 April though, so
get your entry in quickly. |
| 'Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and
words that burn.'
Thomas Gray in our Writers Quotes. |
15 April 2013
| 'Today is the first day of the London Book Fair, which is going to be
an interesting occasion this year. The winds of change are sweeping through
the publishing industry as digital developments bring a whole host of
changes in their wake. It’s all happening at a time of recession too, which
is altering many of the traditional publishing relationships, creating both
new threats and new opportunities...'
News Review reports. |
| Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world: The Slow Death of the American Author -
Scott Turow, president of the US Authors Guild, on a vital change and
Ten ways self-publishing has changed the
books business. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional
editors, have a look at our
Services, especially
our
Copy
editing,
Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Synopsis writing,
Contract Vetting,
Manuscript Typing and our
latest additions, Poetry Critique
and Blurb-writing.
|
| 'If you think of the story that you tell that's your favourite
personal story, or funny story, it doesn't have flashy sentences. It doesn't
have too much detail. It just tells the story. That isn't, for whatever
reason, the way most people write books, But it seemed to me that there was
no reason that it couldn't be the way at least one person writes books. I
said "I'm going to stop writing the parts that people skim..." James
Patterson, author of a great many books, in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven,
quoted in our Comment column. |
| There's just time for young poets to enter the TLM Young Poets
Competition, which is open to anyone aged 16-30 from anywhere around the
world and closes on 30 April. Here's our latest
Writing Opportunity. |
| 'The thing that really really turns me
on – and I've now been doing it for 40 years, and it still works in exactly
the same way – is this: you are sitting at home reading a manuscript and
your hair stands on end and you think, 'I know how to publish this and, with
a bit of luck, it could really work.' Dan Franklin, MD and Publisher of Jonathan Cape
in our Writers' Quotes. |
8 April 2013
| 'The fiftieth anniversary Bologna Book Fair was a
cheering occasion. Eminent children’s publisher Klaus Flugge, the founder and
publisher of Andersen Press, was awarded the honorary citizenship of Bologna for
his services to children's books and to the Fair. He has attended every Bologna
Book Fair to date...' News Review on the Bologna Book Fair |
| Our new PhD editing service
is launched this week. Are you working to prepare your PhD for submission? Professional editing can help
you improve the presentation of your work and iron out any grammar or spelling
errors. See our 19 other editorial services. |
| Links to this week's top
stories Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world: Search and Rescue
In a well-informed
article on the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society site, Danuta Kean asks
if Google is doing enough
to deal with the copyright infringements of file-sharing sites.
British Library adds billions of webpages and tweets to archive. |
| 'I don't have a choice. If there's a story there will always be another
story. There's always the Other Story. If you write fiction, your job is to
apprehend the truth, something real, and be sensitive enough to give back, a
reflection that is both a mirror and beyond the real..' Ali Smith,
author of There but for the in The Times, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Bob's Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer
offers entertaining insights into the life of an aspiring writer. It's a WritersServices exclusive and you can go back to
the
start in 2001 and right through to its
end in
December 2007, when he reflected: 'Still haven’t broken through
my writer’s block. No longer even sure I want to. Why write? What’s writing
for? Have absolutely no idea. How can one add anything worthwhile to the
work of writers like Oscar Wilde? Yet the internet grows more vast by the
minute with the words of the millions who are certain their opinions are
worth airing.' |
| 'What we call fiction is the ancient
way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special
vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the
single mind to make and remake the world.' E L Doctorow
in our Writers' Quotes. |
1 April 2013
| 'Discoverability seems to be the word on everyone's
lips at the moment in the book business. By this is meant how people find books
and it's evident from recent research that bookshops play a very important part
in this. This may not be a great comfort to them, as it must be incredibly
irritating to be used as a showroom for internet retailers from whom the
customer often ultimately buys because they offer the lowest price...'
News Review |
| Find out which book title has won
the 2012 Diagram Prize! |
|
Blurb-writing
-
Our new service is for anyone who is having
difficulty producing their cover or jacket copy and may be especially helpful
for self-publishers. Let our skilled editor/writers do the job for you, so that
you end up with a professional blurb. |
|
'The holy grail for a historian is having three things come together. First
is new material, second is a good story with a tight narrative and great
characters, and third is something that has global and contemporary
appeal. I was lucky enough to have all three...
William Dalrymple, author of White
Mughals and Return of a King, in the Bookseller, quoted in
our
Comment
column. |
| Our new feature
links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world. This week:
Children’s Nonfiction
Publishing Comes of Age
and
James Herbert. |
|
New words
added to Oxford Dictionaries Online reflect changes in society
Oxford
Dictionaries Online, Oxford University Press’s free dictionary and language reference service,
recently added its new quarterly words, which present a fascinating picture of our
changing language. |
| 'There ain't nothing more to write about and I'm rotten glad of it,
because if I'd know'd what trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn't a
tackled it.' Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in
our Writers' Quotes. |
25 March 2013
| 'Last week’s annual Books and Consumers research from
Bowker showed some interesting trends in book-buying both in the UK and the US.
In 2012 British consumers bought 296m books, compared to 288m in 2011, but for
the fifth year in a row spend declined from £2,137m ($3.226) in 2011 to £2.1086 ($3.182)
as the lower prices for ebooks started to affect the overall price mix.'
News Review reports on the latest trends
in UK and US book-buying. |
| This week's links:
Exploring Accessible Publishing for the Print
Disabled,
Sixty Years of Sterling Wisdom
from the “Lord of Publishing”
and
The Most Influential Children’s Publisher You’ve Never
Heard Of. |
| Our reviewer, Maureen Kincaid Speller, said of the
The Arvon Book of Life
Writing by Sally Cline and Carole Angier: 'Many people want to
write about someone’s life, perhaps their own, and there are courses to suit
every level of interest, from university masters degrees to local college
qualifications' and concluded that it was: 'a brisk and helpful guide
on how to set about writing a life story... It is a sensible account of life
writing from experienced practitioners of what is both art and craft, and I
recommend it!' |
| 'Philip Roth once said to me years ago, when he took an interest in me
as a young writer: you've got to write as if your parents are dead. It was very
good advice, and I stuck to it, and now I look back with some horror. My father,
especially, was torn between exultant pride that I'd published a book and sheer
horror at what was in it...' Ian McEwan, whose latest book is Sweet Tooth,
in the Observer, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| 'Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand. It
is immodest and greedy to want more.' Gore Vidal in our
Writers' Quotes. |
| There are more pages of writers' quotes to be
found on the site on this page
and this one and there are
classic quotes too. |
18 March 2013
| 'In a column written for the
Bookseller, agent Peter Straus, who is MD of
Rogers, Coleridge and White and also President of the UK Association of Authors
Agents, has questioned whether it makes sense any longer for publishers to
insist on signing contracts for the legal term of copyright. For publishers this
has been an important consideration, giving them the control of a book for the
full term of copyright unless it goes out of print and is not reprinted...'
News Review takes a further look at
agents. |
| Our links of the week:
Modern authors feel
a 'commercial obligation' to write about sex, Julian Barnes
says, and World Book Day 2013: Parents still find time to read to their
children, despite leading increasingly busy lives. |
| 'Even if you are a bestseller you feel insecure
because it is all so unpredictable. You think, are people still going to go out
and buy this? I'm just as insecure for my new book as I was for my
first one. Patricia Cornwell in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven, quoted in our
Comment column.
|
| Writing Opportunity: there's
still just time to answer the 2013 call for submissions from Cinnamon Press,
with a deadline of 31 March 2013. They have nine slots to fill for books that will be
published in 2015 and are looking for poetry collections, short story
collections or full-length fiction |
| Our 2013 list of International
Book Fairs provides a note of book fairs near you which you
might like to attend. |
| ‘The ability of fiction to
develop creativity, to analyze the human psyche, help you understand people
— it's critical. It's as important as vitamins or anything else. To me, it's
the core of the intellectual health of human beings.’ Helen Zell, who has just donated $50m to support the University of
Michigan's graduate writing program, in our
Writers' Quotes. |
11 March 2013
| 'There are no rules about how long it takes to write one novel, or several
novels. There are some writers who produce as many novels in six months as Tartt
has in her whole career. Nora Roberts, American's most popular writer of romance
novels, turns out five books a year, and has only one rule of writing: "Ass in
the chair". Six to eight hours, every day, adds up to revenue of nearly $60
million a year...' Erica Wagner in The Times in our
Comment column. |
| Horror author Darren Shan will run a live-streamed author event with horror
author on 19th March at 2 pm. Fans will be able to tune in to see Shan talk
about his new 12-part Zom-B series. The third title, Zom-B City, will
be published on 14th March. Viewers should register for the event at
www.darrenshanlive.com, and can
submit questions to Shan ahead of the event. It will be recorded and available
on demand after the streaming. See also our
Success Story on Darren Shan. |
| 'The announcement that 50% of London agency Conville &
Walsh has been bought by Curtis Brown UK is the latest news in the consolidation
which is going on amongst literary agents. This purchase brings a successful
smaller agency into a bigger one which has not perhaps been so dynamic. As a way
of recruiting productive agents, it probably beats trying to develop them (so
long as you have the money to invest or can lay your hands on it), as these
agents are not likely to leave taking their client list with them. In that
respect they are not like new agents developed by bigger agencies, who often
leave to join another agency which offers a better deal, or to set up on their
own...' News Review looks at
agencies combining. |
| We've got a glowing new write-up from Craig Hurren on our
Endorsements page: 'I
must say that their professionalism and expertise was truly impressive...' |
| 'A great book should leave
you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live
several lives while reading it.' William Styron in our
Writers' Quotes. |
4 March 2013
| 'Are creative writing courses just an expensive con, or
do they really help writers with their writing and subsequent careers as
writers? Many writers have spent a lot of money on courses, sometimes expensive
one year Creative Writing MAs, but have these done anything more than make money
for the organisations running the courses? It’s hard to be sure, because this is
something no-one wants to talk about and of course some writers do benefit and
find a publisher for their work.' News
Review |
| Here's the shortlist
for the 2012
Diagram Prize. It looks like it's going to be make this a serious
challenger for the barmiest year ever. It's run by the Bookseller (the UK book trade weekly) with input from dedicated odd title hunters from
all over the world. The
prize, set up in association with the Diagram Group, has been running since
1978 and is a joyous celebration of the barmy side of publishing.
|
| If you want editorial input from our professional
editors, have a look at our
Services, especially
our
Copy
editing,
Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Synopsis writing,
Contract Vetting,
Manuscript Typing and our
latest addition,
Blurb-writing. |
| ‘No longer was I the only
mad woman in the attic. I went to an RNA weekend in Bournemouth. I had to get
the train and I arrived late, and I knew no one, apart from the main speaker.
And I only knew her because she’d been on television. But it was so wonderful
meeting other people with the same obsession. Because when you’re a writer, it’s
very difficult to explain what you do to those who have no concept of what it’s
like…' Katie Fforde, author of A French Affair and President of the
UK Romantic Novelists’ Association, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Have you managed to find a publisher for your work and are now enjoying
the thrill of knowing that your book will soon be published? If you’re
wondering what happens next, here is an outline of the processes involved:
Preparing for Publication. |
| 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as
your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' E L Doctorow in
our Writers' Quotes. |
25 February 2013
| 'It’s a sign of the changing times that Pan Macmillan Science Fiction
and Fantasy imprint Tor UK is now accepting direct submissions from authors.
Most publishers have long since decided not to accept unsolicited
submissions, so this is a major turnaround. It’s possibly also a comment on
the fact that so relatively few agents represent Science Fiction or Fantasy
authors, in most cases because the agents concerned don’t profess to
understand these genres...' News Review
reports. |
| Mslexia now have the first in their series of three specially-commissioned short
story writing workshops set up in relation to the
Mslexia Women's Short Story Competition
available for free online. The first workshop is all about 'Beginnings' and
offers practical writing advice. The other two workshops will be available over
the next few weeks. |
|
Our new feature
links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world: Books in Translation: It’s Time for Others to Join the Fight, Killing the “Pay First, Read Later”
E-bookselling Model and Osprey Takes Flight on Brands, Tribes,
“Clonefiles” and the Crowd. |
|
If you are looking for copy editing online, it is difficult
to ensure that you are getting a professional copy editor who will do a good
job on your manuscript. Our page on
Getting your manuscript copy edited may help. |
| ‘No longer was I the only mad woman in the attic. I went to an RNA
weekend in Bournemouth. I had to get the train and I arrived late, and I
knew no one, apart from the main speaker. And I only knew her because she’d
been on television. But it was so wonderful meeting other people with the
same obsession. Because when you’re a writer, it’s very difficult to explain
what you do to those who have no concept of what it’s like…' Katie
Fforde, author of A French Affair and President of the UK Romantic
Novelists’ Association in our
Comment column. |
| Have you ever wondered
whether there’s any point in entering competitions? Someone must be
winning, but why is it somehow never you? It might be worth reviewing how
you approach competitions, to see if you can achieve a better result. See
our page on
Entering Competitions. |
| 'Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.' T S
Eliot in our Writers' Quotes. |
18 February 2013
| 'Big brand name authors continue to play a major part as far as UK readers
are concerned and many of these are American. Danielle Steel, author of 80
novels, is the only writer to have appeared in every annual list of
most-borrowed books from libraries in the UK in the last 30 years. Her books
were borrowed an astonishing 900,000 times from libraries last year. Altogether
they have been borrowed more than 42m times since 1999, a period over which she
has also sold an estimated 11 million books...'
News Review reports. |
| 'Writing is undoubtedly a creative art. Whether we are
working on the next Booker Prize winner or ghostwriting blog posts, writers need
to be original, imaginative and inspired. But writing is also a business, with
invoices to raise, accounts to be submitted and records to be kept. Writers,
like artists, can find themselves floundering when it comes to the ‘business
end’ of the job. Read on for our easy-to-follow guide to the business of
writing... '
Joanne
Phillips' article will help you sort out the business end of your
writing. |
| Links to this week's top
stories The Financial Reality of a Genre Novelist,
Costa Book Award: who would dare refuse Hilary
Mantel her crown?
and Joanna Trollope on Jane Austen. |
| Our Tips series is an
8-part series which starts with Improve your writing and ends with
Submission to agents and publishers. |
| 'When I heard I was on the shortlist for my category I
thought, "This is enough." It surpasses anything I have ever dreamed of. To
have won it is such an extraordinary feeling and I can't imagine winning
overall...' Francesca Segal, winner of the 2012 Costa First Novel
Category with The Innocents in the Evening Standard, quoted
in our Comment column. |
| 'If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the
novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.' D H Lawrence
in our Writers' Quotes. |
11 February 2013
|
Amazon’s fourth quarter results have just come in $1
billion (£632,62m) short of analysts’ expectations, but because of a 55%
increase in operating income to $405m (£256m), shares rose 6%. There are however
plenty of people who are beginning to wonder whether Amazon, with its
ever-increasing sales and its wafer-thin margins, is ever going to make a
profit. News Review reports.
|
|
This week's
link is to a Telegraph story
about a mysterious crime writer.
Jake Kerridge profiles MC Beaton, the crime writer who's the
third most borrowed adult author in Britain. |
|
Our Writing
Opportunity this week is the Mslexia 2013 Women's Short Story
Competition, closing on the 18th March. |
|
'After each book I get panicky. I don't love
the reviews. I don't like going through all that, and you would think that,
after almost 40 years of writing, I'd have got the hang of it.' Judy
Blume in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Screenplay assessment
fictionalised story - 'Sarah had always been fascinated by the
cinema. As a little girl going to see a film was her favourite treat and
she was also interested in how movies got to be made. Her own favourites
were the films with really good stories, like Titantic and Avatar, but she also liked the ones which were based on books, like
Lord of the Rings and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...'
Our fictionalised stories of
how our services have helped writers give you some idea of what they can
do. |
| In the
same section of our website you can find details of our eighteen
editorial services for writers and useful pages such as
Making
submissions and
Finding an Agent. |
| ‘Nothing on earth can stop people writing the books they want to
write. It’s a matter of desire. Don’t be down-hearted.’ Victoria
Glendinning in our Writers' Quotes. |
28 January 2013
| 'At last there’s some hard information on ebook
sales in the UK and an interesting indication of future trends in the US. The
Bookseller has managed to put together some ebook sales figures which show that
annual ebook sales in the UK are currently worth around £250m.
There has been a huge impact from the 20p ebook offers from Sony and Amazon and
real signs that they may be cannibalising book sales...'News
Review looks at the latest trends. |
|
Getting your manuscript copy edited
- if you are
looking for copy editing online, it is difficult to ensure that you are getting
a professional copy editor who will do a good job on your manuscript. WritersServices has now made its copy editing
service unique, as it will offer as standard TWO versions of your script, one
prepared using 'track changes' and one with all the changes accepted.
|
| 'I'd like to say - if it seems relevant - that I'm a woman writer, but
as long as I'm allowed to explain for me, that still means being subversive,
heretical, and exploring difference.' She is uncomfortable with gender-based
writing 'As though men write one kind of writing and women write another, which
is nonsense...' Michele Roberts, author of Ignorance, in our
Comment column. |
| An intriguing topical link this week is to:
Lance Armstrong Sued for Peddling ‘Fiction’ as Memoir
Famous
cyclist Lance Armstrong,
who admitted he used performance-enhancing drugs to win a record seven Tour de
France
titles, was sued by two California book buyers over claims he sold fiction as
autobiography. This opens up an interesting debate about whether
non-fiction writers have guaranteed the 'truth' of their stories. |
|
Writing
Historical Fiction Our revised article on Writing Historical
Fiction brings this subject up to date. Other articles cover
Writing Crime Fiction,
Writing Science Fiction and
Fantasy, Writing Romance,
Writing Non-fiction
and
Writing Memoir and
Autobiography. |
| 'Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the
border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the
streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.'
Janet Frame in our Writers' Quotes. |
21 January 2013
| ‘For some time the market for writing has been in demonstrable good
health in the UK, with a large audience buying a great number of books. From
the rise of Waterstones in the 1980s, through the mass-market explosion of
the 90s, and more recently the arrival of writing for the web and the ebook
with the new self-publishing model, UK readers have been a substantial,
various audience with an appetite for books and reading...'
News Review on the current
situation in the book world. |
| Driven to Distraction: Writers and Social Media -
Jonathan Franzen famously wrote that
‘it’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection is writing good
fiction’, and many writers are open about blocking sites that harm their
productivity. But with eight out of ten people in Britain now having access
to the internet, and social media sites growing at an alarming rate, social
media can be an effective and useful tool for writers to promote themselves.
This article by Kylie Grant highlights ways in which writers can utilise the
two main social media sites, and reach out to an ever growing creative
online community without it getting in the way of the writing itself.' |
| This week's topical links
are: Penguin Random House merger begins a new chapter
for publishing and Why Do Most Writers Start with Novels? |
| ‘There is an idea that the birth of the self-published writer implies
the death of the agent and publisher (sometimes one and the same person,
nowadays). It's not uncommon to hear it said that editors in big
corporations are so pressured by the bottom line and bean-counting suits
that they no longer take risks: only the editor/owner of a little
independent press can afford to take a chance on a new writer or support
him/her through the long-term business of establishing a reputation and
growing sales... Iain Finlayson, author of Blood Month in
Bookbrunch, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| Our Inside
Publishing series provides a helpful introduction to publishing for
authors. This extremely useful 19-part series has been revised to take
account of changes in the publishing world.
Advances
and royalties, The Relationship
between agents and publishers, Subsidiary rights,
The
English-speaking publishing world,
The Marketing department and
The Financial relationship
between writers and publishers can all be found on the site. |
| 'An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the
critics of the next and schoolmasters ever after.' F Scott Fitzgerald in our
Writers' Quotes. |
14 January 2013
|
'The winner of the 2012 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry has
just been announced today. It’s been won by Sharon Olds for Stag's Leap out of a ten-strong shortlist
comprising collections from Simon Armitage, newcomer Sean Borodale , Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales,
Julia Copus , Paul Farley, Kathleen Jamie, Jacob Polley, Deryn Rees-Jones and
two distinguished American women poets, Jorie Graham and Sharon Olds...'
News Review on this week's
poetry news. |
| If you are trying to get your work into shape for
publication, there's plenty of advice on the WritersServices website which
you may find useful.
Help for
writers is a useful starting-point. |
| 'Bloomsbury, Headline, Little, Brown,
Macmillan, HarperCollins haven't abandoned literary fiction. Let's face it,
Hilary Mantel was published by Fourth Estate, part of HarperCollins, and quite a
few winners were published from large houses - Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst,
Julian Barnes, Howard Jacobson. It's very tough for publishers to publish
literary fiction now... Danuta Kean, books editor of MsLexia
Magazine, in Bookbrunch, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Links to this week's top
stories - Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles
posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in
the book world: Books go digital as print sales slump and J.A.
Konrath Advises Writers: ‘Get Over Yourself’ in his annual Konrath’s
Resolutions For Writers column: “I really think it is possible to make a
very nice living by writing and not worrying about anything else.” |
| 'Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know
anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is
limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.' Philip K
Dick in our Writers' Quotes. |
7 January 2013
| 'As we enter this New Year, it’s a good time to reflect on the work
of one of our key book charities, Book Aid International. WritersServices is
a long-term supporter of this organisation, which has done so much to bring
books to third world countries, especially in Africa...'
News Review on the work of the
charity. |
| A new addition to the Services we offer is the
Poetry Critique. Are you
ready to show your poetry to magazines and publishers, but worried about
rejection, as you haven't had any knowledgeable comment on it? Would it help
to have a skilled editor critiquing it? |
| 'I never write the books with films in mind. I always write them as
books. I don't think one should write a book with a mind on a film version.
I was a screenwriter before I was a novelist and I learn to write
screenplays on the job. Working in television, you pay particular attention
to story. You have to structure your stories properly. You have to work out
what to include and what to leave out...' David Nicholls, author
of One Day, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| The
Historical Writers' Association
was set up last year by novelist Manda Scott as a forum for writers and to
promote the genre. The internet-based group already boasts around 100
members including authors, agents and editors, and is open to writers of
historical fiction and non-fiction. |
| Our checklist on
Entering competitions helps you to review how you approach
competitions and to make sure you give yourself the best possible
chance of winning. |
| 'In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. and if
they are, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in
black ink.' Catherine Drinker Bowen in our
Writers' Quotes. |
31 December 2012
| We've just revised our list of
International Book Fairs, which now includes the major fairs for 2013
and is a useful summary. Many of them are restricted to the book trade, but some
have authors' programmes and literary festivals and they can be a good way of
finding out what is happening in the book world in your country. |
| 'December ended with a piece of news combining the two
big news stories of the year – the continued rise of the ereader market and the
efforts of Pearson to work out a future for itself. Pearson announced that it
had moved into the ereader market by taking a 5% stake in Barnes & Noble’s new
digital books and college bookstore unit for $89.5m (£55m).
News Review on how the year ended with a
surprise. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional
editors, have a look at our
Services, especially
our
Copy
editing,
Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Synopsis writing,
Contract Vetting,
Manuscript Typing and our
latest addition,
Blurb-writing. |
| 'I first became aware of my need for this twice-lived life at
the age of 12 during my time at boarding school in Hertfordshire. I was dawdling
back across the lovely hayfield that separated the tennis courts from the garden
of the main school house when I was stopped in my tracks by the beauty of the
June light on the field. I stood very still...' Rose Tremain on becoming a
writer in the Sunday Telegraph. |
| Why do non-fiction books need an index? In
The Ins and Outs of Indexing
Joanne Phillips provides an answer, explains why it's a specialist job and why computers can't achieve the same
result as a skilled indexer. |
| 'Poetry isn’t sexy. It’s a quiet work. I always thought it was only clever
or dead people who wrote poetry, but then I realised it was a way for me to
settle scores in a funny way. Putting into words what I couldn’t and can’t say.'
Roger McGough in our Writers' Quotes.
|
17 December 2012
| 'The recent news of a
£15m (over $24m) deal between Wilbur Smith and HarperCollins worldwide, a
new publisher for the author, has caused some controversy this week. The
deal is for six books but the Sunday Times claimed that Smith will
not write them himself. The author, who turns 80 next month, will
concentrate on plot lines and characterisation, whilst others do the
writing...' News Review reports. |
| Our
links of the week
are:
Publishers brace for authors to reclaim book
rights in 2013
and Michael Morpurgo: What Michael Gove calls
'rigour' I call 'rigor mortis'. |
| ‘The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original
text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language – it's a way of saying more
with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation
is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a
kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a
very condensed form…' Carol Ann Duffy in an interview in the
Guardian, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, with a closing date
of 15 February, a first prize of £5,000 and an entry fee of £7. |
|
The
Authors Licensing and Copying
Society (ALCS) paid out over £2m to British writers of articles in
magazines, journals and newspapers last year. Make sure you receive your share
of any income they’ve collected by checking the criteria and making your claims
for any articles by
31 December
2012.
ALCS collects money for the secondary use of articles published in magazines,
journals and newspapers, and pays this money out to writers, on a claims basis,
providing their articles meet certain criteria. |
| 'Most writers can write
books faster than publishers can write checks.' Richard Curtis in our
Writers' Quotes. |
10 December 2012
| 'The Bookseller’s big Futurebook conference last
week gave top publishers an opportunity to lay out their stalls in terms of the
future. The keynote speaker was Charlie Redmayne, CEO of Pottermore. The most
visible trend was that publishers are dedicating themselves to getting in direct
touch with readers, largely through online means. It’s difficult to
over-emphasise what a big turnaround this change of attitude is.'
News Review reports. |
| In
Latest
changes in the book trade 7 Chris Holifield
looked at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses
might transform authors' capacity to license the use of their books for
all sorts of purposes. The rest of the series covers
Bookselling,
Publishing,
Print on Demand and the
Long Tail, Self-publishing - career
suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences
and
Copyright. |
| Our last
Success Story featured Christopher Paolini. With the publication of Inheritance
he brought to a triumphant conclusion his epic sequence. In the UK this
book had a first week sale of 76,000 copies and the series as a whole has sold
1.2 million books to date in the UK. It had a first printing of 2.5 million in
the US. Not only have the books been translated in 49 countries but total
sales for the first three books in the series have been 25 million copies
worldwide. |
| ‘I don’t think people always understand the scale of what we have
done in the past 12 months. The level of work has been very intense. What
we’ve done with Pottermore is harness a fanbase of millions of the biggest
Harry Potter fans. In terms of producing value to all of the rights holders
– be it J K Rowling, Bloomsbury, Scholastic, Warner Bros, or indeed our
sponsor Sony – that’s an immensely valuable thing, as any new books, content
or products come out.' Charlie Redmayne, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| If you want editorial input from
our professional editors, have a look at our 18
Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing and Manuscript Polishing,
for authors who are not native English speakers, and
Manuscript Typing. |
| 'There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on
Treasure Island.’ Walt Disney in our
Writers' Quotes. |
3 December 2012
| 'Audiobooks have long been the Cinderellas of the
publishing business, with many anticipated new dawns which have failed to
produce much bigger sales...' News Review
investigates the audiobook world. |
| Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world. This
week's been particularly interesting:
How
Mergermania Is Destroying Book Publishing, The Victims of the Penguin & Random House
Merger: Literary Agents and We must protect and reinvent our local libraries. |
| Check out
Advice for Writers
for links to over 65 useful pages on the site.
Try
The Ins and Outs of Indexing,
How
to market your writing services online,
Writing for the web,
Top Ten
Tips
for nonfiction writers,
Choosing a Service,
Getting your manuscript copy edited and
Getting your poetry published.
|
| Philip Pullman's
advice to writers: 'Read. But assuming they are already people who can't sit
down at breakfast without reading the cereal packet, then I would say write the
sort of things you like to read. Don't write what anybody else tells you is
popular...' Quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Do you enjoy reading what authors have had to say about the writing
life? Our fantastic current series of Writers' Quotes is accompanied by
More Writers' Quotes and
Even more Writers' Quotes, a
feast of interesting and often amusing quotes. |
| For this week we have a gleeful Clive James poem, to be found in our
Writers' Quotes: |
'The book of my enemy has been
remaindered
And I rejoice...
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous
technique,
His individual new voice?
26 November 2012
| 'Recent figures from Bowker show self-publishing
continuing its rapid growth in the US. The number of self-published books coming
out has nearly tripled since 2006, with 235,625 new print and ebook titles
published in 2011... ' News Review on the self-publishing boom in the US. |
| There's just time to enter our latest
Writing Opportunity, the wide-ranging
The New Writer prose, fiction
and poetry prizes, which are closing on 30 November. They're open to everyone,
with different entry fees for different categories, but hurry! |
| We've recently launched our new
Poetry Critique
service Set up in response to popular demand, our new service provides a line-by-line critique
on up to 150 lines of poetry from our expert editor, plus advice on marketing
your poems. If you've been writing poems, but have no idea if they're any good,
or just want to make sure they're the best they can be, this service can
help you. |
| Our topical article this week is
The Copy"right" Principle - writing in
ALCS
News
(Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society) writer
and campaigner Katharine Quarmby explains why publishing her work under Creative
Commons licences is against her principles. |
| 'A brand is a job in its own right. You feel like you
can't leave it. I'm very fond of Charlie and Lola but there was
a time when I really just wanted it to end. You want to walk away because you
want to get on with something else, but if you walk away you can't be sure how
it might move without you... ' Lauren Child, author of the Charlie and Lola
series, in the Sunday Telegraph, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Don't procrastinate!
- 'Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always
easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on
the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from
procrastination.'
Chris Holifield looks at how to get yourself going. |
| 'In writing a series of stories
about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail,
to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.' L Sprague de Camp in our
Writers' Quotes. |
19 November 2012
| 'After twenty years of rejection, Hilary Boyd
certainly didn’t expect to achieve phenomenal success with Thursdays in the
Park. A 62 year-old grandmother, she was very much more used to
failure. ‘Fiction was always my dream, but at 60 I had lost heart – despite
being repeatedly told about Mary Wesley’ (the splendid British author who
published her first novel at 70 and went on to have a very successful career as
a novelist)...' News Review on a
heartening success story. |
| This has certainly been a week of soul-searching about the future of publishing.
Our links to this week's top
stories include
Book publishing crisis: capitalism kills culture
and How Dead Is the Book Business?
|
| If you want editorial input from
our professional editors, have a look at our 18
Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing and Manuscript Polishing,
for authors who are not native English speakers and
Manuscript Typing. |
| You've just got time to take advantage of this week's
Writing Opportunity to enter a
story on the theme of 'autumn' into the PrinterInks Short Story Competition,
closing on 1 December. It's free to enter and the first prize is getting
your story published in hardback! |
| 'All my books work in the same way in that they draw upon a
whole lot of experience that I've already had. I'm not just talking about life
experience but knowledge of Chartres... I will already know about what I'm
writing about. I will do some research a) to remind myself; b) to make sure I
haven't got it wrong; c) to bring it to life again...'
Salley Vickers, author of The Cleaner of
Chartres in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| For Creative writing tutors and their students there's a mass of
useful information on the site, which we are very happy for you to print
out, with due acknowledgement, please. You can find this in the listing
under Advice for Writers, but
we'd specially recommend our 7-part
series Tips for Writers, Our
Categories series, about Writing Crime,
Science Fiction and
Fantasy,
Memoir and Autobiography
and so on, our recently updated series
Latest Changes in the Book Trade
and our 19-part series Inside Publishing. |
| ‘I
never wanted to be a literary writer. I wanted to be an entertainer. All I
wanted was to give what a lot of writers had given me: a good time on a bad
day.’ M C Beaton in our Writers'
Quotes. |
12 November 2012
| 'Things are settling around the idea of Random House and Penguin
merging, but there are plenty of dire predictions. Some think it will change
the nature of publishing as we know it, others that it will lead to further
consolidation. The combined group will have 25 to 30% of the global books
business. This sounds a lot and already there is talk of whether the merger
will be referred to the regulatory agencies in various countries...'
News Review reports. |
|
Links to this week's top
stories this week we follow up on the Random House/Penguin story -
Authors Guild asks for “close scrutiny” of
Penguin Random House merger and Bertelsmann's pickup of Penguin shows the poor
state of British publishing. |
| Our 23 lists of recommended links have been
updated with many new links to sites of special interest to writers. these range
from Writers Online
Services to Picture libraries
and from Software for writers
to Writers Magazines & Sites
and many more. |
| 'Thematically this email is a microcosm of publishing now and
tomorrow. Mega-mergers, new devices, Amazon growth (and losses) and
established players seeking to re-adjust for the digital age through
innovation and restructure. The Penguin Random House story suggests that the
phoney war is now over, digital is here, it is driving our thoughts and
strategies, and will come to dominate this content led business as it has
other content sectors.' Philip Jones in the Bookseller’s
Futurebook, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| Michael Legat's Factsheets
are a series of specially commissioned information-packed Factsheets for WritersServices, which cover the
essentials for writers from a former publisher, novelist and author of 12 books on writing.
For a quick update on
Write
about What You Know,
Literary Agents or
Shall
I be Famous? Shall I be Rich?, and much more, this is the place
to look. |
| There's still just time to go for our
Writing Opportunity this week,
which is The Complete Works, a mentoring opportunity for advanced
Black and Asian poets, before it closes on 22 November. |
|
'I
think I can boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned
and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.'
Jane Austen in
our Writers' Quotes.
|
29 October 2012
| Our new Poetry Critique
service Set up in response to popular demand, our new service provides a line-by-line critique
on up to 150 lines of poetry from our expert editor, plus advice on marketing
your poems. If you've been writing poems, but have no idea if they're any good,
or just want to make sure they're the best they can be, this service can
help you. |
| 'There’s no doubt about the top story this week. The
news that Random House and Penguin are negotiating a merger came out of the
blue. Both companies are large, with Random House currently the biggest UK
publisher with 16.2% of book sales, and Penguin with 10.9%, giving them a
combined 27.1%. In the US the merger would give the combined entity slightly
less of the total at 25%...' News Review
reports. |
|
Getting your manuscript copy edited
- if you are
looking for copy editing online, it is difficult to ensure that you are getting
a professional copy editor who will do a good job on your manuscript.
WritersServices has now made its copy editing
service unique, as it will offer as standard TWO versions of your script, one
prepared using 'track changes' and one with all the changes accepted.
|
| Links to this week's top
stories Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world:
How to write a book in 30 days; Debating Ten Ways to Save the Book Publishing
Industry
and Atwood and Alderman collaborate on Zombie series for Wattpad. |
| 'These days, almost everybody I
meet who's not already a writer wants to become one. Recent Society of Authors
statistics show that only seven percent of all writers in this country make a
reasonable living (which means that 93 percent do not, as compared with 85 per
cent of actors who do not) and yet there's a general clamour to scramble into
this strange and lonely arena...
Rose Tremain in the Sunday Telegraph, quoted in
our Comment column. |
| Joanne Phillips has written a useful article on
The
Business of Writing: 'Writing is undoubtedly a
creative art. Whether we are working on the next Booker Prize winner or
ghostwriting blog posts, writers need to be original, imaginative and inspired.
But writing is also a business, with invoices to raise, accounts to be submitted
and records to be kept. Writers, like artists, can find themselves floundering
when it comes to the ‘business end’ of the job. Read on for our
easy-to-follow guide to the business of writing...' |
| The shortlist for the
2012 T S Eliot Prize
has just been announced, with ten top poets on the list for the Prize,
the winner of which will be announced in January. |
| 'The world is a peculiar place, but it has
nothing on the world of books. This is largely a fantasy world in which the
pecking order goes as follows: If you can't cope with life, write about it;
if you can't write, publish; if you can't get a job in publishing, become a
literary agent; if you are a failed literary agent - God help you!' Colin Haycraft, then publisher of Duckworth,
in our Writers' Quotes. |
22 October 2012
| 'New imprints are being set up to publish genre
fiction in ebook form. One of these is the new women’s fiction imprint set
up by Oliver Rhodes, late of Harlequin UK. Bookouture – perhaps not the most
memorable name - is to focus on creating global author brands and building them
up through clever digital marketing. Bookouture will accept agented and
unagented submissions...' News Review
shows how romance rides high in ebooks. |
| Links to this week's top
stories -
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world:Frankfurt Book Fair 2012:
Self-publishing cell-phones and start-ups
and
Ian McEwan is lucky to
be allowed to publish novellas. |
| Does your manuscript need
Copy
editing? Do you know the difference between
copy
editing and proof-reading? Divided by a common language? - are you
wondering about the difference between
American and British copy editing? Our new page on
Getting your manuscript copy edited provides a useful overview and
clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two
versions of your copy edited manuscript, one showing the editor's changes in
'track changes' and one with the changes accepted. |
| 'Spies allow a novelist to heighten what all
novels do anyway, which is control the flow of information. They allow
limitless possibilities of tangled plot; they carry with them a hint of
danger, which I think we rather love, from the perspective of our rather
safe lives. Historically, we are safer than we've ever been. It's my theory
that the reason we're getting such amazing thrillers from the social
democracies of Scandinavia is because they've got such low crime rates...
Ian McEwan, whose latest novel is Sweet Tooth, in The Times,
quoted in our Comment column. |
| WritersServices editor Kay Gale offers her tips on
Getting
through the Slush-pile, drawing on her own experience as an
editorial assistant reading her way through it. |
| 'For me, poetry is the music of being human.
And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we
will become.' Carol Ann Duffy in our
Writers' Quotes. |
15 October 2012
|
Driven to Distraction: Writers and Social Media -
Jonathan Franzen famously wrote that,
‘it’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection is writing good
fiction’, and many writers are open about blocking sites that harm their
productivity. But with eight out of ten people in Britain now having access
to the internet, and social media sites growing at an alarming rate, social
media can be an effective and useful tool for writers to promote themselves. This article highlights ways in which writers can utilise the two main
social media sites, and reach out to an ever growing creative online
community without it getting in the way of the writing itself.' |
| 'Reports from the Frankfurt Book Fair are quite mixed, although many
concede that publishers are looking beyond the smokescreen of erotica to see
other trends emerging. Iain Pears’ new novel Arcadia will be published by
Faber as an app six months before the print edition comes out...'
News Review reports on the
Frankfurt Book Fair. |
|
The Oxford English
Dictionary needs you! OED Appeals has launched major online
initiative The Oxford English Dictionary has announced the
launch of OED Appeals, a major online
initiative set to involve the public in tracing the history of English
words. Editors are soliciting help in unearthing new information about the
history and usage of English, including the earliest examples of particular
words. |
| 'Spies allow a novelist to heighten what all novels do anyway, which
is control the flow of information. They allow limitless possibilities of
tangled plot; they carry with them a hint of danger, which I think we rather
love, from the perspective of our rather safe lives. Historically, we are
safer than we've ever been. It's my theory that the reason we're getting
such amazing thrillers from the social democracies of Scandinavia is because
they've got such low crime rates... Ian McEwan, whose latest novel is
Sweet Tooth, in The Times, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| 'Books aren't written, they're rewritten.
Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially
after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it...' Michael Crichton in
our Writers' Quotes. |
8 October 2012
|
News Review reports on Frankfurt
trends: 'A report on ebook statistics and
trends to be launched at the Publishers Launch Conference
which precedes the Frankfurt Book Fair next week suggests that some of the
wilder predictions about ebook adoption have been off the mark. US ebook growth
has declined considerably from September 2011, when it had been doubling each
year, and it is now expected to grow at the lower rate of about one-third in
2012...' |
| There's still time to sign up for our
Writing Opportunity this week, the
London Screenwriters' Festival, which runs from 26th to 28th October and
includes many luminaries of the film world. |
| If you want editorial input from
our professional editors, have a look at our 18
Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing and Manuscript Polishing,
for authors who are not native English speakers and
Manuscript Typing. |
| Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world. This week: Richard Curtis asks 'Are Publishers Making a
Killing on E-Books?' |
| 'I went to classes at the college one evening a
week. For the rest of the week I did my homework. I wrote stories, plays, poems,
and read voraciously. We emailed our homework to our tutors and classmates, who
gave invaluable feedback. I became obsessed. My flat is falling to
pieces, the windows filthy, my clothes shabby, my friends have forgotten who I
am, and my relationship with my partner, the writer Andrew Lycett, has
disintegrated to the occasional grunt. And there is nothing in our fridge...' Susan Greenhill, photographer extraordinaire and now
writer and contributor to MIR9, in Bookbrunch, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Our reviewer, Maureen Kincaid Speller, said of the
The Arvon Book of Life
Writing by Sally Cline and Carole Angier: 'Many people want to
write about someone’s life, perhaps their own, and there are courses to suit
every level of interest, from university masters degrees to local college
qualifications' and concluded that it was: 'a brisk and helpful
guide on how to set about writing a life story... It is a sensible account
of life writing from experienced practitioners of what is both art and
craft, and I recommend it!' |
| 'The existence of good bad literature - the fact that one can be
amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply
refuses to take seriously - is a reminder that art is not the same thing as
cerebration.' George Orwell in our
Writers' Quotes. |
1 October 2012
| 'It almost seems as if the only
thing which has happened this last week is that J K Rowling has published
her first adult novel. There’s been no escaping the coverage gleaned by the
media from a generally unreachable author...'
News Review on this week's big
story. |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is the new Bodley Head and Financial Times essay prize,
open to those aged 35 and under, with a prize of £1,000 and a closing
date of 18 November. |
| Are you writing poetry but finding it difficult to get it published?
Look at our page on
Getting your poetry
published. |
|
'I'm probably not a natural novelist, but I want to become one. I loved
working on A Gate at the Stairs. I know it's not perfect, but that's what
novels are allowed to be - imperfect. I know it speeds up at the end like a
Toyota- it has a little floor-mat problem at the end...' Lorrie Moore,
author of A Gate in the Stairs, in the Observer quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
Benjamin Zephaniah describes his route to getting published and his
journey as a passionate poet. |
| Our topical sites
this week are:
Agent Hero;
Book Publisher Goes To
Court To Recoup Hefty Advances From Prominent Writers; and
From Texas, Cyprus, Southampton and
Manchester - would-be novelists make a bee-line for Curtis Brown's Discovery
Day. |
| 'A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow
man is not conceivable as a writer.' Joseph Conrad in our
Writers' Quotes.
|
24 September 2012
| 'Never will a
writer be read more closely than by his or her translator. The best
translators seem to have an extra ear, indeed, have to have an extra ear,
for the literary dimensions and possibilities of their own language.
Translation can draw the poet out of someone who may not have realised the
poet in himself...' George Szirtes, author of
The Burning of the
Books and Other Poems in The Times,
quoted in our Comment column. |
| Topical links -
our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which
will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world. This
week: Publishing's digital switchover; Knowledge and expertise in
a hybrid world and Ebook Price War Obscures Larger Problem. |
| Does your manuscript need
Copy
editing? Do you know the difference between
copy
editing and proof-reading? Divided by a common language? - are you
wondering about the difference between
American and British copy editing? Our new page on
Getting your manuscript copy edited provides a useful overview and
clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two
versions of your copy edited manuscript, one showing the editor's changes in
'track changes' and one with the changes accepted. |
| 'There’s little doubt that winning a literary prize can give a big
boost to your career as a writer. Unfortunately though many of the prizes
which attract the most attention and are most financially attractive to the
winner are only open to writers who have been published by a publisher, ie
not self-published. Usually the books have to be entered by the publisher,
not the author...' News Review on prizes. |
| If you're looking for some diversion,
Writers' Quotes presents a wonderful selection and there's also
More Writers'
Quotes and
Even More
Writers' Quotes. |
| 'Authors with a mortgage never get writer's block.' Mavis Cheek
in our Writers' Quotes.
|
17 September 2012
| 'The Booker shortlist is unusually interesting this
year because of the presence of books by comparative newcomers, including two
authors who have struggled to find a publisher at all and are now published by
small presses...' News Review
reports on this year's surprising shortlist. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is The New Media Writing Prize 2012, a unique prize which can be awarded by
partners Bournemouth University and if:book to
Excellent storytelling
(fiction or non-fiction), Creativity, work written specifically for delivery
and reading/viewing via digital media.
Closing 5 October. |
| 'What moves you is usually what is going
to move a reader - a reader who is interested in your work of course. I'm
not a market research king, what I have to do is look to myself and write
something that moves me and that I believe in. Cecelia Ahern, author
of PS I Love You and four other novels, in the Bookseller,
quoted in our Comment column. |
| There are three extracts from the excellent
Writing a Biography or
Autobiography by Brian D Osborne in our Archive. |
| Links to this week's top
stories Children 'too embarrassed' to pick up books,
alarming study says, and (a follow-up to last week) Authors condemn fake
internet reviews. |
| The Publisher's View is a four-part series by Tom Chalmers, MD of
Legend press. The first article deals with
What
a publisher wants from submissions and what a writer can do about it.
Then there's
Judging a book by its cover and synopsis,
The
Writer's X Factor and
The
changing face of publishing. |
|
'The reason we read poetry is that
it has the ability to penetrate both solar plexus and
between the eyes, simultaneously, in a way that prose
doesn't.' Owen Sheers in our
Writers' Quotes. |
10 September 2012
| 'At the 2012 Edinburgh World Writers conference, the author China Mieville
suggested that one way of safeguarding the future of writing might be a minimum
wage for authors: "For the great majority of people who write, it would mean an
improvement in their situation, an ability to write full-time. For a few it
would mean an income cut, but you know what? It was a good run."'...
News Review reports. |
|
Blurb-writing
Our new service is for anyone who is having
difficulty producing their cover or jacket copy and may be especially helpful
for self-publishers. Let our skilled editor/writers do the job for you, so that
you end up with a professional blurb. |
|
Links to this week's top
stories
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world: On Publishing Punditry and Trying
to Hit a Moving Target; The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy;
and UK’s BookMachine: Meetups and Social
Media Networking for Publishers.
|
| 'I've never worked out what the actual rate of pay is for writing - I
think it would be too depressing. It took me three and a half years to write
the first book, which worked out at ten grand a year, which is not too
bad. That was just the advance...' Evie Wyld, author of After the
Fire, a Still Small Voice, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
Writing for the web is a particular skill.
Is it something you need to learn? Jakob Nielsen’s study has been extracted from to give you
the key points on how to go about this. |
| 'Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a
writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without
pity, and destroy most of it.' Colette's advice in our
Writers' Quotes. |
27 August 2012
| 'In an article in a recent Bookseller, Caroline Horn wrote cheeringly
about the continued health of the children’s books sector. At a time when
publishing for adults is well down and there are many changes which make it
difficult to see far ahead, the children’s publishing sector remains
robust...' News Review on
children's publishing. |
|
New words added to Oxford Dictionaries Online reflect changes in society
-
Oxford Dictionaries Online,
Oxford University Press’s free dictionary and language reference service,
has just added its new quarterly words, which present a fascinating picture
of our changing language. |
|
Links to this week's top
stories
- Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world. This week it's: “A
Right Fit”: Navigating the World of Literary Agents and immersing yourself in
the literary community and Victory for music
and film industries as Google begins piracy crackdown. |
| Great summer reading - follow the triumphs and disasters of an
unpublished writer’s life in
Bob G Ritchie’s Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer. |
| 'Looking back on
the past three years, you can see just how much has changed in publishing,
and how much remains the same. Some of the topics that made headlines years
ago - ebooks, ereaders, territoriality, rights - are still top of the
agenda... Edward Nawotka, Editor-in-chief, Publishing Perspectives,
in our Comment column. |
|
What is a
widget? Chas Jones looks at how writers can use widgets to
promote their work and how viral marketing works. |
| 'A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean
anything to him.' Philip Larkin in our
Writers' Quotes. |
20 August 2012
| 'The recent news that Amazon’s Kindle sales of ebooks have surpassed
sales of print books led many commentators to assume that ebook sales are
now outstripping print book sales. But, even in the States, where the growth
in ebook sales has been extraordinarily fast, print books still outsell
ebooks to a large extent, in fact they currently only constitute about 25%
of total sales...' News Review
reports. |
| The
National Association of Writers in Education offers two new articles
in its Turning the Next Page resources for writers, both of them for
poets, but it's worth also looking at the existing resources. |
| ‘I was surprised at the success of Chocolat. I was told that sort of
book wouldn’t sell as it was too old-fashioned and stuck between literary
and commercial fiction, but the public voted with their wallets. (It sold
more than a million copies.) And just when I was getting used to it being a
bestseller, I had to come to terms with the surreal progress of it becoming
a movie...' Joanne Harris in the Independent on Sunday in our
Comment column. |
| There's still time to enter the new
MsLexia Children's Novel Competition,
closing on 10 September. |
| An Editor's Advice is a useful series is based on the
advice Maureen Kincaid Speller, a long-serving WritersServices
freelance editor, has given writers over the years. The series
covers
Dialogue,
doing further drafts,
genre writing,
planning,
points of view,
autobiography and travel
and
manuscript presentation. |
| 'Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good
writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see
any.' Orson Scott Card in our
Writers' Quotes. |
13 August 2012
| 'It’s alarming to read in Publishers’ Weekly
that unit sales of print fiction backlist titles in the US fell 30% in the
period ended 22 July compared to the same period last year, whilst non-fiction
was 13% down. American publishers have suffered badly from the demise of Borders
and this hasn’t been offset by a switch to online backlist sales, as you might
have expected...' News Review
on the latest changes in the book trade. |
|
Links to this week's top
stories - Amazon sells more e-books than print titles in the UK;
Self-Publishing: Vanity Publishing or Something Else?;
The Bonfire of the Straw Men;
Why social media isn't the magic bullet for self-epublished
authors
and Women On The Rise
Among The World's Top-Earning Authors. |
| ‘So what’s it like being a writer today? At grass roots level I don’t
think it has changed at all from thousands of years ago. Good writers tell
gripping stories; they always have done and always will do – it is the
delivery method that has changed, but then it always has. Originally
storytelling began as an oral tradition. Stories were eventually handwritten
in order to preserve them.' Peter James in the Bookseller in our
Comment column. |
| If you want editorial input from
our professional editors, have a look at our 18
Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing and Manuscript Polishing,
for authors who are not native English speakers and
Manuscript Typing. |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is the Costa Short Story Award, closing on 7 September and
open to all writers over 18 resident in the UK. |
| Our editor Kay Gale has excelled herself in the latest summery entry in
her
Gourmet Single Traveller blog. Do you know how to dress a salad? |
| 'Fiction is not a dream. Nor is it guess work. It is imagining based
on facts, and the facts must be accurate or the work of imagining will not
stand up.' Margaret Culkin Banning in our
Writers' Quotes. |
6 August 2012
| 'Maeve Binchy, who died this week at the age of 72, was one of those rare
authors who is loved by everyone. Her warm, readable novels showed her great
story-telling talent, but it was her wonderful personality which marked her out
from many other successful authors...' News
Review reports. |
| Links to this week's top
stories - this week we have: The future
of publishing is in the cupboard under the stairs and Why social media
isn't the magic bullet for self-epublished authors. |
| Have a look at some very practical pages on the site on
Making
submissions and
Finding an agent. |
| ‘So what’s it like being a writer today? At grass roots level I don’t think
it has changed at all from thousands of years ago. Good writers tell gripping
stories; they always have done and always will do – it is the delivery method
that has changed, but then it always has. Originally storytelling began as an
oral tradition. Stories were eventually handwritten in order to preserve
them...' Peter James in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| 'Style is knowing who you
are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.' Gore Vidal, who died this week,
in our Writers' Quotes |
30 July 2012
| 'The Little Brown UK paperback imprint Sphere has announced that it
is setting up an online hub for crime, thriller and mystery e-books,
commissioning new content as well as acquiring titles which have not
previously been available in the UK, with the aim of becoming a "powerful
marketing platform for digital-first titles".'
News Review reports. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a
look at our
Services, especially our
Editor's
Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing
and
Indexing. |
| Our new feature providing links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world. This week:
Bookseller groups disappointed by US Department of Justice settlement;
The General Secretary of the Society of Authors in the UK
on the threats to authors; and The Search is on for the
Greatest American novelist. |
| Are you a poet who is trying to get your work published?
Have a look at Getting your poetry
published and there's also a review of Chris Hamilton-Emery of Salt
Publshing's
101 Ways to Make Poems Sell, the best book on the subject. |
| 'If your main concern is looking over your shoulder for which writer
might be a bigger hit than you, then you're not really concentrating on your
core activity. It's not a race and it's not a contest. It's not the
Olympics... Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up
The Bodies in The Times, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| 'Poetry is the identity of all other knowledge, the blossom and
fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions,
language.' Samuel Taylor Coleridge in our
Writers' Quotes. |
23 July 2012
|
|
'I like this age (68). Everything still works. I
play squash twice a week. And I feel at peace with myself for the first time, in
particular with my decision to be a writer. Writing never came naturally
and I still have to force my hand to do it... Richard Ford in the Observer,
quoted in
our Comment column. |
|
|
Our latest links
to interesting blogs or
articles posted online has produced the following: “Destroy Amazon!”: Rakuten
Kobo and Kodansha’s Tokyo Love-in and Penelope Trunk's How I got a
big advance from a big publisher and self-published anyway.
'The purchase of Author Solutions Inc by Pearson
this week for $116m marks the first significant investment by an established
publisher in a self-publishing service. Author Solutions was formed in 2007
from the merging of iUniverse, AuthorHouse and other related self-publishing
services. Perhaps surprisingly in view of the booming self-publishing market,
the company had been put up for sale earlier this year.'
News Review on the latest
acquisition news. |
|
|
Our
Writing Opportunity
this week is the National Poetry Competition, closing on 31 October,
which attracts entries in English from all over the world. |
|
|
Our checklist on
Entering competitions helps you to review how you approach
competitions and to make sure you give yourself the best possible
chance of winning. |
|
|
Our reviewer, Maureen Kincaid Speller, said of the
The Arvon Book of Life
Writing by Sally Cline and Carole Angier: 'Many people
want to write about someone’s life, perhaps their own, and there are courses
to suit every level of interest, from university masters degrees to local
college qualifications' and concluded that it was: 'a brisk and
helpful guide on how to set about writing a life story... It is a sensible
account of life writing from experienced practitioners of what is both art
and craft, and I recommend it!' |
|
|
'The good ended happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.'
Oscar Wilde in our
Writers' Quotes. Our enormous backlist of quotes contains a cornucopia of what writers
have said in More Writers' Quotes
and Even More Writers' Quotes.
There's also Classic Quotes.
|
16 July 2012
| 'For the first time ever, the prestigious CILIP Carnegie and
Greenaway medals were recently awarded to the same book, A Monster Calls.
This book has had an extraordinary history which is capped by its double
win. The author, Patrick Ness, had taken on the idea of the book from the
very talented Siobhan Dowd, who died in 2008 from cancer after herself
winning the Carnegie and writing a number of bestsellers...'
News Review on children's
publishing. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is the Greenhouse Funny Prize for a funny children's project. You'll
need to move fast because it closes on 30 July. It's open to
unagented British and Irish writers. |
| Does your manuscript need
Copy
editing? Do you know the difference between
copy
editing and proof-reading? Divided by a common language? - are you
wondering about the difference between
American and British copy editing? Our new page on
Getting your manuscript copy edited provides a useful overview and
clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two
versions of your copy edited manuscript, one showing the editor's changes in
'track changes' and one with the changes accepted. |
| Our new featured links
are especially interesting this week: The Incredible Resilience of
Books; Seth Godin’s self-publishing experiment is over; Making E-books Is
Harder Than It Looks; and $7,000 Fine
for Sharing “WordPress For Dummies” on BitTorrent. |
| 'I don’t like to talk about threats; I like to talk about opportunities,
which is a big difference. I think everyone spending time talking about
threats is wasting a lot of time and a lot of goodwill. The publishing
industry is undergoing epochal changes because of the digital technology,
but the digital technology is also affording the publishing world many
opportunities that are unprecedented.' Alberto Vitale, former CEO of
Random House Inc, in Publishing Perspectives, in our
Comment column. |
| Our Health Hazards
series is a unique 7-part series warning about the dangers to writers of
Carpal Tunnel syndrome, eye problems and your working environment. |
| 'Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all,
has to make sense.' Mark Twain in our
Writers' Quotes. |
9 July 2012
| 'New figures suggest that self-publishing output has played a
significant part in the first growth in US title output in four years.
Bowker figures project that print book output increased by 6% last year over
the previous year, to an astonishing 328,259 titles, but if the
self-publishing contribution is removed the market was flat...'
News Review reports. |
| Links to this week's top
stories
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world: E-books are for porn but real books will survive, says award-winning author; ‘Open access’ move puts thousands of UK jobs at risk; Authors Guild Sees Return of Predatory Pricing if DoJ Deal Stands;
and The Way Books Used to Be Sold by Tim Waterstone. |
| There's just time to enter the
Foyle
Young Poets of the Year Award, Britain's most prestigious prize for
poets aged 11-17, closing on 31 July. |
| ‘The writing itself has always felt like a bit of a compulsion. It’s
what I do, why I exist. My motivation in general is I can do this and I want
to be able to take care of myself, my friends and family. That keeps me
going - the idea that I can have career stability and I can look after
people I care about… Amanda Hocking, bestselling self-published author
of the Trylle Trilogy and the upcoming Watersong series,
quoted in our Comment column. |
|
Why do non-fiction books need an index? In
The Ins and Outs of Indexing
Joanne Phillips provides an answer, explains why it's
a specialist job and why computers can't achieve the same result as a
skilled indexer. |
|
Success story
- Darren Shan’s first book, Ayuamarca,
was published in 1999 by Orion and didn’t have much impact. The sequel, Hell's Horizon, sold fewer copies than the first. But in January 2000, Shan
released Cirque du Freak, the first book of The Saga of Darren Shan series in
the UK and Ireland and this was the beginning of his tremendous success and as
a YA
(and, more recently, adult) horror writer. |
| ‘The short story is as diverse and exciting a form as the novel,
offering the condensed satisfaction of a good poem.’ Sean O’Brien in our
Writers' Quotes. |
25 June 2012
| 'The Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon seems unstoppable. The paperback
and ebook editions have sold in excess of 2.75m copies, breaking all
previous records, in the UK alone and the ebook is reckoned to have sold 4m
copies worldwide. US sales are over 10m...'
News Review reports. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is a Mills and Boon and Harlequin competition for a romance, So You think
you Can Write. Check it out now to make sure you have plenty of time to
enter. |
| ‘While no author's chosen subject matter should be dictated by a
ruthless appraisal of what might sell books, it's always nice when a topic
springs to mind that, on closer consideration, chimes with one's perception
of the public mood. Payback Time focuses on a group of friends taking
revenge on a bank they blame for their friend's suicide... Geraint
Anderson, author of Payback Time in Bookbrunch, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Suzanne Joinson, who's
just about to publish her first book, offers her tips to writers in advance
of her session at the Writers and Artists How to Get Published conference. |
| Links of the week:
Indies continue to decline on high
street,
Going to the Very Edge of the Known Writing Universe,
Why the Waterstones/Amazon Deal is “Like Vichy France”
and
What Can Trade Publishers Learn from Fanfiction? |
|
Rotten
Rejections
lists the famous writers who had their work rejected:
The Diary of Anne Frank
(‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special
perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity”
level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which was rejected 16
times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies)
was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about an artist.’ |
| 'I have been successful probably because I have always realized that
I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting
story entertainingly.' Edgar Rice Burroughs in our
Writers' Quotes. |
18 June 2012
| 'Last week’s BookExpo America in New York City seemed to show a
resurgence amongst independent booksellers, until recently in steep decline.
The American Booksellers Association reported that the number of member
bookstores has increased from 1,512 to 1,567, and booksellers seem to have
been voicing a new confidence about their role. Book buyer attendance was up
5% on last year.' News Review on
news from the fair. |
|
Links to
this week's top stories,
keeping you up to date with what's going on
in the book world: Good Books Are Worth the Wait - Tim Schaffner in Publishing Perspectives asks why writers are in so much of a
hurry and The Value of Self-Publishing is the “Blind Spot in
the Market” - the Bowker figures show an astonishing 124,700 self-published titles in the total
of 211,269 titles published in the US in 2011. |
| If you want editorial input from
our professional editors, have a look at our 18
Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing
and our new service,
Indexing. |
|
The Caine
Prize for African Writing has come of age this year, with energetic chairing of
the judges by Bernardine Evaristo and a further reaching-out to a wider African
and international audience. This year the thirteenth ‘African Booker’ has produced
an anthology, African Violet, which will be published in six African
countries and consists of five shortlisted stories from the Caine Prize
entries, and 10 short stories produced at the workshop held in South Africa
in March 2012. |
|
Our list of picture libraries
is a good place to start if you're looking to source pictures for
your book. |
| ‘The Booker made me a lot of money. I didn't realise that all over
the world, people will read a book just because it won the Booker prize. Not
something I would do myself... But then one goes into some quite other,
private region to produce a book. I think the Booker can drive people quite
mad. That's why it's good to be detached from it...' Alan Hollinghurst,
author of The Stranger's Child in the Guardian, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
Why do non-fiction
books need an index? In The Ins and Outs
of Indexing
Joanne Phillips provides an answer, explains why it's a specialist job and
why computers can't achieve the same result as a skilled indexer. |
| 'Poetry is language at its
most distilled and most powerful.' Rita Dove in our
Writers' Quotes. |
11 June 2012
| Last week’s Bookbrunch carried an
interesting report on the recent Reader Organisation Conference. Jane Davis set
up the first Get into Reading group in 2002, for young single mothers at a
library in Birkenhead, Wirral, so creating a model that allows people of all
reading abilities to come together to enjoy great literature, and to use
that literature as a launch-pad for personal discussion...'
News Review on a very worthwhile
organisation. |
| Another very worthwhile thing is International Short Story Day,
coming up fast on 20 June, week on Wednesday. Go to
their website to
find out how you can get involved. |
| Don't procrastinate!
- 'Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always
easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on
the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from
procrastination.'
Chris Holifield looks at how to get yourself going. |
| 'After a few years of enjoying and thinking about electronic books,
paper still has a very specific place in my world - in fact, it has regained
some ground. The depthless grey of my Kindle screen and the gloss brightness
of the iPad or iPhone are fine and good, but they are not the
hearth-and-home experience... ' Nick Harkaway in the Bookseller, quoted
in our Comment column. |
| 'So you want to write historical fiction? Your timing is good, because historical fiction is fashionable
again after many years in the doldrums. In fact it’s so popular that it
has virtually reinvented itself as a category...' The last article in
Chris Holifield's Categories series explores the market and approaches
to Writing Historical Fiction.
|
| Other articles in the series cover
Writing Romance,
Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy,
Writing Crime Fiction
and Writing Non-fiction. |
| 'What obsesses a writer
starting out on a lifetime's work is the panic-stricken search for a voice
of his own.' John Mortimer in our
Writers' Quotes. |
4 June 2012
| 'It’s been a big week for the Orange Prize for Fiction. First there
was the announcement that Orange will no longer be sponsoring it after this
year’s Prize. This was certainly a big surprise, as it’s generally been
regarded as one of the most successful of all sponsorships and there had
been no indication, in public at least, that anything had changed. It has
been the longest-running arts sponsorship in the UK...'
News Review on this week's big
story. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is the Manchester Poetry Prize, closing
on 31 August, open internationally and with a First Prize of £10,000. |
| Our Inside
Publishing series provides a helpful introduction to publishing for
authors. This extremely useful 19-part series has been revised to take
account of changes in the publishing world.
Advances
and royalties, The Relationship
between agents and publishers,
Subsidiary rights, The
English-speaking publishing world,
The Marketing department and
The Financial relationship
between writers and publishers can all be found on the site. |
| 'I worry so much about everything I write, I always think: "Is this
the one that's a disaster?" Fortunately I've written enough, and didn't get
successful with my first book so I've had experience with not selling very
many copies. I worry every single time, it's an awful experience, but
hopefully it makes my writing better...' Patrick Ness, author of A
Monster Calls and the Chaos Walking trilogy, in the Bookseller,
quoted in our Comment column. |
| This week's
Links to recent stories
includes NY
judge grants class status in Google book fight, James Daunt isn't a
moron, Publishers should be proud of their legacy and UK Publisher's Association Accuses British
Library Of 'Tawdry Theft' For Supporting More Reasonable Copyright . |
| 'The only obligation to
which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of
being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.' Henry James in our
Writers' Quotes |
28 May 2012
| Our latest
Success story
deals with Stephen Leather, who has had an interesting path to success. A
thriller writer who has been writing for long enough to have produced 25
titles, he has diversified over his writing career, with three series
characters and books in slightly different genres. But it is how he has
used self-published ebooks to build his audience which is particularly
interesting. |
| 'Shock horror announcement - That’s not putting too strongly the
chorus of disapproval which greeted the surprise announcement from James
Daunt of Waterstones that he had agreed an alliance with Amazon which would
see Waterstones selling Kindles in their shops and providing wi-fi acess so
that customers can browse the shop’s stock and then order ebooks on their
Kindles.' News Review on the
story of the week. |
| From our archive, five excerpts from
Inspired Creative Writing
by Alexander Gordon Smith from the
brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series. |
| This week's
links to topical stories:
US agent Rosemary Stimola and the Changing World
of Children’s Books, Apple: U.S. e-book lawsuit 'fundamentally
flawed' and Publishers Association Director Mollet attacks 'grotesque' tactics of
copyright opponents. |
| 'The sprawling fan fiction groups of the internet cover everything
from films to TV shows to pop stars, and the strongest tend to cluster
around imaginative teenage fiction such as Harry Potter and the Twilight
series. It's from these groups that Fifty Shades of Grey has emerged...
James Bridle in the Observer in our
Comment column. |
| Our fictionalised stories show
how our eighteen services have helped writers give you some idea of what they can do.
Screenplay assessment
fictionalised story - 'Sarah had always been fascinated by the
cinema. As a little girl going to see a film was her favourite treat and
she was also interested in how movies got to be made. Her own favourites
were the films with really good stories, like Titantic and Avatar, but she also liked the ones which were based on books, like
Lord of the Rings and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...'
|
|
'There are three reasons for
becoming a writer. The first is that you need the money; the second, that
you have something to say that you think the world should know; and the
third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.' Quentin Crisp
in our Writers' Quotes. |
21 May 2012
| 'I wouldn't use the word "fun" to describe the process
(of writing). It's like someone has said "OK, you have to scrub St Paul's
Cathedral. Now here's your toothbrush." It looks overwhelming, but you think in
terms of scrubbing one brick at a time. One chapter, one sentence, one word at a
time, and eventually you'll get there.' George R R Martin in The Times
in our Comment column. |
| Links to recent stories
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world. This week: How a book is born, It doesn’t matter what e-books cost to make
and Serious Non-fiction in the Digital Age. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look
at our 18 Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing
and
what we call Manuscript
Polishing - getting your manuscript ready for
publication if you are not a native English speaker and need some help to
get it right. |
| 'As if there wasn’t enough change going on in the
publishing world at the moment, the British government has decided to take a
hand in academic publishing, having just concluded that a new model would work
better. For years publishers have undertaken this kind of scholarly publishing
which is financed by book and journal sales, yet now government minister David
Willetts is suggesting that open access is the way forward.'
News Review on academic
publishing. |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is the H G Wells Short Story Competition, closing on 22
July and especially welcoming to younger writers. |
| Bob's Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer
offers entertaining insights into the life of an aspiring writer.
It's a WritersServices exclusive and you can go back to
the
start in 2001 and right through to its
end in
December 2007, when he reflected: 'Still haven’t broken through my
writer’s block. No longer even sure I want to. Why write? What’s writing
for? Have absolutely no idea. How can one add anything worthwhile to the
work of writers like Oscar Wilde? Yet the internet grows more vast by the
minute with the words of the millions who are certain their opinions are
worth airing.' |
| 'When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people
not characters. A character is a caricature.' Ernest Hemingway in our
fantastic Writers' Quotes. |
14 May 2012
| 'J K Rowling’s Pottermore site seems to have
succeeded all expectations. The ebook store has sold £3m ($4.83) worth of Harry
Potter ebooks in its first month. Sales appear to have been driven by
pent-up demand and sales values are high because many fans are buying the
complete ebook bundle, which is priced at £38.64 ($62.25)...'
News Review reports. |
| Calling all travel writers! Our
Writing Opportunity of the week is the Bradt/Independent on
Sunday Travel Writing Competition, open to all British residents and
closing on 15 June. |
| An Editor's Advice is a useful series is based on the
advice Maureen Kincaid Speller, a long-serving WritersServices
freelance editor, has given writers over the years. The series
covers
Dialogue,
doing further drafts,
genre writing,
planning,
points of view,
autobiography and travel
and
manuscript presentation. |
| ‘Although it may sound surprising, neither Amazon
nor Apple are 2.0 oriented companies. And this is their weakest point. Both
were born at the end of the analog era and although their corporate cultures may
be highly innovative, their strategic focus is still very traditional. Both have
created totally restricted ecosystems that only permit limited co-operation with
other companies.' Javier Celaya in Publishing Perspectives,
quoted in our Comment column. |
| Our Contract vetting
service may be just what you need if you've got an agreement with a
publisher but are now faced with dealing with the contract. Our
contracts expert can advise and help you make sure you get a good deal. |
| 'Authors with a mortgage
never get writer's block.'
Mavis Cheek in our Writers' Quotes. |
7 May 2012
| 'An article in a recent edition of the Bookseller focused on the London
agency Conville and Walsh, a relative newcomer to the agency business but a
successful one. How is the world of agenting being affected by the changes in
the book world, and what impact does this have on writers?
News Review reports on agenting in a
changing world. |
| Our Writing Opportunity this
week is the new Mslexia Children's Novel Competition, open to
children's novels in any genre by previously unpublished women novelists.
First Prize £5,000 and an entry fee of £25. |
| 'I want to make sure that a reader could figure out
every twist in the book from what went before. I try really hard to give
those clues and suggestions double or triple meanings and steer (the reader) in
a different direction. But the opportunity, if one chose to figure out what was
going to happen, should be there...' Jeffrey Deaver, author of XO and 29 other
thrillers, in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Does your manuscript need
Copy
editing? Do you know the difference between
copy
editing and proof-reading? Divided by a common language? - are you
wondering about the difference between
American and British copy editing?
Our new page on
Getting your manuscript copy edited provides a useful overview and
clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two
versions of your copy edited manuscript, one showing the editor's changes in
'track changes' and one with the changes accepted. |
| Links to recent stories
-
Scale and synergy do not drive publishing, people do, Why Writers Need Publishers…Or Do They?
and Why smart authors are cutting Amazon out. |
| WritersServices editor Kay Gale offers her tips on
Getting
through the Slush-pile,
drawing on her own experience as an
editorial assistant reading through it. |
| And the same Kay Gale now has her own blog about gourmet food,
The Single
Gourmet and Traveller, which is highly recommended for all foodies.
|
| 'Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He
may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of
hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself
as writer.'
Ray Bradbury
in our Writers' Quotes. |
30 April 2012
| 'Erotica, Romance, Crime and Fantasy bullish
- So what do these four areas of genre publishing have
in common? Well, they’re all in demand at the moment, in some cases after a
period in the doldrums. How much is this down to ebooks? Well, hard to say, but
with romance in particular this is certainly part of the equation.'
News Review looks at genre
publishing. |
| Links to recent stories
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world: Larry Kirshbaum shares many more details on how Amazon
Publishing will work, Lack Of Pulitzer Didn’t Hurt Book Sales and
Publishers Beware, more creative destruction on the way. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look
at our 18 Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing
and
what we call Manuscript
Polishing - getting your manuscript ready for publication if you are not
a native English speaker and need some help to get it right. |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is the 18 competitions which are part of the Winchester
Writers' Conference and which cover just about every type of writing. |
| ‘This has been a tumultuous year for the book business, a time of
profound change in the way books are distributed and read. It is no
exaggeration to say that the widespread acceptance of digital devices and a
simultaneous contraction of shelf-space in stores qualify as a historic
shift...' Peter Osnos, founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs
Books in The Atlantic, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| What does it take to
market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today?
Joanne Phillips
provides the answer, which is that the
internet is a fertile ground for writers. You just need to know how to
make it work for you... |
| 'Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing
profession carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be
creative; that one must be cantankerous and objectionable in order to be
bright; that ego is paramount over skill; that one can rise to a level from
which one can tell the reader to go to hell. These myths, if believed, can
ruin you. If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have
enough ego.' David Brin in our
Writers' Quotes. |
23 April 2012
| 'In the halls of the London Book Fair, publishers and others
continued to agonise about whether the e-book agency model can survive
globally in the wake of the US Department of Justice lawsuit (see News
Review last week) and there was also widespread frustration at the delay of
the Nook device launching in the UK...'
News Review reports from LBF. |
| Read Michael Legat’s 19
Factsheets on everything from plotting your novel to
publishers’ contracts. |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is The
Biographers' Club Tony Lothian Prize, which has a deadline of 1
August and is open to uncommissioned writers working on a biography. |
| ‘I don’t believe in writer’s block. Think about
it—when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn’t it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer’s
block is having too much time on your hands. If you have a limited amount of
time to write, you just sit down and do it... ' Jodi Piccoult, author of Lone Wolf,
in our Comment column. |
|
Publicising
your book - gaining publicity is one of the biggest hurdles a new fiction or non-fiction
writer faces. After all, without it, no-one will even know your book exists.
In this article, media agent Alison Smith-Squire offers some top tips. |
| Links to
recent stories - our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world:
Love, Sex & Romance - In a move to build
community and learn more about its customers, American publisher Sourcebooks is
launching a romance e-book club. Trending: clash of the book titles
- What's worse than seeing that someone else has come up with the same book
title as yours? But there's no copyright in titles, as John Walsh points out. |
| 'Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.' William
Hazlitt in our Writers' Quotes. |
16 April 2012
|
'At the beginning of the week it looked like the
London Book Fair would be the story of the week. But by mid-week a tsunami had
swept through the book world and there was only one story dominating the
headlines. In a move which may ultimately affect publishing
across the world, the American Department of Justice filed an antitrust
lawsuit alleging that Apple and five publishers (Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin,
Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins) conspired to limit competition for the
pricing of e-books when they moved to the agency model in early 2010 in a
"collective effort to end retail price competition by coordinating their
transition to an agency model across all retailers".
News Review reports on this
astonishing week. |
| A Library in Your Living
Room - Oxford University Press have just announced that public libraries in
England, Wales and Scotland will be able to provide library users with access to
a myriad of fantastic reference works and language collections. Anyone with
membership to these libraries will be able to use their library card to get
instant free access in the library or at home. |
| Is your progress as a writer stymied by the fact that you have old
typewritten or even handwritten manuscripts that you can't face retyping
onto a computer? Our
Typing service can help with this. |
| 'Before my first book,
Cityboy, was
published I had foolishly assumed that an author's job was to write books. What
a naïve buffoon I was! Having had three books published, it is now clear that
writing stuff is only half the battle… at best. Unless you are already an
established author or have written something so outrageously fantastic that it
makes Catch-22 look like insipid balderdash you need to get out there
and promote the hell out of it. Geraint
Anderson, author of just-published Just Business, quoted in our Comment column. |
| Our reviewer, Maureen Kincaid Speller, said of the
The Arvon Book of Life
Writing by Sally Cline and Carole Angier: 'Many people
want to write about someone’s life, perhaps their own, and there are courses
to suit every level of interest, from university masters degrees to local
college qualifications' and concluded that it was: 'a brisk and
helpful guide on how to set about writing a life story... It is a sensible
account of life writing from experienced practitioners of what is both art
and craft, and I recommend it!' |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is The Global Short Story Competition, with a monthly prize
leading up to an annual one, open to writers across the world and with an
entry fee of £5. |
| 'I don't know much about creative writing programmes. 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 in our
Writers' Quotes. |
9 April 2012
| 'The annual Books & Consumers research into the British book market
was delivered to a highly interested audience last week. Rarely can there
have been so much change in one year and the assembled bookseller and
publishers were keen to hear what had actually been going on.'
News Review joined the audience. |
| Update to our links
Our 23 lists of recommended links have just been
updated with many new links to sites of special interest to writers. these range
from
Writers' Online
Services to
Picture libraries
and from Software for writers
to
Writers' Magazines & Sites.
There's a new
Writers' Blogs
listing which needs populating, so please send your suggestions in. |
| 'Oddly enough, despite the explosion of
new formats and new media, the fundamental things apply. Vanity Fair
confirms that the grammar of writing and publishing is unchanged. Authors
work alone in their private space. Eventually, their work is ready to be
seen by readers...' Robert McCrum in the Observer, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look
at our 18 Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing
and
what we call Manuscript
Polishing - getting your manuscript ready for publication if you are not
a native English speaker and need some help to get it right. |
|
Links to
stories of the week Our new
feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will
help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world. This week
it's Discoverability and the New
World of Book PR and Why The 'Missing 20th Century' Of Books Is Even Worse
Than It Seems. |
| 'Put down everything that comes
into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge
his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.'
Colette in our
Writers' Quotes. |
2 April 2012
|
'The launch of the Harry Pottter books in ebook form
last week was described by the Bookseller’s Philip Jones as ‘digital
publishing's Beatles moment’. He said ‘These will be huge – they are a game
changer because of the power of the Potter brand.’ (The Harry Potter series has
sold 450m print copies worldwide to date.)'
News Review reports. |
| Links to stories of the
week Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world: The lost history of Fifty Shades of Grey - Galleycat
delves into the origins of E L James's bestselling book as Twilight fan fiction
in a fascinating tracking of its origins. What's the greatest fear
for publishers, Amazon or piracy? Mike Shatzkin on the wider implications of
Pottermore's approach to selling the Harry Potter ebooks. |
| Finally we have the
winner of this year's Diagram Prize. |
|
'I think there are probably some writers who are more
cine-literate than in the past and there are many who write, thankfully, in a
very un-cinematic way. What's also the case is that the market for books
into films has increased and the awareness of the possibility of a book being
turned into a film is much greater than it used to be. David Heyman, producer of the eight Harry Potter
films, in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column.
|
|
In
Latest
changes in the book trade 7 Chris Holifield
looked at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses
might transform authors' capacity to the license use of their books for
all sorts of purposes. The rest of the series covers
Bookselling,
Publishing,
Print on Demand and the
Long Tail, Self-publishing - career
suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences
and
Copyright.
|
|
'The only reason for being a professional
writer is that you just can't help it.' Leo Rosten in our
Writers' Quotes. |
26 March 2012
| 'I’m afraid we can’t escape Amazon
in the news at the moment. In Publishing Perspectives Bryce Milligan, the
publisher of small American indie Wings Press, asks whether Amazon’s
philanthropic grants are not just helping along their company aim of
overwhelming the competition. The independent Publishers Group of small
publishers is currently engaged in a battle with the Internet giant. The
options don’t look good – either trade with Amazon at a discount, which
means the publisher will actually lose money, or don’t trade with them at
all...' News Review reports.
|
| Links to stories of the
week Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world: The New Press - 20 years of publishing in the public
interest and now they have a bestseller and Sourcebooks announces
Agile model, which allows for the rapid and
interactive development of work by its authors, where the content evolves
through a partnership between the author and their community. |
| Real Time Web for Old Time Books:
the Benefit of Social Media for Publishers and Authors - Fauzia
Burke explores the online activities you can do in real time -- from status
updates on Facebook, to microblogging on Twitter to uploading photos and
videos on other social media sites. If you want to explore how social
networking can help you market your book, her article provides a
starting-point. |
| ‘One reason why first-time novelists are frequently turned down by
agents and publishers is because they tend to regard freedom of expression
as a permit to waffle on, page after page, about nothing in particular.
Their manuscripts lack rigour and economy, and this reveals a common failing
in the creative mind-set of beginners: too much allowance is made for the
gratification of every expressive urge that springs to mind...' Roland
Vernon, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| Our Writing Opportunity this week is the Authors' Foundation awards from the Society of Authors,
in nine categories, open to British writers who fulfil the criteria. |
| 'I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because when
two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries
and only half the royalties.' Agatha Christie in our
Writers' Quotes. |
19 March 2012
| 'It’s a sign of the times that previously unknown
British author E L James has topped the New York Times bestseller list
with an erotic romance, Fifty Shades of Grey. The book was published in a
print edition but the vast majority of sales were in ebook. Vintage US are
releasing new ebook versions of the trilogy on Monday while their first print in
paperback will be 750,000.' News Review
has the story. |
| Does your manuscript need
Copy
editing?
Our new page on
Getting your manuscript copy edited
provides a useful overview and clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two versions of your copy edited manuscript,
one
showing the editor's changes in 'track changes' and one with the changes
accepted. If you're not a native English speaker, you might be
interested in our Manuscript
Polishing service, which helps you make sure that your written
English is correct. |
| This week's links to
stories of the week include
the
Department of Justice’s
confusing lawsuit against the five of
the Big Six publishing companies and Apple,
Inc, a Huffington Post story from the UK about why libraries
are worth saving and after analysing
5,750,000 books on Goodreads, Otis Chandler shares his insights on the
evolving nature of book discovery. |
| 'The bit between the writer and reader is called publishing. We need
to think of copyright in an imaginative way. Publishers are very creative
about formats for books, through covers and marketing campaigns, but we are
not that creative about the product. The creativity there seems to go on
before we receive the product. We can think what we might make from the
copyright and from the brilliance of working with an author.' Stephen
Page, MD of Faber and Faber, at the Bookseller's Futurebook conference, in
our Comment column. |
| What does it take to
market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today?
Joanne Phillips
provides the answer, which is that the
internet is a fertile ground for writers. You just need to know how to
make it work for you... |
|
Our Writing Opportunity this
week is the Wasafiri New Writing Prize open to anyone worldwide who
has not published a complete book for creative submissions in one of
three categories: Poetry, Fiction or Life Writing. |
| 'All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of
their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting
struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never
undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon which one can
neither resist nor understand.' George Orwell in our
Writers' Quotes. |
12 March 2012
| 'With the word’s top children book fair, Bologna, starting on the 19th March,
all eyes are on this lucrative and expanding area of the publishing market. This
is partly because across the world parents have continued to invest in books for
their children and in their children’s education at a time when general
bookselling has been affected by recession. Children’s publishers are subject to
less uncertainty than their adult counterparts and can continue to invest in the
long term.' News Review reports. |
|
The
2011 Diagram Prize - Now's your chance to catch up with this
year's shortlist of six barmy titles, and to go to the Bookseller's site to cast
your own vote. Ranging from Mr Andoh's Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a
Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge to Estonian Sock Patterns
All Around the World, this is a vintage year. |
| Our Inside Publishing
series provides a helpful introduction to publishing for
authors. This extremely useful 19-part series has been
revised to take account of changes in the publishing world.
Advances and royalties,
The Relationship between agents and
publishers, Subsidiary rights,
The English-speaking publishing
world, The Marketing
department and The Financial
relationship between writers and publishers can all be found on the
site. |
| 'I can't do fantasy. When I read C S Lewis I just
don't get it. I can walk into the cupboard but I can't walk out of it into the
snow. I like historical facts, evidence, real stories. There are so many
vampires now, there is a lot of dross as well as good stuff. But take J K
Rowling or Philip Pullman, it is amazing what these people have done... Michael Morpurgo, author of
War Horse,
in The Times, quoted in our Comment column. |
|
British
Library Web Archive -
We feel very honoured that the British Library asked to archive www.writersservices.com
in its web archive. It was initially archived on 15 October 2009 and has
been updated at six-monthly intervals ever since. |
| ‘That’s the thing about a film script. It doesn’t
matter how much of your heart and soul you put into it, it’s still an
instruction manual, and if someone doesn’t make it, it doesn’t have a
purpose.’ David Nicholls in our
Writers' Quotes. |
5 March 2012
| 'This week’s there’s an interesting story from the US
about writer Kate Alcott, whose first novel The Dressmaker has just sold
35,000 copies in hardback and been sold for translation in five countries...
But, as News Review explains, Kate Alcott was actually a pseudonym and her
story shows why new authors may have an advantage over previously published ones.
|
| Links to stories of the
week - Our new feature links to interesting blogs or
articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on
in the book world. This week, it's all about Amazon: How to counter Amazon: Create a one-World
Book Alliance - A global answer to Amazon and Amazon, Innovation, and the Rewards of the
Free Market from the US Authors' Guild. |
| Are you having a problem with
Making
Submissions? Here is our page on
Your
submission package and we can also help with our
Submission Critique service. You could also think about having a report,
our Editor's Report will help you with a professional editorial assessment
of your work. |
| 'How could the author who had cut out ALL the
middle-men with the invention of Pottermore, jump back onto the ship she
appeared to have left aground? The answer is relatively simple, but one often
neglected in a world of Kindle-mania. Rowling wants the new book to be a
success: and success is not just measured in units sold...' Philip Jones, Futurebook, the Bookseller, quoted in
our Comment column. |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is the MsLexia Women's Short Story Competition, open to women all
over the world and closing on 19 March. |
| Bob's Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer
offers entertaining insights into the life of an aspiring writer. It's a WritersServices exclusive and you can go back to
the
start in 2001 and right through to its
end in
December 2007, when he reflected: 'Still haven’t broken through
my writer’s block. No longer even sure I want to. Why write? What’s writing
for? Have absolutely no idea. How can one add anything worthwhile to the
work of writers like Oscar Wilde? Yet the internet grows more vast by the
minute with the words of the millions who are certain their opinions are
worth airing.' |
| 'Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of
poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight
of prose.' Walter Savage Landor in our
Writers' Quotes. |
27 February 2012
| Links to
stories of the week - our new feature
links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep
you up to date with what's going on in the book world. This week: the
new website of the Crime Readers’
Association, David Nichols in the Independent,
The death of chick lit
and Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book. |
| 'The publishing world has been electrified by the news that J K
Rowling has written her first adult novel and it is expected to be published
later this year, although there’s no title or date yet. Some observers have
always felt that Rowling would produce another book. She does after all give
every appearance of being a compulsive writer, the kind of author who always
has plots running round her head.' News
Review on this week's hot news. |
| Publicising
your book - gaining publicity is one of the biggest hurdles a new fiction or non-fiction
writer faces. After all, without it, no-one will even know your book exists.
In this article, media agent Alison Smith-Squire offers some top tips. |
| Do you enjoy reading what authors have had to say about the writing
life? Our fantastic current series of
Writers Quotes is accompanied by
More Writers' Quotes and
Even more Writers' Quotes, a
feast of interesting and often amusing quotes. |
| 'We are not seeing a migration from print to digital reading among
young people, we are seeing reading falling in overall popularity as a
leisure activity. We know that viewing video online is becoming more popular
for all internet users than reading text. Reading itself is being squeezed.'
Jonathan Douglas, Director of the UK National Literacy Trust, in his
blog, quoted in our Comment column. |
| We're proud of the good things writers have said about our site and have
collected them together on an Endorsements
page. |
| 'Eight hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, that's the
only way I know how to do it.' Philip Roth in our
Writers' Quotes. |
20 February 2012
| 'World Book Day and World Book Night get the Wow! factor.
World Book Day and Night are approaching fast. This
year it’s going to become more of an international set of events, and some it
will be available online. It's a fantastic line-up on 1 March and 23 April.'
News Review looks at the
exciting new plans. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look
at our 18 Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing
and
what we call Manuscript
Polishing - getting your manuscript ready for publication if you are not
a native English speaker and need some help to get it right. |
| 'In November I'll start to think about the next book.
In January I'll begin writing it, deliver it in June, in July it'll be edited,
August is the holidays. September I'll start doing pre-publication interviews,
it'll come out in October and I'll' go on the road again. It's like working
on a production line, there's not an awful lot of time to sit around chewing the
fat with Salman Rushdie, even if he wanted to...' Ian Rankin, author of
The Impossible Dead in
the Independent on Sunday, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| There's just time to enter this week's
Writing Opportunity, the
Cardiff International Poetry
Competition. The first prize is £5,000 and it closes on 2 February. |
| Set up your
own blog 'In order to be in the best position to promote
yourself and your writing, it’s well worth setting up a blog. In case you find
this idea a bit alien, here’s why you should take the trouble to do this. A blog offers you the
opportunity to start building an audience for your work and the chance to
experiment with writing about yourself and with different kinds of writing.
Many successful writers’ blogs start with a small readership of family and
friends, but build a good audience over the years. Relax and just write what
comes naturally, it makes sense for your blog to be more informal, more personal
than a standard piece of non-fiction writing and more lively than a slice of
autobiography, as there are no conventions that go with it.' |
| 'Any
magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a
witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make
such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows
the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.'
H P Lovecraft in our Writers' Quotes. |
13 February 2012
| 'I think the short story's a bit of a bisexual - it takes from prose
what's great about prose, the wide-angle lens and the interest in psychology
and character. And then it takes from poetry the distillation of language
and the complete ease at using metaphors and images and motifs...'
Jackie Kay in The Poetry Paper, quoted in our
Comment column. Don't miss our
lively series of comments from writers and others in the book world. |
|
Help get your book ready for
publication with an editorial service Marti Norberg, who has worked as a reporter and
managing editor for several Colorado newspapers, advises on how to use an
editorial service
(such as WritersServices)
to get your book ready. |
| 'Hugely successful self-published author Amanda
Hocking has grabbed the headlines again with her decision not to go with
Amazon’s new publishing venture, in spite of their offer of a higher advance,
but to stick with St Martin’s Press, which she felt would be better able to get
her books into bookshops. This deal was for her new four-book series
Watersong, with the first title, Wake, to be published this autumn.'
News
Review reports. |
| Tips for Writers
is our 8-part 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
and Submission to publishers and agents. |
| 'Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man
more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to
be read.' Lord Chesterfield in our
Writers' Quotes. |
30 January 2012
| 'There’s been an interesting discussion this week
sparked off by an article in Publishing Perspectives about why an editor
who has been working at a senior level in a publishing house would want to
become a literary agent in order to spend more time working on authors’
manuscripts. The editor in question is Rebecca Carter of Harvill
Secker and before that of Chatto & Windus, both highly-regarded imprints of
Random House UK.' News Review investigates. |
| Does your manuscript need
Copy
editing?
Our new page on
Getting your manuscript copy edited
provides a useful overview and clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two versions of your copy edited manuscript,
one
showing the editor's changes in 'track changes' and one with the changes
accepted. If you're not a native English speaker, you might be
interested in our Manuscript
Polishing service, which helps you make sure that your written
English is correct. |
| John Jenkins' January column
'Why is that even some successful authors find that writing a synopsis is a
difficult task? Perhaps because they want to employ too much of their
imagination and command of the English language. For beginners the problem
seems to be one of confusion as they fail to appreciate the differences between
a review, a biography and something to sell the book to a publisher or agent...' |
| 'To the Society of Authors, the arguments in favour of higher
royalties on e-books seem as unanswerable as they have ever been. We feel
that the starting rate for an unenhanced book, including academic texts,
should be at least 30% - and that where enhanced e-books are being
published, the royalty rate should be negotiated to reflect the degree of
additional costs and work involved. Where the deal is exclusively for an
e-book, and no advance is being paid, the royalties should start at a
minimum of 50% and be valid either for a period of some three years, or else
permit the author to terminate the agreement. Tom Holland, retiring
chair of the UK Society of Authors in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
Rotten
Rejections lists the famous writers who had their work rejected:
The Diary of Anne Frank (‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have
a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the
“curiosity” level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which
was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell
about 25 million copies) was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about
an artist.’ |
| 'It is true that publishers try to stop me from writing anything but
mysteries, but whenever they do, I go to another publisher. And they know I'm
going to do that, so they have to make some kind of room for me.' Walter
Mosley in our Writers' Quotes. |
26 January 2012
| 'The New Year has started with a mass of news from the ebook front,
where things are really moving very fast. In the States ebook sales surged
after Christmas. In the UK the figures show that more than one million
ereaders and more than half a million tablet devices were received as gifts
over Christmas, with Amazon and Apple the leading suppliers of e-readers and
tablets respectively. One in 40 adults received a Kindle for Christmas.'
News Review. |
|
Success story
- with the publication of Inheritance, Christopher Paolini brought to a
triumphant conclusion his epic sequence. In the UK this book had a first
week sale of 76,000 copies and the series as a whole has sold 1.2 million
books to date in the UK. It had a first printing of 2.5 million in the US.
Not only have the books been translated in 49 countries but total sales
for the first three books in the series have been 25 million copies
worldwide. |
| |
| 'I believe that the iron grip that large publishers
and their marketing partners have had on readers’ attention since the 1990s has
slipped quite a bit with the arrival of online retailers and opinion-makers.'
Fred Ramey in Psychology Today, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| |
|
Do you find it difficult to get started on your
writing? Is it always easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that
novel/embarking on the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer
from procrastination. Chris Holifield shows you how to overcome the
temptation to pause or stop writing in
'Don't procrastinate'. |
| 'The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is
very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet
shelf at home.' John Campbell in our
Writers' Quotes. |
'The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very
simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet
shelf at home.' John Campbell in our
Writers' Quotes.
28 November 2011
| 'A review of the UK children’s publishing scene by
Caroline Horn in this week’s Bookseller provides an interesting picture
of a part of the publishing business which is in pretty good shape. There is a
strong feeling in the trade that the focus has shifted to bestsellers,
bestselling authors and brand-name series. This makes it hard for new authors to
get a sympathetic view taken of their work. The view is that nobody is
interested in unknowns unless they are likely to be instant bestseller material.'
News Review takes a look. |
| Are you having a problem with
Making
Submissions? Here is our page on
Your
submission package and we can also help with our
Submission Critique service. You could also think about having a report,
our Editor's Report will help you with a professional editorial assessment
of your work. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is the Commonwealth Prize short Story Competition, open to unpublished
writers throughout the Commonwealth, but closing on 30 November, so hurry
if you want to enter. |
| Chas Jones looks at the tricky subject of
Defamation ,
the defences against it, defamation and free speech, and how it works in
different parts of the world. It's all too easy to defame someone, so authors
should be wary about the risks. |
| 'We've arrived at this place where we just
thoughtlessly plunge towards whatever the thing is that will allow us to make
less of an effort. We know we're diminishing experience. We know that
it was richer to walk to the store, talk to the bookseller, maybe meet your
neighbour than it is to click online. But we can't stop ourselves...' Nicole Krauss, author of
Great House,
in the Observer, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| 'The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and
outlives the majority of human passions.' T S Eliot in our
Writers' Quotes. |
21 November 2011
|
John Jenkins' November column:
What kind of a free Press do we writers want? A totally
free Press left with its own self-governing body for standards of behaviour?
Or a Press without any restrictions other than the existing laws of libel?
Or a Press subject to government and legal censorship? |
| ‘The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat
connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the
moment that you need them...' Dennis Lehane, author of Moonlight Mile
in The Independent on Sunday, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Are you looking for feedback on
your work and constructive professional advice on how to improve it? Our
services may be able to help. To produce an
Editor's Report our editor will look at content, style and storyline, and
give an assessment of your chances of getting your work published. Alternatively
there are 17
other editorial services. |
| 'Many of us who have worked in the publishing
business have long expected hardbacks to be superseded by paperbacks. But over
the years hardbacks have been surprisingly durable in their grip on the
book-buyer, with various come-backs affecting how much they are produced. Although it’s obviously going against normal pricing
rules, the more expensive hardback edition survives partly because of the gift
market and partly because readers don’t want to wait to read their favourite
novelist. But why not publish that novel straight into paperback?
News Review muses on the latest
trend. |
| Sell, don't tell: 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 some
pretty strict ‘rules’ which you need to follow if you are to maximise your
chance of success. Read Chas
Jones' two part article. |
| 'I am never indifferent, and never pretend to be, to what people say
or think of my books. They are my children, and I like to have them liked.'
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in our
Writers' Quotes. |
14 November 2011
| 'Certain genre areas of fiction publishing seem to
be coming into their own in a big way at the moment, which is good news if
that’s the area you write in. Science fiction and fantasy are particularly
popular. Last month major SFF author Terry Pratchett’s new novel became the
fastest selling adult hardback novel by a British novelist since records
began, selling no less than 31,094 copies in its first full week... News Review
looks at the boom in genre publishing. |
| Don't procrastinate!
- 'Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always
easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on
the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from
procrastination.'
Chris Holifield looks at how to get yourself going. |
| What does it take to
market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today?
Joanne Phillips
provides the answer, which is that the
internet is a fertile ground for writers. You just need to know how to
make it work for you... |
| Our Contract vetting
service may be just what you need if you've got an agreement with a
publisher but are now faced with dealing with the contract. Our
contracts expert can advise and help you make sure you get a good deal. |
| 'Books have always been defined by
their physical presence. Those under 50,000 words do not give customers
value for money, books much over 200,000 words are cumbersome to read
and prohibitively expensive to produce. Ebooks make those rules
redundant. Piers Blofeld, agent at Sheil Land, in the Bookseller,
quoted in our Comment column. |
| Check out our
review
of How to Market Books if you're planning to publish
your own. |
| 'There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself
an index to majority opinion.' George Orwell in our
Writers' Quotes.
|
31 October 2011
| 'Amazon has been much in the news this last week. After the
announcement of it first big purchase for its new publishing arm at the
Frankfurt Book Fair, which sent tremors through the publishing world, it is
now consolidating its position on e-books. The deal in question may have
garnered the book for Amazon because of the high ebook royalty offered. But the question is going to be whether the company can get the book into
the book trade – or will Amazon sales be enough?'
News Review reports. |
|
Success story
- Darren Shan’s first book, Ayuamarca,
was published in 1999 by Orion and didn’t have much impact. The sequel, Hell's Horizon, sold fewer copies than the first. But in January 2000, Shan
released Cirque du Freak, the first book of The Saga of Darren Shan series in
the UK and Ireland and this was the beginning of his tremendous success and as
a YA
(and, more recently, adult) horror writer. |
|
The latest
addition to our fictionalised stories
about our services - how Alison used our children's editorial services
to get her magic unicorn story right. Plus how an
Editor's Report helped
Catherine, How
Copy editing turned
Tony's
work into a publishable manuscript, how
Makito benefited from
Manuscript Polishing to get his PhD into
shape, Self-publishing helped promote
Annie's
cake business and how Manuscript Typing helped John to get
his father's wartime diary into
good shape for publication. |
| 'There's just too much stress on authors. The business model seems to be
that publishers want a book a year. I wanted to spend time on my novels, but
that isn't economically viable...' Steph Swainston, fantasy author, who is
abandoning writing to become a chemistry teacher, in the Independent on
Sunday, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| For Creative writing tutors and their students there's a mass of
useful information on the site, which we are very happy for you to print
out, with due acknowledgement, please. You can find this in the listing
under Advice for Writers, but we'd specially recommend our 7-part
series Tips for Writers, Our
Categories series, about Writing Crime,
Science Fiction and
Fantasy,
Memoir and Autobiography
and so on, our recently updated series
Latest Changes in the Book Trade
and the Inside Publishing series. |
| 'If booksellers wanted to be millionaires, they'd be in another line of
business.' Godfrey Smith, in our
Writers' Quotes. |
24 October 2011
| 'There is an increasing trend for older people to write their own
memoir and then to self-publish it, sometimes in a nice gift edition. For
many people looking back over their lives, the motivation for this is to set
it all down for the family, particularly the grand-children, so that the
story of their lives will not be lost but can be passed down through the
generations. To have a handsome volume to give to your relatives is one
thing, but for your own personal slice of family history to be preserved for
the future is also a great motivator.' News Review
looks at the trend. |
| The very strong shortlist for the
2011 T S
Eliot Prize for Poetry has just been announced this week, together with new
three-year support from Aurum Funds. |
| 'Peter (Kravitz - her editor) said to me, I'll give you money for this. It
had never occurred to me that anyone would give you money for writing: I thought
writers were wealthy people who just wrote things out of the goodness of their
heart and gave them as gifts. Janice Galloway, author of All Made Up,
in the Guardian, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| Does your manuscript need
Copy
editing?
Our new page on
Getting your manuscript copy edited
provides a useful overview and clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two versions of your copy edited manuscript,
one
showing the editor's changes in 'track changes' and one with the changes
accepted. |
| Author David Balderstone from Melbourne suggests how to use the two
versions: "I studied the version with track change suggestions closely,
learnt a lot, and fully realised how much editing work was involved. Then I read
the version with track changes accepted very carefully." |
| Our latest Writing Opportunity is
National Novel Writing Month: Write Your Novel Online, an online support group
for novelists. Here's your chance to join in , as 200,000 people worldwide did last November, completing the recommended 1,700 words a day (50,000
by the month's end). Starts 1 November. |
| 'In the same way that a woman becomes a
prostitute. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my
friends, and finally I did it for money.' Ferenc Molnair, on being asked how he became a writer,
in our Writers' Quotes. |
17 October 2011
|
|
‘On the surface, there is little to
distinguish this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair from any other but beneath the
frantic meetings, crowded aisles and over-priced hotels the subtle shades of
digital are stealing across the landscape… a new global market in
English-language e-books is fast developing as the growing number of
English-speaking readers worldwide opt to buy the cheaper English variant
instead of the more expensive local-language product,’ says Publishing
Perspectives Editor-in-Chief Ed Nawotka. News Review at the Frankfurt
Book Fair. |
|
|
There's still time to enter the
National
Poetry Competition, with the closing date of 31 October, but you
need to get your skates on. |
|
|
Our checklist on
Entering competitions
helps you to review how you approach
competitions. |
|
|
'Here’s the flat truth of it, my friends:
If you
are a midlist writer and you sign a traditional publishing contract with most
modern terms, and you do so with an agent—and not an IP attorney—negotiating for
you, you will not make any more than your advance on that book. And the
advance is not enough to live on. Kristine Kathryn Rusch in our
Comment column. |
|
|
The Slush-pile -
advice from an editor on how to get through it. |
|
|
Latest
changes in the book trade 7: in the last part of this series, Chris Holifield
looks at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses
might transform authors' capacity to the license use of their books for
all sorts of purposes. |
|
|
The rest of the series covers
Bookselling,
Publishing,
Print on Demand and the
Long Tail, Self-publishing - career
suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences
and Copyright. |
|
|
'It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit
brilliantly.'
C J Cherryh in our
Writers'
Quotes. |
10 October 2011
| 'The Historical Writers’ Association, which we
reported on last year, seems to have marked the coming of age of the genre of
historical fiction... It is strange
how genres come and go, with no obvious explanation, although sometimes the
success of one or two books can have a knock-on effect, reviving the market for
other similar books. News Review
reports. |
| John Jenkins' October
column - did you know – as you sit at your
state-of-the-art computer – that Qwerty has been going virtually unchanged for
around 140 years? Not many such useful inventions last that long without some
idiot trying to change them.
It’s a classic case of -- it works don’t fix it. These letters are now fixed
into the brains of millions of users and operate on millions of computers across
the world. |
| Our list of
Picture Libraries continues to
grow and is one of the best on the web, so have a look if you want to
source some photos for your book. |
| 'Here’s the flat truth of it, my friends: If you are a midlist writer
and you sign a traditional publishing contract with most modern terms, and
you do so with an agent—and not an IP attorney—negotiating for you, you will
not make any more than your advance on that book. And the advance is not
enough to live on.' Kristine Kathryn Rusch quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Check out
Advice for Writers
for links to over 65 useful pages on the site.
Some of the latest are are
The Ins and Outs of Indexing,
Sell,
don't tell - a two-part article on how to pitch your script,How
to market your writing services online,
Writing for the web,
Top Ten
Tips
for nonfiction writers,
Choosing a Service,
Getting your manuscript copy edited and
Getting your poetry published. |
| 'The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that
you can never lack occasions for poems.' J W Goethe in our fantastic
Writers' Quotes. |
26 September 2011
|
'A new
Harris poll has revealed that the number of Americans reading ebooks has
doubled in the last year. One in six Americans who do not have an ebook
reader are planning to buy one in the next year.'
News Review
reports on the latest developments in ebooks. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is Myriad Editions Graphic Novel Competition, open to all and with with
an entry fee of £10. It closes on 1 October though, so better get your entry
in quickly! |
| Does your manuscript need
Copy
editing? Do you know the difference between
copy
editing and proof-reading? Divided by a common language? - are you
wondering about the difference between
American and British copy editing?
Our new page on
Getting your manuscript copy edited
provides a useful overview and clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two versions of your copy edited manuscript,
one
showing the editor's changes in 'track changes' and one with the changes
accepted. |
| ‘The next time you parachute a non-editor into a commissioning role,
take your best real editor and promote them to - let’s call it - Structural
Editor and pay them most of what you are going to pay the commissioning
editor in lieu of the kudos (and the rest of the salary); let them work hand
in hand with the commissioning editor and take care of the editorial work
that the commissioning editor isn’t really qualified to do.' Advice to
publishers from Stephen Guise, former editor at Mitchell Beazley, Cassell
and at Little, Brown, quoted in our Comment column. |
| So you want to write historical
fiction? Your timing is good, because historical fiction is fashionable
again after many years in the doldrums. In fact it’s so popular that it has
virtually reinvented itself as a category...' The latest article in
Chris Holifield's Categories series explores the market and approaches
to Writing Historical Fiction.
|
| Other articles in the series cover
Writing Romance,
Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy,
Writing Crime Fiction
and Writing Non-fiction. |
| 'If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you
have the odds in your favor.' Edgar Rice Burroughs, in our
Writers' Quotes. |
19 September 2011
| 'Last week saw the unusual spectacle of an author leaving her publisher
because she thought the covers they put on her new book were inappropriate.
Polly Courtney said the image was too racy – and she wanted her novel to be
taken more seriously. 'News Review reports. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is the Mills & Boon New Voices competition, which has publication by the
publisher as one prize. But you need to hurry as the open stage closes on 10
October.
Also, visit the website to assess and score the submissions. |
| Don't procrastinate!
- 'Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always
easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on
the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from
procrastination.'
Chris Holifield looks at how to get yourself going. |
| Screenplay assessment
fictionalised story - 'Sarah had always been fascinated by the
cinema. As a little girl going to see a film was her favourite treat and
she was also interested in how movies got to be made. Her own favourites
were the films with really good stories, like Titantic and Avatar, but she also liked the ones which were based on books, like
Lord of the Rings and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...'
Our fictionalised stories of
how our services have helped writers give you some idea of what they can
do. |
| 'One child in Edinburgh asked me who my main competitors were. If Julia
Donaldson didn't exist and her books didn't exist, then I wouldn't have the
readers. If I didn't exist then Anthony Horowitz and Jo Rowling wouldn't have
their readers. Children need lots of different books. Adult writers are a lot
more competitive, but with children you need this vast amount... Francesca
Simon, author of the Horrid Henry books, in the
Independent on Sunday, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Is your progress as a writer stymied by the fact that you have old
typewritten or even handwritten manuscripts that you can't face retyping
onto a computer? Our Typing service
can help with this. |
| 'The long-lived books of tomorrow are concealed somewhere amongst the
so-far unpublished MSS of today.' Philip Unwin in our
Writers' Quotes.
|
5 September 2011
|
|
John Jenkins' September column:
'Every biography begins with a single
sentence - 'Have you ever fancied writing your life story?
There
is always a market for biographies. Your story is equally exciting – a piece of
social history, fascinating to your family and perhaps a wider audience if you
go about it in the right way.' |
|
|
'The big debate for anyone at the moment is where
does publishing provide value? What is our role? In my view what we do is we
select, we nurture, we position, we promote, we leverage - but author care,
editorial expertise, design excellence - those things are absolutely critical...
Tom Weldon,
CEO of Penguin UK in the Bookseller,
quoted in our Comment column. |
|
|
We're very sad to announce the death last week of Mike Legat,
distinguished paperback publisher and author of our
Factsheets, as well as twelve books
on writing. Mike helped us in the early days of the site by producing this
series of succinct and authoritative short articles. His factsheets range from
Write about
What You Know to
The Qualities
that Make a Writer, from
What Do
Publishers Want? to
Useful
Techniques for the Novelist and much else. |
|
|
'Following an appeal by two female customers from Tonbridge in the
English county of Kent, the bookseller W H Smith has agreed to remove all
references to ‘women’s fiction’ in its shops from October. The two women,
Clare Leigh and Julia Gillick, complained that the women’s fiction section
was ’very light, with lots of pink fluffiness’ and there were no classic
authors.' What price women's fiction?
News Review reports. |
|
|
Our
Inside Publishing
series consists gives you a clear picture of how publishing
works. This extremely useful 19-part series has recently been
revised to take account of changes in the publishing world.
Advances and royalties,
The Relationship between agents and
publishers, Subsidiary rights,
The English-speaking publishing
world and The Marketing
department have all just been brought up-to-date, and the series
finishes with The Financial
relationship between writers and publishers. |
|
|
'The crown of literature is poetry.. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and
delicacy.' the writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.' Somerset Maugham in our
Writers' Quotes. |
|
|
The September Magazine is ready! |
29 August 2011
| 'The advent of ebooks and consumers’ reluctance to
accept the high price of hardbacks are having an impact on the traditional
relationship between hardback and paperback publication. Traditionally, one year
has been the norm and publishers have stuck to this for many years, in spite
of the growth of sales of paperback editions.'
News Review investigates. |
| Our Writing Opportunity this
week is the Trinity College London International Playwriting Competition,
but it's closing on 1 September so you'll need to get your skates on if
you want to enter. |
|
Publicising
your book - gaining publicity is one of the biggest hurdles a new fiction or non-fiction
writer faces. After all, without it, no-one will even know your book exists.
In this article, media agent Alison Smith-Squire offers some top tips. |
| We're proud of the good things writers have said about our site and have
collected them together on an Endorsements
page. |
| 'The biggest thrill of my life was selling my first
novelette. It was a Western for Argosy magazine in 1951, called
"Trail of the Apaches". I'd done a lot of research about the Apache Indians in
the 1880s and they seemed like ruthless individuals out to raise hell, which
fascinated me...' Elmore Leonard in the Independent on Sunday
in our Comment column. |
| If you want something to lighten your mood, try our
Collection of Clangers to see that the
experts don't always get it right. |
| 'F*** this, I've had enough of
writing. I don't like the book world. I don't like most books,
even. I don't like sitting on my own in a room for hours on end.'
Alex Garland on writing your second novel (which took him nearly ten
years), in our Writers'
Quotes. |
15 August 2011
| 'By encouraging and effectively subsidising the creation and
distribution of so many free apps by providing free distribution, Apple has
given rise to a situation where anything that's not free has to work
incredibly hard to prove its value, and in which consumers feel a tremendous
sense of entitlement to be amused and pandered to for basically next to
nothing... Simon Appleby, Digital Projects Manager for Octopus
Publishing in the Bookseller's Futurebook, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Our Writing Opportunity this week is the first MsLexia Women's Novel
Competition, closing on 31 September. It's open to unpublished women novelists writing in any
genre for adults and the entry fee is £25. |
| Does your manuscript need
Copy
editing? Do you know the difference between
copy
editing and proof-reading? Divided by a common language? - are you
wondering about the difference between
American and British copy editing?
Our new page on
Getting your manuscript copy edited provides a useful overview and
clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two
versions of your copy edited manuscript, one showing the editor's changes in
'track changes' and one with the changes accepted. |
| 'Recently I was rejected utterly by over 500 literary agents and
publishers for the 12th year in a row in an attempt to find representation
or a publisher for 5 novels I have created. In my last attempt, one agent
wrote to say...' Read the latest entry in our
Rotten Rejections. |
| Joanne Phillips' article about
The
Business of Writing is essential reading for any writer.
It really is a business, with invoices to raise,
accounts to be submitted and records to be kept. Writers, like artists, can
find themselves floundering when it comes to the ‘business end’ of the job.
Read this article for our easy-to-follow guide to the business of writing. |
| 'Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was
killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to
keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could
still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of
incest. Do you still want to be a writer - and if so, why?'
Bennett Cerf, Co-founder of Random House, in our
Writers' Quotes.
|
8 August 2011
| John
Jenkins' August column provides a lively and rather cynical view of this
year's Booker shortlist, which has a large number of surprise inclusions. |
| 'Now it’s beginning to look as if World Book Night may shortly become
just that, rather than an aspirational name for the adult version of the
UK’s World Book Day. The United States is to partner the UK, launching World
Book Night in 2012... and 8 more Quick Reads are to come from bestselling
authors.' News Review reports. |
| Do you want to find out how to publish your
work as an ebook? The final article in Chas Jones' series on ebooks is entitled
Selling
and Marketing Your Ebook and covers marketing through Amazon, Google and
Ingrams, being your own supplier, print and payment, and other marketing.
|
| The
first article in the series provides a practical introduction to
Ebook publishing.
The second
article looks at metadata and explains the importance of getting the
metadata right. |
| The third article about ebook publishing deals with
Ebook
conversion and what you should think about before starting your own ebook
conversion, with an overview of the software. The fourth article deals with
Preparing files for e-book conversion. |
| 'I write full-time, it's my job, I
have nothing else to do. I've got no excuse for not writing a book a year...
I have no truck at all with this supposed link between quality and quantity,
tell that to Mozart... I understand that it's not everybody's cup of tea,
but because I come from a performance background, I'm not shy when in comes
to standing up at festivals or in bookshops. Mark Billingham, author of
Good as Dead, interviewed by Alice O'Keeffe in the Bookseller,
and quoted in our
Comment column.. |
| WritersServices editor Kay Gale offers her tips on
Getting
through the Slush-pile, drawing on her own experience as an
editorial assistant reading her way through it. |
| 'When you give someone a book you're giving them the most imaginative of
gifts, because you're taking a personal interest in what interests them.'
W H Smith ad in the Observer, in our
Writers' Quotes. |
1 August 2011
|
|
Our new
Blurb-writing
service is for anyone who is having
difficulty producing their cover of jacket copy and may be especially helpful
for self-publishers. Let our skilled editor/writers do the job for you, so that
you end up with a professional blurb. |
|
|
'American author Bob Mayer had published over 40 books with traditional
publishers before he decided to take things into his own hands and convert his
backlist into ebooks. By January of this year the author of 40 books had reached
a turning-point. After 20 years of writing, he had written himself out of his
last contract. Mayer said: ‘It was a good news, bad news situation. The good
news was for the first time in two decades I could really sit down and think
about what I wanted to write. The bad news is, that in traditional publishing,
an author without a contract is unemployed...’
News Review
on the cutting edge of the ebook revolution. |
|
|
The winner of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction
Contest is Sue Fondrie, an associate
professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin
Oshkosh.
Given
annually since 1982, the competition, sponsored by the English department at
the University, is inspired by the melodramatic first line of Sir Edward
Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford. |
|
|
Self-publish your way through the
recession -
Our article by Chris Holifield, first published
in The Self-Publishing Magazine, looks at what's going on in the
publishing world and why it might make sense to consider self-publishing. |
|
|
Rotten
Rejections
lists the famous writers who had their work rejected:
The Diary of Anne Frank (‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have
a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the
“curiosity” level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which
was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell
about 25 million copies) was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about
an artist.’ |
|
|
'It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of
a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.' Penelope
Lively in our Writers' Quotes.
|
25 July 2011
|
'There have been a series of events on the
bookselling front which may mark a seismic shift. In the States, Borders have
gone into liquidation after what seems like months - or even years - of
teetering on the brink. And in the UK Amazon has swooped on its successful
competitor, The Book Depository, buying out the competition.
News Review
reports. |
| The fourth article in Chas Jones's series showing how to set up your
books as ebooks deals with
Preparing files for e-book conversion. The first article,
A Practical Guide to
Ebook Publishing gives an overview of the whole process. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional
editors, have a look at our
Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Synopsis writing,
Contract Vetting,
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing and our
latest addition,
Indexing. |
| The novelists' task, says Jonathan
Franzen in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven, is: 'To find an adequate
narrative vehicle for the most difficult stuff at the core of me, in the
hope that that might resonate with the reader who otherwise has been
feeling alone with those deep, difficult feelings...' Quoted in our
Comment column. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is the 4th Luke BitmeadWriter's Bursary, in memory of the young
writer who died prematurely, which closes on 31 August. |
| Real Time Web for Old Time Books:
the Benefit of Social Media for Publishers and Authors - Fauzia
Burke explores the online activities you can do in real time -- from status
updates on Facebook, to microblogging on Twitter to uploading photos and
videos on other social media sites. If you want to explore how social
networking can help you market your book, her article provides a
starting-point. |
| 'I have been successful probably because I have always realized that
I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting
story entertainingly.' Edgar Rice Burroughs in our
Writers' Quotes. |
18 July 2011
| John Jenkins' July column
introduces Dr Bernard Lamb's Guarding the Queen's English, which he
can 'recommend to all writers and would be writers, particularly those
bewildered by me and I, who and whom, it’s and its, that and which, who’s and
whose.' |
| 'Do you want to find out how to publish your work as an ebook? This
is something you may be thinking about, in view of the rapid growth in ebook
sales. Many authors are suffering from a big contraction in their earnings.
Midlist authors have found it increasingly difficult to get their books
published by mainstream publishers and may be looking for the the chance to
go it alone with ebook versions of their books.'
News Review investigates. |
| NoViolet Bulawayo from Zimbabwe has won the £10,000
2011
Caine Prize for African
Writing with her short story "Hitting Budapest", published. |
| The third article in Chas Jones's series about ebook
publishing deals with
Ebook
conversion and what you should think about before starting your own ebook
conversion, with an overview of the software. |
| 'Actually, there's hardly a mainstream genre
(fiction, history, children's books, poetry) that's not undergoing significant
change, attributable to the liberation of the new technology, from ebook to
Kindle: poets developing apps, J K Rowling linking Harry Potter to cyberspace,
would-be novelists launching their work as
ebooks.' Robert McCrum in the Observer,
quoted in our Comment column. |
|
Writing
Historical Fiction our revised article on Writing Historical
Fiction brings this subject up to date. Other articles cover
Writing Crime Fiction,
Writing Science Fiction and
Fantasy,
Writing Romance,
Writing Non-fiction
and
Writing Memoir and
Autobiography. |
|
'The best poem is that whose
worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to
those moments of magical accident.'
Dylan Thomas in our
Writers' Quotes. |
11 July 2011
|
|
'It looks as if the campaign against closing libraries in the UK has
just scored a significant victory. Since the Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey,
has failed to intervene to assert the statutory right to a library service,
campaigners all over the country have rallied to challenge the closures
being put in place by local authorities. Up to 500 libraries in the UK are
at risk as a result of the UK government’s current austerity drive.'
News Review reports on the
campaign. |
|
|
This week's
Writing Opportunity
is Wasafiri New Writing in Poetry, Fiction or Life Writing, but hurry
because the closing date is 29 July. |
|
|
Are you writing poetry but finding it difficult to get it published?
Look at our page on
Getting your poetry
published. |
|
|
'When I'm writing a picture book, I automatically think "I don't need
to say that" because the pictures will say it. Or better still, "I'll say
this and the pictures will say that, which contradicts it.' Allan
Ahlberg in the Guardian, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
Michael Legat's Factsheets
are a series of specially commissioned information-packed Factsheets for WritersServices, which cover
the
essentials for writers from a former publisher, novelist and author of 12 books on writing.
For a quick update on
Write
about What You Know,
Literary Agents
or
Shall
I be Famous? Shall I be Rich?, and much more, this is the place
to look. |
|
|
'In an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods
and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.' Harper Lee
in our Writers' Quotes. |
4 July 2011
| 'Rather to the amazement of the publishing world, J
K Rowling, long a bye-word for her loyalty to her agent and publishers, has cut
out her publisher Bloomsbury and set up a new site to sell ebook versions of her
books direct to her readers... Even more surprisingly, Rowling has announced that
she has left her agent of 16 years, Christopher Little,
and moving to a new agency, The Blair Partnership, set up by Neil Blair, the
lawyer who worked with her at the Christopher Little Agency.'
News Review reports on the
latest surprising news. |
|
Ebook publishing
- do you
want to find out how to publish your work as an ebook? Chas Jones's new series
guides you through the process. The first article provides a practical
introduction to ebook publishing. |
|
The second article looks at metadata and explains the importance of getting
the metadata right. |
| Our fictionalised stories about our services help to show how they
might help. Find out how an Editor's Report helped
Catherine, How
Copy editing turned
Tony's
work into a publishable manuscript, how
Makito benefited from
Manuscript Polishing to get his PhD into
shape, how Self-publishing helped promote
Annie's
cake business and how Manuscript Typing helped John to get
his father's wartime diary
ready for publication. |
| 'I always say "Please edit me", because
I don't want to write those big, flabby books where the writer's making loads of
money and nobody wants to tell them that it's crap. You know who I'm talking
about. You have to take your ego out of it and say, do I want people to be
obsequious to me or do I want to write good books?' Denise Mina, author of
The End of the Wasp Season, in the Independent on Sunday,
quoted in
our Comment column. |
| Have you looked at our Problem Page? You can
send in your own problem to us, but
this one is pretty interesting because it's about problems with finding
an agent. |
| 'Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon
the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever
so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.' Virginia
Woolf in our Writers' Quotes.
|
27 June 2011
| Update to our links - our 23 lists of
recommended links have just been updated with many new links to sites of special
interest to writers. these range from
Writers Online
Services to Picture libraries
and from Software for writers to
Writers Magazines & Sites. |
| 'The British Library and Google have just announced a partnership to digitise
250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s collections. Opening up access
to one of the greatest collections of books in the world, this demonstrates the
Library’s commitment to increase access to anyone who wants to do research.'
News Review reports. |
| Have you followed Eastenders with interest and always thought about
being a TV scriptwriter? Bob's Journal of
a Virtually Unpublished Writer covers the period when he wrote for EastEnders and very revealing it is too. Try
Wednesday 9 February 2005:
'86-page planning document arrives from Elstree.
Undoubtedly happy to be writing another episode; only hope I have more
control over it than I had over last one...' |
| And here's a recommendation
from Bob's fellow EastEnders script-writer
Pippa McCarthy: 'Just discovered
your web page... I've just
spent the last hour crying with laughter with periodic yelps of 'been
there!'... I'm going to make my entire family read your diary. Then perhaps
will understand own bizarre behaviour every time I start a script...
Anyway, will shut up now but just wanted to say you have cheered me up no
end. It's brilliant.' |
| We're proud of the good things writers have said about our site and have
collected them together on an Endorsements
page. |
| 'Although it is hard for many of us to emotionally detach ourselves from
the book as an incredible medium, what with all its historical contributions to
humanity, we must admit that the concept of the book as the best delivery system
for knowledge and information is, in fact, dead.' Julius Wiedemann of
Taschen, in the Huffington Post, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| 'If you have other things in your life - family, friends, good productive
day work - then these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the
richer.' David Brin in our Writers'
Quotes. |
20 June 2011
| Set up your own blog
- in order to be in the best position to promote yourself and your writing,
it’s well worth setting up a blog. In case you find this idea a bit alien,
here’s why you should take the trouble to do this. A blog offers you the
opportunity to start building an audience for your work and the chance to
experiment with writing about yourself and with different kinds of writing. Many successful writers’ blogs start with a small readership of family and
friends, but build a good audience over the years. |
|
Writing for the web is a particular skill.
Jakob Nielsen’s study has been extracted from to give you a digest of
how to go about this. |
| 'Australia breaks into the international publishing
news less often than it should, but last week government minister Nick Sherry
hit the headlines when he said: ‘I think in five years, other than a few
specialist booksellers in capital cities we will not see a bookstore, they will
cease to exist.’ He believes it is ‘inevitable’ that
online shopping would wipe out general bookstores within five years, leaving
only specialist shops in capital cities.' News Review reports on events down under. |
| Do you want to get your work
copy edited? Our
Copy editing service may be
able to help. There are articles on the site about the difference between
UK and US copy editing, and about the difference between
Copy editing and Proof-reading. |
| This week's Writing opportunity is from the Alan Titmarsh Show and is The People's
Novelist Competition, closing on 1 July, so hurry if you want to enter. |
| 'Writing for television is such a strange world, you
have to write up to 25 episodes of a programme each year and you need to create
a lot of drama. You end up thinking: "Have we done this before and if we
have, will anyone notice?"' John Stephens, author of The Emerald Atlas
in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| 'I can't start writing until I have a closing line.' Joseph
Heller in our Writers Quotes. |
13 June 2011
|
|
John
Jenkins' June column is entitled 'A new chapter for publishers' and deals with the vast changes sweeping through the publishing world as the
ebook rapidly gains a large audience - to his regret. |
|
|
'An article in last week’s Bookseller looks at the long-heralded death of
the mid-list. Discussions about this have been going on as long as anyone in the
business can remember, but this time it really does look as if we’re on to the
last rites. The economics of contemporary publishing dictate that it’s more
efficient for publishers to publish fiction at a higher level and to focus on
new authors, rather than going for the long slow build, as they used to do. This
means a bigger up-front investment in a new author, in terms of both advance and
promotion, to build them into an instant bestseller. The reason for this
seemingly risky strategy on the part of publishers is the way the book trade
will support or not support the author in question.'
News Review investigates. |
|
|
Our latest
Writing Opportunity
is the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, run by the Poetry Society,
the top UK award for young poets aged 11-17. Each year 100 winners are
selected by a team of high profile judges, and receive their awards at an annual
prize-giving event on National Poetry Day. Closing date 31 July 2011. |
|
|
Sell, don't tell: 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 some
pretty strict ‘rules’ which you need to follow if you are to maximise your
chance of success. Read Chas
Jones' two part article. |
|
|
‘A few weeks ago, I was talking to a group of writers online. The
subject was what an author can do for herself if her book isn’t chosen to get
the "big love" from her publisher. We all knew what she meant: each season, it
seems like some books are selected for star treatment — often, but not always,
debut novels — and all the rest are left to take off, or more likely, fade into
obscurity, without much support... ' Lisa Tucker, author of The Promised
World in Publishing Perspectives,
quoted in our Comment column. |
|
|
We're proud of the good things writers have said about our site and have
collected them together on an Endorsements
page. |
|
|
'One of my great surprises when I was in American was about twenty-five
years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the
way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present,
and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack.' Stephen Spender, writing in 1984, in our
Writers' Quotes.
|
|
|
The June Magazine is ready!
|
30 May 2011
| 'Never has there been a time when so much is changing so fast in the
world of books. Seminars and discussion from Book Expo America last week
underlined the way things are going, and it’s a scary prospect for people
who have spent their lives in publishing or bookselling.'
News Review reports on the
scrum. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional
editors, have a look at our
Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Synopsis writing,
Contract Vetting,
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing and our
latest addition,
Indexing. |
| Writing biographies: ‘If you get to hate them you should give up the
book! But it is a bit like being married. You have days when you feel fed up
and days when you feel passionately in love. Dickens did terrible things in
his life. But a good thing about being old is that you’ve seen it, you’ve
done it. You know we all do terrible things… Claire Tomalin, author of
nine biographies, with Charles Dickens : A Life coming later this
year, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| Is a creative writing degree
really worth it? Having completed a creative writing degree, Josh
Spears thought he would become a bestselling writer or at least be able
to get a job. Neither of these has happened, so was it worth it and would he
advise other writers to put themselves through the course? |
| Are you writing poetry but finding it difficult to get it published?
Look at our page on
Getting your poetry
published. |
| 'In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an
experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction,
the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your
reader to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.' Ben Bova in our
Writers' Quotes. |
23 May 2011
| 'Other news stories had to be shelved with the
news on Friday that Waterstone’s has been bought by Russian oligarch
Alexander Mamut’s A&NN Group. Although this negotiation has been a bit long
drawn-out, the news has been well-received and is in contrast to the
situation in the United States, where Borders continues to teeter on the
brink. The troubled HMV group has only raised £53m in the sale, considerably
less than they had originally hoped for.'
News Review on the latest news.
|
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is the Tony Lothian Biographers Club Prize, closing on 11
August and with an entry fee of £10. This presents a good chance for
unpublished biographers. |
| Tips for Writers
is our latest 8-part 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
and Submission to publishers and agents |
| ‘The inevitable disappearance of the vast majority of bookshops will
remove a main marketing channel and will seriously undermine the power of
publishers. It will also increase the scary dominance of Amazon. Book
printers will, sadly, mostly go out of business, and physical books will
become more expensive as a consequence of reduced economies of scale. Public
libraries, as repositories of physical volumes, will disappear...' UK
investor Luke Johnson, former Chairman of Borders UK, in Publishers’
Lunch, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| If this all sounds a bit gloomy, have a look at our
Classic Quotes to cheer yourself
up. |
| Joanne Phillips has written a useful article on
The
Business of Writing: 'Writing is undoubtedly a
creative art. Whether we are working on the next Booker Prize winner or
ghostwriting blog posts, writers need to be original, imaginative and inspired.
But writing is also a business, with invoices to raise, accounts to be
submitted and records to be kept. Writers, like artists, can find themselves
floundering when it comes to the ‘business end’ of the job. Read on for our easy-to-follow guide to the business of
writing...' |
| 'I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote simply
for money. What makes a writer is that he likes writing. Naturally, when he
has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is
a very different thing from writing for money.' P G Wodehouse
in our Writers' Quotes.
|
16 May 2011
| "The shortlist for the £10,000 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing –
the twelfth “African Booker” - has just been announced. Libyan novelist
Hisham Matar, Chair of the judges, said that "choosing a shortlist out of
nearly 130 entries was not an easy task – one made more difficult and yet
more enjoyable by the varied tastes of the judges – but we have arrived at a
list of five stories that excel in quality and ambition. Together they
represent a portrait of today’s African short story: its wit and
intelligence, its concerns and preoccupations.”
News Review reports. |
| Do you find it difficult to get started on your
writing? Is it always easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that
novel/embarking on the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer
from procrastination. Chris Holifield shows you how to overcome the
temptation to pause or stop writing in
'Don't procrastinate'. |
| 'I've always had uneasy loyalties
about the relevance of the term 'work' to the activities I perform every
day, and which occupy the hours when most other people are in fact
"working". I write novels and stories and essays for a living. And while I
fairly mindlessly refer to what I do as "work"... it's hard for me to think
that work is what I really do.' Richard Ford in the Guardian, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is the wonderful 2012 Times/Chicken House Children's
Fiction Prize,closing on 28 October with a prize of a £10,000 advance
plus publication by Chicken House worldwide. |
| Use our
UK, US, Children's
and International agents' listings to find the right agent for your work and
then our pages on Finding
an Agent,
Making submissions and
Your submission package
will help with your submissions. |
| 'Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon
the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever
so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.' Virginia Woolf in our Writers'
Quotes. |
9 May 2011
|
|
'Readers of this column may be tiring of all the talk about ebooks,
but it should be said in our defence that the news has been full of nothing
else for many weeks now. Take comfort however, because in the midst of this
obsessive concentration on digital developments, publishing – and writing –
is still going on as normal... A major trend at present is the increase in
the number of books published.' News
Review looks at the figures. |
|
|
The revision of our
Inside Publishing
series is complete. This extremely useful 19-part series has been
revised to take account of changes in the publishing world.
Advances and royalties,
The Relationship between agents and
publishers, Subsidiary rights,
The English-speaking publishing
world and The Marketing
department have all just been brought up-to-date, and this week we've
finished with The Financial
relationship between writers and publishers. |
|
|
'How do you choose your subject matter? Indeed, do
you choose it or does it choose you? Should you follow the adage "write what you
know", or should a writer engage with the world beyond their back-yard?
How
important is research? Are you "allowed" to write a story that doesn't "belong"
to you, for reasons of race, class, gender and so on? Is it possible to "own"
any story, even the story of your life, given that others who intersect with it
(your parents, your lover) will have a different "truth" to tell?...'
Monica Ali on writing Untold Story, her novel about
Princess Diana, in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
This week's
Writing Opportunity is the
Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition, with a first prize of £5,000,
closing on 10 June. |
|
|
Our 23 lists of
recommended links give access to many sites of interest to writers,
including
Writers
Online Services and
Online resources.
Many new links have been added and please send
us any suggestions. |
|
|
'No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but
most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly
believe their wish has been granted.' W H Auden, in our
Writers' Quotes. |
2 May 2011
| Help get
your book ready for publication with an editorial service
- Marti Norberg, who has worked as a reporter and managing editor for
several Colorado newspapers, advises on how to use an editorial
service (such as WritersServices) to get your book book ready to be published. |
| 'A recent article in Teleread questioned the way publishers bring out
the premium edition, the hardback, and then make readers wait for the mass
market paperback, which is available at a lower price which most people can
afford... But if books are valued down to nothing, or almost nothing, as
they are being right now in the Amazon Kindle store, doesn’t the consumer
get used to the idea that books, like many other things, should be free or
nearly so? And how do writers make an income from their writing if that is
the prevailing view? News Review
reports. |
| Rotten
Rejections lists the famous writers who had their work rejected:
The Diary of Anne Frank (‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special
perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity”
level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which was rejected 16
times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies)
was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about an artist.’ |
| Our checklist on
Entering competitions helps you to review how you approach
competitions and to make sure you give yourself the best possible
chance of winning. |
| 'It's a unique crime, the only one for which we can never make
reparation to the victim. There is an invisible line that the murderer steps
over, and which divides him from or her forever from the rest of us. Murder
is an extraordinary act. PD James on murder in the Sunday Telegraph, in
our Comment column. |
| Our list of picture libraries
is a good place to start if you're looking to source pictures for
your book. |
| 'There is no such thing as moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written, or badly written. That is all.' Oscar Wilde in our
Writers' Quotes. |
| Our May Magazine is ready! |
18 April 2011
|
|
Getting your manuscript copy edited
- if you are
looking for copy editing online, it is difficult to ensure that you are getting
a professional copy editor who will do a good job on your manuscript.
WritersServices has now made its copy editing
service unique, as it will offer as standard TWO versions of your script, one
prepared using 'track changes' and one with all the changes accepted.
|
|
|
Our Copy editing service
can help if you are interested in getting your book copy edited. If you're
not sure what this entails, this article may clarify it -
Copy editing and Proof-reading.
If you are concerned about getting English English or
American English, our article on
American copy editing
is worth a look. |
|
|
'The two big spring book fairs in Europe, Bologna and London, have
both gone rather well, with packed aisles and a lot of solid business being
done. This is all the more surprising because the book business
internationally is in something of a crisis. The two big English language
markets are both down on book sales, the UK by 3% and the US by a worrying
9%. Although sales of ebooks are growing, especially in the States, this is
not yet compensating for the lost print sales.'
News Review reports. |
|
|
The
Historical Writers' Association
has been set up by novelist Manda Scott as a forum for writers and to
promote the genre. The internet-based group already boasts around 100
members including authors, agents and editors, and is open to writers of
historical fiction and non-fiction. |
|
|
'We're in the early stages of a whole new era. The
last time something this important happened was when Gutenberg introduced modern
book printing to the world. That revolution helped books spread to more corners
of the planet than ever before. This revolution will take them even further,
faster, and I'm absolutely thrilled to climb on board and be a part of it. Viva
e-books! Viva The Word!!' Darren Shan, in
Futurebook,
quoted in our Comment column.
|
|
|
'And as to experience--well, think how little some good poets have
had, or how much some bad ones have.' Elizabeth Bishop in our
Writers' Quotes. |
11 April 2011
| 'Self-publishing has been much in the news recently,
with bestselling self-publisher Amanda Hocking deciding to sign up with a
publisher, whilst author Barry Eisler has decided to continue self-publishing in
spite of receiving a big offer.' News Review
looks at the pros and cons of
going it alone or signing up with a publisher. |
|
John Jenkins' April column - Ideas for stories
begin in many different places: a snatch of dialogue, a character, a title,
sometimes from a news fragment from TV or newspapers. Whatever the start point, the crucial question – whether from Aristotle to
Shakespeare or Sam Goldwyn to Stephen Spielberg is:
What’s the big idea? |
| Thinking about subscribing to a writers' magazine?
Our Magazine Reviews offer a
unique service, guiding you through what's available for writers: Writers' News, Mslexia, Writers' Forum, Writer's Digest, Scriptwriter
and Self-Publishing Magazine. |
| 'Pay a fair price, e-whingers: Talent and experience should cost a
just amount of money in a commercial marketplace. Professionals deserve a
fair reward. This whingeing, petty, adolescent sense of entitlement to
culture and entertainment for free has almost proved the death of recorded
music. It must not happen with books.’ Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor, in
the Independent, in our Comment
column. |
|
Online advertising for writers
- Chas Jones looks at how writers can
benefit from using the web as an advertising medium, including using
Google ads and display ads to promote your book online. |
| 'It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing,
but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.' Robert
Benchley in our Writers' Quotes. |
4 April 2011
| Poetry
Book Society fights Arts Council England funding withdrawal -
the tiny Poetry Book Society is fighting back against the
Art's Council's shocking decision to remove its funding completely in one
year's time. Carol Ann Duffy, the UK Poet Laureate, was widely quoted in
the press last week: "This news goes beyond shocking and touches the
realms of the disgusting. The PBS was established by T S Eliot in 1953 and
is one of poetry's most sacred churches with an influence and reach far
beyond its membership. This fatal cut is a national shame and a scandal and
I urge everyone who cares about poetry to join the PBS as a matter of
urgency." |
| Have you looked at our very useful
Printing and Publishing Glossary? |
| 'The recent Books and Consumers conference showed some surprising
trends in British book-buying, which is catching up on the US as regards
e-books. Ebook sales, whilst much talked-about, were still only 1% of
the total in 2011. But Kelly Gallagher, Vice President Publishing
Services of PubTrack Bowker, observed that in the US ebook sales had
enjoyed a "hockey stick" moment, with a steep rise in sales once devices
had become prevalent. News Review
at the Books and Consumers conference. |
|
Become a biographer - Chas Jones looks at why you might decide
to become a biographer,
covering searching out the right subject, dealing with celebrity and
whether you should make your book fact or fiction, footnote of
history or a piece of literature. |
| Also on the site are
Writing a biography or autobiography and
Writing Memoir or Autobiography. |
| Our latest Writing Opportunity
is for young writers aged 16-18 and living in the UK. Could you be the
next John le Carre? Write a short story and find out but hurry as you
need to get it in by 14 April. |
| '"Consider the nature of what happens when we read
a book... in private, unsupervised, unspied-on, alone. It isn’t like a lecture;
it’s like a conversation. There’s a back-and-forthness about it. The book
proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We
bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities,
and our own limitations too, our own experience of reading, our own temperament,
our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter."' Anthony Horowitz quoting Philip Pullman
in our Comment column. |
| 'Sleep on your writing: take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a
morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in
your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend,
if he be an author especially.' Amos Bronson Alcott in our
Writers' Quotes. |
28 March 2011
| 'In a stunning final judgement,
Judge Denny Chin has this week rejected the Google Book Settlement, some 13
months after its final fairness hearing, saying: "In the end, I conclude
that the [Settlement Agreement] is not fair, adequate, and reasonable." Chin
suggested his concerns with the agreement could be overcome with one simple
change. "As the United States and other objectors have noted, many of the
concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA were
converted from an opt-out settlement to an opt-in settlement. I urge the
parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly."
News Review on the Google
Settlement. |
| The National Poetry
Competition winner is announced and you can read his stunning poem
here. |
| An Editor's Advice is a useful series is based on the
advice Maureen Kincaid Speller, a long-serving WritersServices
freelance editor, has given writers over the years. The series
covers
Dialogue,
doing further drafts,
genre writing,
planning,
points of view,
autobiography and travel
and
manuscript presentation. |
| ‘Very often I'm brought to a halt by some ridiculous mistake that
hasn't been picked up by an editor, which makes me think there can't be much
line-by-line editing going on in publishing houses these days. I don't know
that it matters all that much. It makes a lot of people absolutely furious
so they can hardly enjoy reading. But for me if what is being said comes
clearly across that's what matters. It is a bit pedantic to fuss too much
about the editing of detail. On the other hand, it does offend my personal
instincts, having been trained in the old-fashioned ways, which meant our
texts should be perfect.' Diana Athill, author of Somewhere Towards
the End in the Guardian, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| The winner of the second Ted
Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry has also been announced this
week. The £5,000 prize is donated by Carol Ann Duffy, funded from
the annual honorarium the Poet Laureate traditionally receives from HM The
Queen. The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry seeks to recognise
excellence in poetry, highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets
to our cultural life. |
| Do you want to make a
Table of Contents for your
non-fiction book? It looks good to provide one,
especially when you prepare a large document. It is remarkably easy to get a
professional-looking table which is generated for you by the software. Chas Jones shows you how. |
| 'The more a man writes, the more he can write.' William Hazlitt in
our Writers' Quotes. |
7 March 2011
| 'World Book Night was brilliant and
World Book Day its usual effective self. But what about the literacy
campaign which lies behind the whole operation? It is a shocking statistic
that one in six people in the UK struggle with literacy. The figure is
better in many European countries and worse in the US and many others. What
is clear is what a terrible loss this is for them, how it reduces their life
chances in every way, barring them from decent jobs and sapping their
self-confidence.' News Review
reports. |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, eligible to all writers
over 16 living in the UK or Ireland and worth a fantastic £16,000. |
| Have you looked at our Problem Page? You can
send in your own problem to us, but
this one is pretty interesting because it's about problems with finding
an agent. |
| Real Time Web
for Old Time Books: the Benefit of Social Media for Publishers and Authors
- Fauzia Burke explores the online activities you can do in real time --
from status updates on Facebook, to microblogging on Twitter to uploading
photos and videos on other social media sites. If you want to explore
how social networking can help you market your book, her article provides a
starting-point. |
| 'Sometimes writing is easy and sometimes not. You
have to be sitting at your desk; if you wait to want to do it you might wait for
ever. But you generally find that once you're doing it, you want to. Early
morning is best. I write in my dressing gown, because when you're writing
fiction the nearer you are to your subconscious, your sleeping state, the
better. My theory is that once you dress, that's the end of work for the day.
The real world surges in and takes over. Fay Weldon in The Times, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Is your progress as a writer stymied by the fact that you have old
typewritten or even handwritten manuscripts that you can't face retyping
onto a computer? Our Typing service
can help with this. |
| 'If you write one story,
it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.' Edgar Rice Burroughs in our
Writers' Quotes. |
28 February 2011
|
|
'World Book Night is practically upon us, and thousands in the UK
will help celebrate it this coming Saturday, 5 March. This year the
organisers have broken away from the traditional Quick Reads and book tokens
for children - although the traditional programmes are still there - to go
for a much larger promotion.' News
Review reports. |
|
|
The Creative Process
- Chas Jones writes: we came close to inventing a quantum theory of
creativity during a poetry reading by Professor Philip Gross of Glamorgan
University at Kellogg College, Oxford.
Rather like Schrodinger’s cat, the debate that followed suggested how the
creative process was changed, if not actually killed off, when it is
examined. Does the keeping of notebooks, for example, change the quality of
the creative impulse that the words try to capture? |
|
|
Are you thinking about self-publishing? Our site,
WritersPrintShop,
has over 90 pages - the most informative resource on this on the web - so
it's the perfect place to find out what's involved and what it costs.
|
|
|
'The balance of power has permanently, irreversibly
shifted from the media companies to the tech firms. Let's imagine some bolder moves from the publishing
industry. Perhaps multiple publishers could band together in opposition,
starving the App Store of content until better terms can be negotiated. Or maybe
they could seek to challenge Apple on antitrust grounds. Either might prove
effective in leading to slightly better terms for publishers. Pete Cashmore
founder and CEO of Mashable in our
Comment column. |
|
|
Our
Writing Opportunity this week is the
Cardiff International Poetry
Competition, worth £5,000 to the winner and closing on 25 March.
|
|
|
Thinking about subscribing to a writers' magazine?
Our Magazine Reviews offer a
unique service, guiding you through what's available for writers: Writers' News, Mslexia, Writers' Forum, Writer's Digest, Scriptwriter
and Self-Publishing Magazine. |
|
|
'The Americans may have need of the telephone but we do not. We have
plenty of messenger boys.' Sir William Preece,
chief engineer of the General Post Office in Britain
in our colllection of clangers.
|
|
|
'The Iliad is only great because all life is a
battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because
all life is a riddle.' G K Chesterton in our
Writers' Quotes. |
21 February 2011
|
In this useful article on
Applying
text style, Chas Jones shows you how to apply text style to your
manuscript. All word processors offer you the chance to apply a layout style to sections
of the text. When preparing your manuscript for submission or for the
printer, this is how to go about it. |
| 'Borders’ filing for bankruptcy this week was the expected
outcome of the long slow decline of the second-biggest US bookstore
chain, as it gradually ran out of impetus and money. The book retailer
has been struggling for months, with Ingram as the chain's main supplier
of books, and most publishers putting them on stop. Borders had proposed
that publishers receive interest-bearing notes instead of payment but
publishers, not surprisingly, were cool on that proposal.'
News Review on this week's bad
news. |
| Our 17 editorial services, some of which we've been delivering for
ten years, cover the range from the
Editorial
Report to
Synopsis writing, from
Copy
editing to
Submission Critique. there are also special
Children's
Editorial Services and
Contract vetting. |
| 'With a biographical novel you've got the basic structure of the
life, you've got a mass of facts. The problem is to find a novel-shaped
story to tell, there's no point telling the biographical story, it's been
done…' David Lodge, author of A Man of Parts on H G Wells, in the
Bookseller, quoted in our Comment
column. |
|
2010 Diagram
Prize shortlist - here's the shortlist for the 2010 Diagram Prize.
It looks like it's going to be another strong year. This is run by columnist Horace Bent in the
Bookseller (the UK book trade weekly) with input from dedicated odd title
hunters from all over the world. The prize, set up in association with the
Diagram Group, has been running since 1978 and is a joyous celebration of the
barmy side of publishing. |
| What does it take to
market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today?
Joanne Phillips
provides the answer, which is that the internet is a fertile
ground for writers. You
just need to know how to make it work for you... |
| 'Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard
and shot it.' Truman Capote in our
Writers' Quotes. |
14 February 2011
| The revision of our
Inside Publishing
series is complete. This extremely useful 19-part series has been
revised to take account of changes in the publishing world.
Advances and royalties,
The Relationship between agents and
publishers, Subsidiary rights,
The English-speaking publishing
world and The Marketing
department have all just been brought up-to-date, and this week we've
finished with The Financial
relationship between writers and publishers. |
| 'The big questions about creative writing courses still remain,
although there’s no doubt about their popularity, nor that the universities
and colleges see them as real money-spinners. There are now a huge number of
writing courses in America - no less that 1,000 - and, after a slower start,
about 100 postgraduate courses in the UK catering for the creative writing
student.' News Review asks
whether creative writing courses are worth it. |
| Back in 2007, Colin Murray wrote an article for WritersServices on
getting published entitled
'The
long and winding road'. It was all about the difficulties of
getting your second novel published. It's great therefore to report
that last week Colin had a launch party in Goldsboro Books in London for his
second book, No Hearts, No Roses, the first Tony Gerard thriller. |
| 'When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to
remember the book. It's important to see the film as a film. Of course, it's
easier with an old book. If it's Wuthering Heights or something, it's like
going to the theatre and seeing another version; it might as well be
Chekhov. This book (Never Let Me Go) came out in 2006, so it's harder to do
that. But it's a movie. Every discussion shouldn't be dominated by
comparison with the novel...' Kazuo Ishiguro, the film of whose book
Never Let Me Go has just been released, in the Evening Standard. |
| The latest
addition to our fictionalised stories
about our services - how Alison used our children's editorial services
to get her magic unicorn story right before submitting it to children's
publishers. These stories are just a bit of fun, but they do show how
our services can help you. |
| 'An author ought to consider himself not as a gentleman who gives a
private treat, but rather as one who keeps a pub, at which all persons are
welcome for their money.' Henry Fielding in our
Writers' Quotes. |
7 February 2011
|
|
'In the light of everything else going on in Egypt, it’s perhaps a small
thing that the Cairo International Book Fair was cancelled a few days ago. China
was to be the guest of honour and its large delegation of it 248 publishers and
10,000 books was withdrawn at the last minute. President Mubarak, now with other
things on his mind, was to have opened the Fair.'
News Review on events in Cairo. |
|
|
John Jenkins' February column
- in this month's column John deals with the
all-important subject of creating characters. How good are you are
creating characters? John shows you how to go about it. |
|
|
Writing
Historical Fiction our revised article on Writing Historical
Fiction brings this subject up to date. This series about writing in
different genres is really useful for anyone trying to tackle one of them, as it
looks at the writing and the market too. |
|
|
Other articles cover
Writing Crime Fiction,
Writing Science Fiction and
Fantasy,
Writing Romance,
Writing Non-fiction
and
Writing Memoir and
Autobiography. |
|
|
'The fact of the
matter is that author events will take over your life if you let them. Being
invited to Edinburgh these days is like entering the royal enclosure at Ascot.
If you haven't sat sipping whisky in that yurt, you haven't arrived - and it's
not just other pen-pushers that you'll meet. Politicians, sportsmen,
celebrities... they don't need to have written or even ghost-written a book.
Talking about books seems to be a bigger business than reading them...'
Anthony Horowitz in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
Chas Jones looks at the tricky subject of
Defamation
, the defences against it, defamation and free speech, and how it works in
different parts of the world. It's all too easy to defame someone, so
authors should be wary about the risks. |
|
|
'I have been successful probably because I have always realized that
I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting
story entertainingly.' Edgar Rice Burroughs in our
Writers' Quotes.
|
31 January 2011
| Publicising
your book - gaining publicity is one of the biggest hurdles a new fiction or non-fiction
writer faces. After all, without it, no-one will even know your book exists.
In this article, media agent Alison Smith-Squire offers some top tips. |
| 'Amazon has just announced that ebooks for its Kindle are now outselling
paperbacks... For bricks and mortar booksellers, the news from Amazon was almost
totally bad. The rapid increase in ebook sales as the Kindle gains market share
is due to the ease with which people can download ebooks on to their devices. In
the US a large proportion of paperback buyers are opting for ebooks instead. But
it also shows that Amazon are getting a much bigger proportion of the e-book
market than they have of the paperback
market.' News Review reports. |
| You'll have to be quick to take advantage of this week's
Writing Opportunity, which is the
Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, with two grand prizes of publication by the
Penguin Group, closing on 6 February. |
| ‘Publishers are relevant. We have practical expertise and, of course,
money. We give our authors advances which enable them to concentrate on their
work in hand… My idea of hell is a website with 80,000 self-published works on
it – some of which might be jewels, but, frankly, who's got the time? What
people want is selection and frankly that's what we do.' Gail Rebuck, CEO of
Random House UK, in the Guardian, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Latest
changes in the book trade 7: in the last part of this series, Chris Holifield
looks at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses
might transform authors' capacity to the license use of their books for
all sorts of purposes. |
| The rest of the series covers
Bookselling,
Publishing,
Print on Demand and the
Long Tail, Self-publishing - career
suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences
and Copyright. |
| 'Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing profession
carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be creative; that one
must be cantankerous and objectionable in order to be bright; that ego is
paramount over skill; that one can rise to a level from which one can tell the
reader to go to hell. These myths, if believed, can ruin you. If you believe
you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.' David Brin in our
Writers' Quotes. |
24 January 2011
| 'An interesting study published recently in the US suggests that
writers are at greater risk of depression than most other occupations. The
study puts artists and writers among the most vulnerable of professionals,
alongside other "at risk" jobs including care workers, teachers, social
workers, maintenance staff and salespeople. Irregular pay and isolation
contribute to the tendency for writers to succumb to depression, says the
site, with nearly 7% of male artists and writers likely to suffer a major
episode of the illness.' News Review
looks at the evidence. |
| The winner of this year's
T S Eliot Prize has
just been announced at an award ceremony in the Wallace Collection in
London. It's been a fantastic shortlist and the Readings in the Royal
Festival Hall were a glittering success, attracting an audience twice as big
as last year's event. |
| Read Michael Legat's 19 incredibly useful
Factsheets
to get some quick guidance on everything from plotting your novel
to publishers' contracts. |
| 'I was lucky. Susan
Watt (his editor) said: "It will take four or five books to establish you."
HarperCollins sat out those first books and the fifth Sharpe took off. I really
don't know if publishers would have the patience to do that in the current
climate.' Bernard Cornwall, author of The Fort and many other novels,
in the Observer, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Book Prize, closing on 24
February and offering a prize of £1,500 plus the option for Janetta Otter-Barry at Frances Lincoln
Children’s Books to publish to the best manuscript for 8 to
12-year-olds that celebrates diversity in the widest possible sense. |
| From our archive, five excerpts from
Inspired Creative Writing
by Alexander Gordon Smith from the
brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series. |
| 'In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an
experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction,
the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your
readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.'
Ben Bova in our Writers' Quotes. |
17 January 2011
| 'Bestselling author J K Rowling is in the clear as regards a case
brought against her by the estate of the late Adrian Jacobs in relation to
his book Willy the Wizard, which she was accused of using as the
basis of the Harry Potter books. The judge said: "The contrast between the
total concept and feel of the work is so stark that any serious comparison
of the two strains credulity." ' News
Review looks at accusations of plagiarism and attempts to
defend work against passing-off. |
| Don't procrastinate!
- 'Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always
easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on
the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from
procrastination.'
Chris Holifield looks at how to get yourself going. |
| The Writer’s
Compass is the new name for all the UK's National Association of
Writers’ professional development services for writers. It brings
together NAWE’s professional development programme with the free information
and advice services for all writers formerly offered by
literaturetraining. Aiming to help writers in all genres, and at all stages
in their development, to steer a course through the complexities of the
writing life and build and sustain their careers. The Writer’s Compass
offers training and events, One-to-One support, information services and
resources. |
| 'I was lucky. Susan
Watt (his editor) said: "It will take four or five books to establish you."
HarperCollins sat out those first books and the fifth Sharpe took off. I really
don't know if publishers would have the patience to do that in the current
climate.' Bernard Cornwall, author of The Fort and many other novels,
in the Observer, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| Our Writing
Opportunity comes from BBC writersroom, which is launching a
new partnership programme for writers and theatres, with 10 commissions for
UK writers, closing 24 January, so you need to get a move on. |
| Are you looking for an agent? Our
agents' listings have been compiled from agents' own websites
and other information they publish about what they're looking for. You
can use them to research which agents to submit to. The listings cover UK
and US agents, with separate listings for children's agents in the UK, and
international agents from all over the world. |
| 'The crown of literature
is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the
human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of
prose can only step aside when the poet passes.' Somerset Maugham in
our Writers' Quotes. |
10 January 2011
| John Jenkins'
January column looks
at the eternally fascinating question of rejection and how some successful
writers have overcome it. He also quotes from our
Rotten Rejections page. |
| 'The old idea of sentimental and formula-driven romances of the sort
produced by Mr Mills and Mr Boon has been replaced by a highly efficient
publishing machine which has an exact idea of what readers want and long ago
set about delivering it. Many of the books they publish now would have
scandalised the ‘spinsters’ of the past. New series deliver a much more
raunchy read and their books are avidly consumed by a wide-ranging, almost
totally female, readership of all ages and from all backgrounds – and across
the world, with new markets like India developing fast.'
News Review on why romance is
perfect for e-readers. |
| Are you thinking about self-publishing? Our site,
WritersPrintShop,
has over 90 pages - the most informative resource on this on the web - so
it's the perfect place to find out what's involved and what it costs. |
| Have you been following the Eastenders saga with interest and thinking
sympathetically about the dilemma of the scriptwriters? Bob's Journal of
a Virtually Unpublished Writer covers the period when he wrote for
EastEnders and very revealing it is too. Try
Wednesday 9 February 2005:
'86-page planning document arrives from Elstree.
Undoubtedly happy to be writing another episode; only hope I have more
control over it than I had over last one...' |
|
And here's a recommendation
from from fellow EastEnders script-writer
Pippa McCarthy: 'Just discovered
your web page... I've just
spent the last hour crying with laughter with periodic yelps of 'been
there!'... I'm going to make my entire family read your diary. Then perhaps
will understand own bizarre behaviour every time I start a script...
Anyway, will shut up now but just wanted to say you have cheered me up no
end. It's brilliant.' |
|
'Through all these "wither the industry" debates, I feel I'm looking on from
the outside. It's frustrating not to understand the implications and,
truthfully, I realise I resent having to think about it all. Like many
writers, I just want to concentrate on the book that I'm working on...'
Kate Mosse, author of Sepulchre, in the Bookseller,
quoted in our Comment column. |
|
MsLexia's tips on
How
to win a short story competition might come in handy if you want to
enter theirs, but hurry, it closes
on 24 January. |
|
'Any man who keeps
working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies
the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make
some kind of career for himself as writer.' Ray Bradbury in our
Writers' Quotes. |
3 January 2011
|
International Book Fairs 2011 - bang up to date, our list of the key
international books fairs for 2011. Some are growing in this
competitive sector, some have vanished, and others are still a bit vague
about their dates, but here's the list as it stands at present. |
|
Making all sorts of New Year's resolutions about
your writing? Well, you could start by reading systematically through the mass of free
pages on our website. The best way to find them is through this
listing Help for Writers. |
| 'A fantastic new tool has become available for
anyone interested in using the power of the web to trace word use. Google’s
Ngram is a digital storehouse which comprises words and short phrases – 500
billion of them from 5.2 million books – contained in books published between
1500 and 2008 in English French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian... '
News Review is wowed by a
great new development. |
|
Why do non-fiction books need an index? In
The Ins and Outs of Indexing
Joanne Phillips provides an answer, explains why it's
a specialist job and why computers can't achieve the same result as a
skilled indexer. |
| 'Since 2000, the Anglo-American book business has been rocked by
seismic convulsions. Google has digitised some 10 million titles, Barnes and
Noble is for sale. Borders, bankrupt in the UK, clings on in the US. Here,
Waterstones's parent company, HMV, wants to sell. Amazon's market share
continues to soar...' Robert McCrum in the Observer, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| We have a whole section of writers' magazine reviews, so if part of your New Year's resolution
is to take out a subscription to one of them to help with your writing, it's
worth taking a look at how we rated them. |
| 'War and Peace maddens
me because I didn't write it myself, and worse, I couldn't.' Jeffrey Archer
in our Writers' Quotes. |
20 December 2010
| 'In the internet age the English language has become especially
dominant and over half of all web pages are currently written in English.
This gives authors writing in English an immense advantage, a market
potentially of both the 400 million and the 1.4 billion mentioned above.
Without your work needing to go through the expensive and difficult process
of translation, it can in theory be made available to all the readers in
these huge groups.' News Review looks at the remarkable spread of English. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest 20111. With a closing date
of 14 January, it offers four prizes of $500, publication
in Boston Review and a reading at the Boston Poetry Center.
This USA competition, now in its fifth decade, attracts large audiences of
poets who have not yet published a collection. |
| Interested in writers' software? There's a number of
packages which can help you with your writing reviewed in our
Writers' Software section. |
| 'Male writers write books with themselves as characters in them,
because we never cease to feel that there's something less than manly about
the way that we earn our living. Literary creation is an isolated business
involving nothing in the way of physical aptitude, courage, leadership or
business acumen. Writers are cut off from all of the male-bonding rituals
that gestate in the world of work...' Will Self in The Times, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Inside Publishing
- this extremely useful 19-part series is in the midst of being
revised to take account of changes in the publishing world.
Advances and royalties,
The Relationship between agents and
publishers, Subsidiary rights,
The English-speaking publishing
world and The Marketing
department have all just been brought up-to-date, and this week we're on to
Creative Commons. |
| 'The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe' who
'brings the whole soul of man into activity'. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
in our Writers' Quotes. |
13 December 2010
|
|
‘The idea that publishers 'now appear frozen in the
headlights of the onrushing digital revolution' is simply untrue. Long before
the digital revolution had become a reality for readers, most major publishing
houses have been planning and investing in their digital divisions in addition
to 'doing the day job', publishing and selling their authors in all formats and
in all markets... 'Ursula Mackenzie, CEO of Little Brown UK, on the Guardian website,
quoted in our Comment column. |
|
|
John Jenkins' December
column - 'Show the reader, don't tell him: Sooner or later most good tutors will advise you to stop "telling" the
reader what has happened and instead "show them." The point is to involve
the reader. There are many times when tell is more important but nine times
out of ten go for show.' |
|
|
The
Digital Rights Management debate - Chas Jones looks at the way the views
on digital rights management are changing. Is generosity a good
sales strategy and what about piracy? |
|
|
More
submission tips from Andrew Lownie is a useful feature on the agent's
website, with plenty of examples of what to avoid. |
|
|
Rotten
Rejections lists the famous writers who had their work rejected:
The Diary of Anne Frank (‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have
a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the
“curiosity” level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which
was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell
about 25 million copies) was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about
an artist.’ |
|
|
'It's a kind of zen question: if you write a book and no one reads
it, is it really a book?' Lee Child in our
Writers' Quotes. |
6 December 2010
|
My e-book
reader - Chas Jones relates his own experience with a new e-book reader
and looks at what's going on in the e-reader world. |
| 'Libraries are under threat as governments carry out major cuts
to public services in both the US and the UK... It’s a bad lookout for
libraries, which are all too easy to cut, especially as regards their
book budgets and staff, but this time local authorities are going for
large-scale closure of branch libraries...
News Review reports. |
| The 18th Bad Sex in Fiction
Award for 2010, run by the Literary Review, is just as entertaining
as usual and has been won by Rowan Somerville. |
| 'I always look back to that and tell people if I had given up then, if I had said well I tried it and I'm
not good enough, it didn't work out, I would still be practising law right
now... I think so much of whatever we do in life is about hard work and it's
about luck... Emma Giffin, author
of Heart of the Matter in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Our reviewer, Maureen Kincaid Speller, said of the
The Arvon Book of Life
Writing by Sally Cline and Carole Angier: 'Many people
want to write about someone’s life, perhaps their own, and there are courses
to suit every level of interest, from university masters degrees to local
college qualifications' and concluded that it was: 'a brisk and
helpful guide on how to set about writing a life story... It is a sensible
account of life writing from experienced practitioners of what is both art
and craft, and I recommend it!' |
| Our
Contract vetting
service may be just what you need if you've got an agreement with a
publisher but are now faced with dealing with the contract. Our
contracts expert can advise and help you make sure you get a good deal. |
| 'Having imagination, it
takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative,
would take only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.'
Franklin P Adams in our Writers'
Quotes. |
29 November 2010
| 'So, what has changed in the world of short stories?
Well, the biggest change is that the internet has made short stories more viable
by creating the possibility of publishing them online and using the internet to
find an audience for them. Because of the brief form, short stories can be read
online or even printed out, which, just like poetry, gives them a head-start
over novels. The short form also suits a time-pressured audience with an
increasingly short attention span.' News
Review looks at what's happening. |
| Still on the subject of short stories, this week's
Writing Opportunity is the
Mslexia Women's Short Story Competition, open to all women, closing on
24 January and with a £2,000 first prize. |
| Tips for Writers
is our latest 8-part 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
and Submission to publishers and agents |
| 'I always look back to that and tell people if I had given up then, if I had said well I tried it and I'm
not good enough, it didn't work out, I would still be practising law right
now... I think so much of whatever we do in life is about hard work and it's
about luck...' Emma Giffin, author of Heart of the Matter in the Bookseller,
quoted in or Comment
column. |
| The National Academy
of Writing has just launched its series of
Conservatoire-style Masterclasses which will start in April. This
is a specialist course for committed writers seeking to publish a
book-length work in either fiction or non-fiction. Up to eighteen writers
will be selected each year as members of The National Academy of Writing. |
| Our Glossary of Technical Terms,
Glossary of Printing and Publishing and
List of Acronyms
have just been updated and provide a useful reference source. |
| ‘I will never stop writing. People often ask when I will retire, but
I say it’s none of their business. Writing defines who I am. I love the
feeling of holding a finished book in my hands, and then I can’t wait to
start the great adventure of writing the next one.’ Barbara Taylor
Bradford in our Writers' Quotes. |
22 November 2010
|
|
'A recent posting on
Publishing Perspectives
took
the reader to their article on Pitchapalooza, written by authors David Henry
Sterry and his wife Arielle Eckstut, the duo known as The Book Doctors. The Book
Doctors invented ‘Putting Your Passion Into Print’, now known as
Pitchapalooza. This is an American Idol for books, where writers get
one minute to pitch their books to a panel of book professionals... '
News Review reports. |
|
|
What is
bandwidth?
Chas Jones investigates: 'High bandwidth has been likened to a multi-lane
highway. This is a poor physical analogy because the carrying capacity is
increased by packing the digits nose to tail rather than side by side but it
will do.' |
|
|
Our
Writing Opportunity this week is the UK Crime Writers' Association Debut
Dagger, open to unpublished writers, with a £25 entry fee and a closing
date of 5 February 2011. |
|
|
From the winner of the 2010 Debut Dagger,
Belinda Bauer, author of Blacklands, previously quoted on the site: 'As a screenwriter you have to be
succinct and cut out any extraneous words or descriptions so when I
started writing prose for the first time it was really difficult to make
it last. I'd write Chapter One (and it would take up) three-quarters of
the page!' |
|
|
'Fundamentally, though, the need for publishers
endures, even if not in their current form. Readers will be best served by
publishers who can marry the best of what is sometimes labelled "legacy"
publishing to the new means of developing and delivering what readers want
and writers need. And if that marriage is achieved, then the persistent
reporting of the death of old publishing will continue to be mere
exaggeration.’ Stephen Page, MD of Faber and Faber, in the Guardian blog,
quoted in our Comment column. |
|
|
There's
a well-informed article on the London Book Fair website, written by
Bookbrunch's Liz Thomson, for anyone who's interested in developments in
publishing in the Arab world, |
|
|
'Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing
profession carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be
creative; that one must be cantankerous and objectionable in order to be
bright; that ego is paramount over skill; that one can rise to a level from
which one can tell the reader to go to hell. These myths, if believed, can
ruin you. If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have
enough ego.' David Brin in our Writers' Quotes. |
15 November 2010
|
|
John Jenkins' November column
- this month John has put together a hilarious collection of howlers,
ranging from 'Man kills self before shooting wife and
daughter' to 'College dropouts cut in half'. |
|
|
'The idea of turning a blog into a story is not
original but the idea of bloggers getting together to co-operate on the story
did seem to be original, combining the contributions, whether they are art work,
a soundscape, or a few words, which are brought together by an editor: or is the
editor really the author...?' Chas Jones on
Crowd-sourcing,
'one of the most
exciting ideas as the Frankfurt Book Fair. |
|
|
'E-book sales are astonishing'. So, given publishers' latest focus, are readers
switching to e-books at a staggering speed and is the whole market for books set
to change radically within a short space of time? The evidence for this is
actually a bit contradictory. News Review takes a look at the latest
studies. |
|
|
Epub: Version 3. The business of international standards is not
normally the most exciting story in the world. But there was an infectious buzz
at the meeting where the latest version of Epub was being discussed at the
Frankfurt Book Fair 2010...
Chas Jones' latest report from the Frankfurt Book Fair
looks at this important new standard and what it means. |
|
|
'Of course, it didn't hurt that we had begun
to write fiction that's hugely enjoyable to read. And maybe that's the
key part of the answer. Maybe our present success has something to do
with escaping from the weight of misery that was at the heart of The
Well of Loneliness: the tradition Radclyffe Hall established of
writing about crippled and damaged lives...'
Val McDermid in the Independent on Sunday on making lesbianism
mainstream, quoted in our Comment
column. |
|
|
'The only thing I was fit for was to be a
writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be
fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.' Russell Baker
in our Writers' Quotes.
|
|
|
There are pages more of writers' quotes to be
found on this page and
this one and there are
classic quotes too.
|
1 November 2010
|
|
'So what’s the situation with the UK’s small funded literature sector in
the light of the enormous cuts which were announced last week by the new
coalition government? Literature is very much the poor relation when it comes to
Arts Council funding, with theatre, music and art all taking very much larger
slices of the pie. Arguing, quite reasonably, that literary fiction is quite
well provided for by commercial publishing houses, most of the literature money
is spent on poetry, with a small amount going to pay for the publication of
literary translations and some to programmes to support and develop writers.'
News Review investigates. |
|
|
What is a
widget? Chas Jones looks at how writers can use widgets to
promote their work and how viral marketing works. |
|
|
Poet to crime writer:
'Both have a massive preoccupation with structure. In
a poem, every word has to be in the right relation to every other word. In a
crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have
to plant the information in chapters three and 11.' Sophie Hannah in the Independent on Sunday,
quoted in our Comment column. |
|
|
The updating of the
Inside
Publishing series continues with
Vanity
Publishing, which, even with the advent of self-publishing, still can
deceive writers. |
|
|
What is metadata?
In this second article Chas Jones shows how
metadata is data about other pieces of data, how you can add your metadata and
how image metadata works. |
|
|
If you want editorial input from our professional
editors, have a look at our
17 Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing
and
Indexing.
|
|
|
'The only reward to be expected from the
cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and and hatred if one
succeeds.'
Voltaire in our Writers' Quotes.
|
25 October 2010
|
|
Matera Women's Fiction
Festival: Writing Historical Fiction. In
Elizabeth Edmonson's masterclass
her opening point was that
'you must know yourself... creating a historical fiction
requires an extra dose of confidence, plus a real feel for the period and
subject. The challenge for the writer is to generate the complete,
imaginative environment for the reader which often means that they have to
distance them from their familiar frame of reference.' |
|
|
'The recent Children’s Bookseller Conference in
London focused on a part of the publishing industry in relatively good
health. Children’s book sales have suffered less than adult books as a
result of the recession and they are only down 2% in the UK against an
overall figure of 4%... there is still a greater sense of confidence in the
children’s sector...' News Review
reports. |
|
|
Two more articles in the
Inside
Publishing series have now been revised and brought up to date:
Children's publishing and
Copy editing and proof-reading. There
are 19 articles in all. |
|
|
The shortlist for 'the world's top poetry
prize, the T S Eliot Prize, has
been announced this week and there's
a new reading group
scheme on the Poetry Book Society website with free downloads.
|
|
|
Our list of
Picture Libraries continues to
grow and is one of the best on the web, so have a look if you want to source
some photos for your book. |
|
|
It's fascinating to see how
Print
Machines and
Auto-scanners work, as these photos show.
|
|
|
'Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies,
in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must
always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting
and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the
most treacherous is the label of Success.' James Baldwin in our
Writers' Quotes. |
18 October 2010
|
Matera Women's Fiction Festival: making a pitch -
'It is a brave person who stands up in front of an audience of
writers and creative people to tell them how to communicate. Writers tend to
believe it is one thing that they are good at! But that that is exactly what
Jesse Ponce did at the Matera Women's Fiction Festival 2010 when he talked
about making a pitch. Like all good communicators he had one message
that he wanted to convey in the time allotted for this presentation. His
message was
‘make sure you define your objective’.' Chas Jones reports. |
| 'The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize has been a
compete surprise to everyone, including the author. Howard Jacobson had
never even been shortlisted before, and his book The Finkler Question was
the bookies’ least favourite title on the shortlist. It’s very nice to see this important prize going to
an author who has paid his dues, with 16 titles which are reckoned only to have
sold 90,000 copies in all. News Review
investigates. |
| Our photo-essay of
Frankfurt 2010 by Chas Jones shows there was plenty going on in
between the serious publishing meetings. |
| 'I believed right from the start it would work powerfully on stage because
it's the story of one man, with a very strong central narrative drive,
questioning what it means to be human, I don't know a more dramatic question
than that. Also, for me, it says that no matter what happens, there is always
the possibility of redemption. I hope the play will make you cry, but make you
come out wanting to live...' Unknown playwright Rachel Wagstaff on dramatising
Sebastian Faulks' First World War novel Birdsong, quoted
in our Comment column. |
| Our latest Writing Opportunity
is the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, with a closing date of 1pm on 30 October
and a first prize of £30,000 for a single story. It's the world’s
most valuable short story prize, but please note that unfortunately eligibility is restricted to fiction authors who have had work published in
Britain or Ireland. |
| This week the two articles in
Inside Publishing which have been
revised and updated cover Print on Demand and
Copyright. |
| 'I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils
something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.'
Norman Mailer in our Writers' Quotes.
|
11 October 2010
|
|
'The Frankfurt Book Fair seems to have engendered a mood of optimism,
in spite of the uneasy world economy and the particular preoccupations which
are making book publishers feel as if the ground is shifting under their
feet. The numbers were up, with 7,533 exhibitors, an increase of 3%, and
522 agents registered in the Literary Agents Centre, 4% up on last year.
This shouldn’t be exaggerated as a factor, but some publishers who didn’t
make it to London because of the volcanic ash seem to have felt that a trip
to Frankfurt was a necessity, although most of them would have been going to
the German book fair anyway.' News
Review on the big book fair. |
|
|
John
Johnson's October column - John's column recounts
how he won the heart of his prospective mother-in-law through a volume of
Bryon's poems and provides a glowing review of a
travel book which takes you in the footsteps of the poet. |
|
|
The third week it's
Books clubs and
Direct selling,
as we continue
our revision of the 19-part
Inside Publishing series, which is being
revised to take account of changes in the publishing world. |
|
|
'The ideas I will tend to choose for novels are ones
that least resemble books I have already written. My curiosity leads me to
choose different types of books to write. I rather encourage this trait because
it's the best way I can see of avoiding the condition of writing endless
versions of the same novel, which can lead to premature artistic death.’ David Mitchell, author of
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet in
the Independent, in our Comment
column. |
|
|
For Creative writing tutors and their students there's a mass of
useful information on the site, which we are very happy for you to print
out, with due acknowledgement, please. You can find this in the listing
under
Advice for Writers, but
we'd specially recommend our 7-part
series Tips for Writers, Our
Categories series, about Writing Crime,
Science Fiction and
Fantasy,
Memoir and Autobiography
and so on, our recently updated series
Latest Changes in the Book Trade
and Inside Publishing (see above). |
|
|
There's also some very practical pages on
Making
submissions and
Finding an agent. |
|
|
'My books aren't trying to fathom the mysteries of human existence.
I'm an entertainer.' Bernard Cornwall in our
Writers' Quotes. |
4 October 2010
|
|
'It’s been a gift for the media. ’A comedy of errors for author of
The Corrections.’ (The Times) ‘Jonathan Franzen's 'book of the century'
pulped over error.’ (the Guardian) ‘ Franzen’s new novel recalled to be
pulped.’ (Evening Standard). So what really happened to Jonathan Franzen’s
highly-anticipated new novel, Freedom, and why did the UK edition
have scores of errors, which were so serious that the publisher has
reprinted the corrected version and asked buyers to return their copies to
be pulped?' News Review has the
story. |
|
|
Inside Publishing - this
extremely useful 19-part series is in the midst of being revised to take
account of changes in the publishing world. This second week we're on to
The Frankfurt Book Fair,
the Sales Department,
the Production Department,
Pricing and
Distribution. |
|
|
Screenplay assessment
fictionalised story - 'Sarah had always been fascinated by the
cinema. As a little girl going to see a film was her favourite treat and
she was also interested in how movies got to be made. Her own favourites
were the films with really good stories, like Titantic and Avatar, but she also liked the ones which were based on books, like
Lord of the Rings and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...'
Our fictionalised stories of
how our services have helped writers give you some idea of what they can
do. |
|
|
‘Recently, Newsweek ran an article about the brave new world of
self-publishing. Its title asked the question "Who Needs a Publisher?" Well,
the short answer is, I do. The bigger answer is: we all do. Don't get me
wrong. I'm glad that self-publishing has evolved from stigma to
respectability. I love that worthy authors who might be overlooked by the
major houses can now be read. It's great that writers with a special niche,
an established following or an entrepreneurial bent can make more money
self-publishing than they would in royalties. But I'm also concerned about
the future of books and the larger issue of assuring the flow of reliable
information.' Philip Goldberg in the Huffington Post, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
Googleworld
- digitilization/Google and all that
- Nick Webb, publisher turned author, comments on what GoogleWorld might
mean for authors. |
|
|
'Justice to my readers compels
me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself
induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to
say.' Charles Caleb Colton in our Writers' Quotes. |
|
|
And the new
Magazine is ready! |
27 September 2010
|
|
'Can creative writing courses really open up the world of writing to
the students who pay heavily for the privilege of taking them? As students
begin the return to college or university across the northern hemisphere,
this seems a good time to examine whether or not creative writing courses
earn their keep...' News Review investigates. |
|
|
Inside Publishing series - this
extremely useful 19-part series is in the midst of being revised to take
account of changes in the publishing world. The introduction,
How the publishing business works,
Advances and royalties,
The Relationship between agents
and publishers, Subsidiary
rights, The
English-speaking publishing world and
The Marketing department
have all just been brought up-to-date. |
|
|
'When I was a child, we lived in a two-up, two down. We had no bath - it
was a tin tub in the back yard. The toilet was at the end of the yard. The
first six years of my life, we used to go over the road twice a day and
fetch water from the well. We were too poor to own books. However, every
night we were read a story, and those stories came from books, and those
books came from the library...
Pie Corbett, in
an interview
on the National Literacy Trust website and in our
Comment column.. |
|
|
You're probably familiar with our Agents' listings, but have you checked
out the list of
Bursaries,
Fellowships and Grants for writers we have on the site, which offers all sorts of
opportunities for writers. |
|
|
This week's
Writing Opportunity
is the The First Chapter Literary Prize, a
new prize from just-launched publisher Lighthouse Publishing. |
|
|
'Justice to my readers
compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice
to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have
nothing to say.' Charles Caleb Colton in our
Writers' Quotes. |
20 September 2010
| News Review reports on
recent studies of bestsellerdom: So, what does it mean for authors? Well, the
strongest message from all this is that people buy books by author brand.
They’re affected by bestsellerdom, which tends to be a bit of a self-fulfilling
prophecy, as bestsellers get more display space and marketing spend, in the
attempt to turn them into ever greater bestsellers. This means they sell more.
|
| Our latest Writing opportunity
is the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, with a
closing date of 15 October 2010 and an entry fee of £5/$8. It's open to all poets over 18 writing
in English. |
| In
Latest
changes in the book trade 7 Chris Holifield
looked at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses
might transform authors' capacity to the license use of their books for
all sorts of purposes. The rest of the series covers
Bookselling,
Publishing,
Print on Demand and the
Long Tail, Self-publishing - career
suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences
and
Copyright. |
| 'A writer's passion, his belief in his work, is what keeps him going
through those long, dark stretches when it seems as if no one is ever going to
get it. But if a writer has got himself out there - just a toe in the water -
then readers' passions come into play too, and in the age of Amazon and
e-readers independent booksellers still have a huge role to play.' Erica
Wagner in The Times, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| We are very proud that the British Library has chosen
to add WritersServices.com to its web archive. You can find out more about this
UK Web Archive here
and our site is archived
here. |
|
'How vain it is to sit down to write when you have
not stood up to live.'
Henry David Thoreau in our
Writers'
Quotes. |
13 September 2010
|
|
'Keith Ogoreck, Senior VP for Marketing for Author Solutions, has
made a rather astounding prediction in book editor Alan Rinzler's blog on
Forbes. He suggests that big publishers like Random House could one day
‘cede the midlist to a vast army of self-published authors’. His theory is
that the 80% of publishers’ lists which make up what is known as the midlist
– literary fiction, cookbooks, self-help books and presumably a lot of
genre fiction publishing - they’d just cherry pick from self-published
authors who had already tested the market by publishing their book and shown
a track-record of success.' News Review
looks at some predictions of the future. |
|
|
We've done a thorough update of our Links, with many new links to
interesting and useful sites in our 23 lists of links, which range from
writers'
online services to
pictures libraries,
from
writers' magazines and sites
to
software for writers. |
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‘Some
people think they know what my books are about when they haven’t read them. They
feel I’m in favour of bad behaviour or swearing. Some even think I write
about drugs. There’s nothing of that kind. Mostly, my books are about
outsiders, kids who don’t fit in. I feel they’re quite moral tales, although
they do show that there are things even loving parents can’t always protect
children from. Children recognize the truth of that… Jacqueline Wilson
in our Comment column. |
|
|
Our
Health Hazards series is a unique 7-part series warning about the
dangers to writers of Carpal Tunnel syndrome, eye problems and your working
environment. |
|
|
Reaching new poetry audiences
- the Poetry Book Society has just announced the launch of two major new websites,
www.poetrybookshoponline.com
and
www.poetrybooks.co.uk,
which will provide a substantial way for poetry readers to find out about
poetry and to buy poetry books and CDs.
It’s becoming ever harder to find a decent selection
of poetry in bookshops,
so these new sites offer a good way of finding out about the latest new
poetry - and much more - and buying it. |
|
|
New content on these sites includes
Seamus Heaney’s ‘Encounters with poetry’,
Roddy Lumsden on Identity Parade, Katy Evans-Bush on the difficult
relationship between Henry James and Oscar Wilde, and Philip Gross on how
winning the T S Eliot Prize started a year of prizes and what it has meant
to him. |
|
|
'The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than
in knowing your own.' Ned Rorem in our
Writers' Quotes.
|
6 September 2010
| John Jenkins'
September column is about the inspiring story of Joe Delaney,
whose agent suggested he should switch to writing for children, which he did
with the Wardstone Chronicles series. The first book, The Spook’s
Apprentice, spent seven weeks in the bestseller’s charts, was
translated into 12 languages and landed a film deal with Warner
Brothers. |
| 'Television Book Clubs are back in the news again with much
talk about Oprah’s new choice and the relaunch of the Richard and
Judy Book club in the UK. Richard and Judy presided over a real
phenomenon... Over the last six years the titles in their club have
sold in excess of 10 million copies and generated over £60m (nearly
$93m) million in book sales, turning at least eight authors into
multi-millionaires and throwing a welcome spotlight onto new
writers.' News Review
reports. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional
editors, have a look at our
17 Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing
and our new service,
Indexing. |
| This week's Writing
Opportunity is Mills & Boons' New Voices competition.
It's open to all but you'd better be ready to submit your chapter
when it opens on 6 September, as it closes on the 22nd! |
| ‘A lot of people love to get their history through historical
fiction, so it’s very important that what they read is as close to
the truth as possible. Where the novelist uses her imagination is to
fill in the gaps. But even then you can’t let rip. What you write
has to be credible within the context of what is known about that
person. You can’t indulge flights of fancy because that sells short
both those who know a lot and those who know a little about the
subject…' Alison Weir in the Toronto Star, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Our list of picture libraries
is a good place to start if you're looking to source pictures for
your book. |
| 'Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. the very
best and the very worst.' Ford Madox Ford in our Writers'
Quotes.
|
| The September Magazine is ready! |
30 August 2010
| 'Last week saw a flurry of articles about libraries
in the UK press, starting with Culture Minister Ed Vaizey’s views on
libraries and the future, which included proposals to cut costs by giving
libraries to communities to run and to run them from pubs and shops.
Public libraries have long been at risk, but in the current
economic climate they seem absolutely endangered. If the Department for Culture,
Media and Sport withdraws their support, many local authorities will find
libraries a soft target when they start to make cuts.
News Review reports. |
| Our Writing Opportunity this
week is the The 7th International Women's
Fiction Festival from 23-26 September 2010.
It is a literary festival dedicated to women’s
fiction from all over Europe. It attracts
best-selling writers, agents, translators and
editors from international publishing houses to
the beautiful city of the Sassi, Matera in
southern Italy. Our very own Chas Jones will be giving a talk on New Opportunities,
Epublishing and Self-publishing. |
| 'What's different about digital publishing? The answer should be: nothing.
It's a fact that we talk about digital and traditional publishing and we need to
stop that now. One of my frustrations is that many publishers seem to keep
editors away from digital discussions, leaving contracts and "digital"
departments to take things on.' David Miller, agent at Rogers, Coleridge &
White in the Bookseller, in our Comment
column. |
| Joanne Phillips has written a useful article on
The
Business of Writing: 'Writing is undoubtedly a
creative art. Whether we are working on the next Booker Prize winner or
ghostwriting blog posts, writers need to be original, imaginative and inspired.
But writing is also a business, with invoices to raise, accounts to be submitted
and records to be kept. Writers, like artists, can find themselves floundering
when it comes to the ‘business end’ of the job. Read on for our
easy-to-follow guide to the business of writing...' |
| And from our Writers' Quotes: 'A writer ought to be the
best possible source about their work but the writing instinct doesn't come
out of self-examination. That part of yourself in your work is expressed
willy-nilly, without your cooperation, motivation or collusion. You can't
help being what you write and writing what you are.' Tom Stoppard. |
| If you're looking for some diversion,
Writers' Quotes presents a wonderful selection and there's also
More Writers'
Quotes and
Even More
Writers' Quotes.
|
23 August 2010
| 'Åsne Seierstad, the author of The Bookseller of Kabul, has
been ordered to pay more than £26,000 in punitive damages. As Conor Foley in
the Guardian put it, this news will be greeted 'as either a blow to artistic
freedom of expression or a victory for the world's misrepresented and
powerless poor... But should any writer be free to use any material, however
private, in any way they like? News
Review looks at this fascinating case. |
| We're complimented by Stuart Aken's review of our site in his blog
for 27 July:'It is the Resources pages that really make this site stand out from the
crowd. Here you’ll find reviews of books and software, listings of agents,
self-publishing facts, educational matters, health and safety advice, and
there’s a new feature, reviewing writing magazines. You’ll see there is a
great deal of information on this site. It’s well presented and easily
navigated, which is as well, considering the number of pages. It’s a site I
browse often and I think you’ll benefit from a good look at this one.'
Read more. |
| 'Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just
to get into it: down, down, down... I only read on paper. I don't have an e-reader or
an i-Phone. I have the best time reading newspapers. I don't believe books are
dead. I've seen the figures. Sales of adult fiction are up in the worst economy
since the Depression.' Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius in the Observer, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Interested in writers' software?
There's a number of packages which can help you with your writing reviewed
in our Writers' Software section. |
| The Publisher's View is a four-part series by Tom Chalmers, MD of
Legend press. the first article deals with
What
a publisher wants from submissions and what a writer can do about it.
Then there's
Judging a book by its cover and synopsis,
The
Writer's X Factor and
The
changing face of publishing. |
|
'Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which
gives me entire satisfaction.' Peter Porter
in our Writers' Quotes. |
9 August 2010
| John Jenkins'
August column - ever fancied a bet on the Booker? John
reviews the field and offers his own caustic comments on the whole
process. |
| 'The British independent publisher Quercus has just announced
stellar results: revenue has almost tripled to £15m ($24m) for the
first six months of the year, making a profit of £3.4m ($5.41m)
compared with a loss of £100,000 ($159,120) in the same period in
2009. And what is it down to? Well, the answer is Stieg Larsson.
News Review reports.
|
| Here's our latest Writing Opportunity - there's just time to enter the Arvon
International Poetry Competition, if you're quick off the mark.
It's closing on 6 August, has a first prize of £7,500, and an entry
fee of £7 per poem. |
| Read Michael Legat’s 19
Factsheets on everything from plotting your novel to
publishers’ contracts. |
| 'Books are not going anywhere. Neither is publishing. Since
Gutenberg made his epic contribution to the human race, publishing
has secured a place as one of the largest and most profitable
industries in history. In that time, publishing has adapted to major
technological changes, survived economic meltdowns, persisted
through political censorship, and made it to the other side of
catastrophic price wars...' Jennifer Havenner, independent
publisher, in the Huffington Post, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Great summer reading - follow the triumphs and disasters of an
unpublished writer’s life in
Bob G Ritchie’s Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer. |
| 'What the detective story is about is not murder but the
restoration of order.' P D James, who has just celebrated her
90th birthday, in our Writers
Quotes, along with a sparkling and thought-provoking
collection of thoughts from a huge range of writers from across the
centuries. |
2 August 2010
| 'It will surprise no-one who read the STOP PRESS at the end of last
week’s News Review to know that Andre Wylie’s Odyssey Editions and what’s
happening to e-books have dominated the publishing news agenda this week.
Using the aggressive approach which has earned him the soubriquet ‘The
Jackal’, Andrew Wylie decided to push ahead with launching his new imprint,
designed specifically to seize his authors’ e-book rights and offer them a
better deal than they were getting from publishers...'
News Review looks at an
extraordinary week in publishing. |
| Our self-publishing site,
WritersPrintshop,
provides a first-rate service and, if you're still
just thinking about it,
there's over 90 pages about self-publishing, providing the fullest
information on self-publishing available on the web. |
| Our latest My Say is from Dominae
Primus and says some pleasantly complimentary things about WritersServices
now, and then! |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is The Writing Forge Short Story Competition, with a first
prize of £700 ($1,098), a closing date of 30 August and an entry fee of £6
for the first entry. |
| 'The fundamental relationship between authors and publishers is
changing... We now have to say we are actually in the copyright business,
not the book business. It is a whole new dimension of understanding various
media, in the larger context of being the author's business partner.
Anthony Cheetham, Director and Associate Publisher of Atlantic UK, in the Bookseller,
quoted in our Comment
column. |
| WritersServices editor Kay Gale offers her tips on
Getting
through the Slush-pile, drawing on her own experience as an
editorial assistant reading through it. |
| 'You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement,
hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put
on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your
fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down
names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because
you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it
again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.' This advice from
Stephen King is in our Writers'
Quotes. |
26 July 2010
|
|
John Jenkins'
July column - John's view is that 'you can do everything with
dialogue: let your characters tell the story'. He illustrates
what he means by this and how you should go about it in his July
column. |
|
|
Inspired by Colin Robinson's recent article in
The Nation, News Review takes another
look at Amazon, still growing fast and now the largest bookseller in
the world, with all that entails. Are they using their power wisely?
What effect do they have on publishers? There's a stop press
too, relating to the latest big story on e-books. |
|
|
The English language
publishing world - in the face of a changing situation as
English becomes ever more established as the international language,
Chris Holifield has revised this article in the
Inside Publishing series, which
consists of 19 articles which take you inside the publishing world. |
|
|
‘Any bookseller who might be considering whether to order
more copies of Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel, which
(in May) took the Independent Foreign Fiction prize, should look at
this week's charts. Astonishingly, translations currently account
for 40 per cent of Britain's top-ten bestsellers.' Boyd Tonkin,
Literary Editor of the Independent in our
Comment column.. |
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|
'Poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can
ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written,
he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.' T S Eliot in our
Writers'
Quotes. |
19 July 2010
| News Review looks at the big
international publishing companies and what a recent study shows about how
they have fared in the rankings in the last year. Trade publishing is not
top of the charts and it is the companies which have a global approach which
have grown the most. But waht difference does this make to writers? |
| 'I think there was what people sometimes call 'a gap in the market'
because I wanted to get away from the fantasy and sensationalism of James
Bond and the Ludlum-esque stuff... after a while too much fantasy has a
bludgeoning effect: you accept that the guy can fly, or defuse a bomb with
bare hands, or whatever.' Jason Elliot, author of The Network, in
the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| Tips for Writers
is our latest 8-part 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
and Submission to
publishers and agents |
| Our Writing Opportunity
this week is the Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition, open to women only
and closing soon, on the 26 July. First prize is £5 for up to three poems. |
| Our checklist on
Entering competitions helps you to review how you approach
competitions and to make sure you give yourself the best possible
chance of winning. |
| 'The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which
he is not always master - something that at times strangely wills and works
for itself.' Charlotte Bronte in our
Writers' Quotes. |
12 July 2010
|
|
Do you want to make a
Table of Contents for your book? It looks good to provide one,
especially when you prepare a large document. It does not take long and the
benefits make it well worth doing. If you are using Microsoft Word, or
most other word-processing packages, it is remarkably easy to get a
professional-looking table which is generated for you by the software. Not
only will the table look good but the headings are ‘active’; so people
reading the document on a computer can click on the TOC and jump to the
place in the text. Chas Jones shows you how. |
|
|
'Following on from our look at prizes and what effect they have last
week, this week’s column will be devoted to new prizes. There has been a
proliferation of new ones launched over the last few years, so there’s quite
a lot to evaluate. Some of them focus on new work but only a proportion of
them are open for entries from unpublished writers.'
News Review looks at new prizes. |
|
|
Our latest
Writing Opportunity
is the Luke Bitmead Writer's Bursary, in memory of the young author
Luke Bitmead. The top prize is a publishing contract with Legend Press, as
well as a cheque for £2500. |
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|
'Only now that the book is out have I fully realized what the most
frightening part of the is process is. The questions: How will the reading
public respond? Do ads work? Do people even read much anymore, beyond
vampire books? Is the sophomore slump real? Is the sales rank on Amazon.com
a true indicator?... I want people to buy and read my book, but the reasons
for this want lie not in sales rank or blog hits. The reasons lie where they
always have for the artist. If we do our job right, writers can, in the
words of Muhammad Ali, shake up the world.' Glenn Taylor, author of
The Marrowbone Marble Company on Publishing Perspectives
in our
Comment column. |
|
|
Does your book need
copy
editing, either to prepare it for submission or so that you can
self-publish with confidence? Our team of skilled copy editors is ready to
help. Here's an article about
UK and American copy editing
and another about
the
difference between proof-reading and copy editing. |
|
|
'And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the
outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to
creativity is self-doubt.'
Sylvia Plath in our Writers'
Quotes. |
5 July 2010
|
|
New review of
The Writing
Workshop Notebook by Alan Ziegler
- our reviewer Maureen Kincaid Speller concluded that: 'This is an unconventional book about writing,
inspirational as much as it is practical, and focusing on an aspect of
the writing process that isn’t much discussed. It would, I think, prove
a valuable addition to the writing bookshelf if you are at all
interested in the workshopping process and what it involves.' |
|
|
'The literary world is awash with literary prizes, with new ones being set
up every year. But what effect do these prizes have and do they actually sell
more books?... The answer is mixed. Some of the biggest prizes do have a major
effect on sales but others have surprisingly little impact. The €100,000
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which bills itself as the world’s
largest prize for a single novel, was won recently by a novel in translation
which will probably not sell in really significant numbers...'
News Review investigates. |
|
|
Bob's Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer
offers entertaining insights into the life of an aspiring writer.
It's a WritersServices exclusive and you can go back to
the
start in 2001 and right through to its
end in
December 2007, when he reflected: 'Still haven’t broken through
my writer’s block. No longer even sure I want to. Why write? What’s writing
for? Have absolutely no idea. How can one add anything worthwhile to the
work of writers like Oscar Wilde? Yet the internet grows more vast by the
minute with the words of the millions who are certain their opinions are
worth airing.'
This year’s Bulwer-Lytton
Prize, the annual award for the worst opening sentence, has gone to
Molly Ringle's comparison of a lovers' kiss with the sucking of a
thirsty rodent. Given annually since 1982, the competition, sponsored by the English
department at San Jose State University, is inspired by the melodramatic
first sentence of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford. |
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|
'A multi-media strategy pays
richer dividends to busy, versatile authors for whom film adaptations, TV slots,
press columns and the like come easily. For focused literary types who simply
want the best deal for their words, other agents still keep faith with books
alone.' Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor, in the Independent,
on literary agents, quoted in our Comment column.
|
|
|
Thinking about subscribing to a writers' magazine?
Our Magazine Reviews offer a
unique service, guiding you through what's available for writers: Writers' News, Mslexia, Writers' Forum, Writer's Digest, Scriptwriter
and Self-Publishing Magazine. |
|
|
'Almost anyone can be an author; the business
is to collect money and fame from this state of being.' A A Milne in our
Writers' Quotes. |
21 June 2010
|
|
'An article in a recent edition of the Bookseller has highlighted the
ongoing pressure on acquisitions in publishing houses, which has now become
acute. Helen Garnons-Williams, Bloomsbury fiction editorial director said:
"Our entire business is based on confidence, whether among the publishers or
the agents, and pretty much everyone is wobbling because no one knows what
will sell." Auctions have often faltered because the recession is causing a
massive loss of confidence and publishers are becoming increasingly
risk-averse.' News Review has
the story. |
|
|
Our Writing Opportunity this
week is the wonderful new prize for unpublished novels set up by Terry
Pratchett and Transworld Publishers. Called The Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now Prize
it is for a publishing contract with Trnasworld with a £20,000 advance. |
|
|
Why do non-fiction books need an index? In
The Ins and Outs of Indexing
Joanne Phillips provides an answer, explains why it's a specialist job and why
computers can't achieve the same result as a skilled indexer. |
|
|
Our skilled
Indexing service.
Are you an author planning to compile your own
index? Have you been asked by your publisher to provide an index for
your book? Or are you self-publishing your work?
If so, don’t let your
readers down by offering them a sub-standard index. A professional
index will set your work apart from other self-published books.
|
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|
'I've always loved short stories. The process is probably
less anxious than writing a novel. There's something about the intensity of
a short story that I love... You can reinvent them all the time (whereas)
with the novel there's the huge weight of tradition. There's something about
modern life that suits the short story. It's a bit snipped up and jagged and
raw and I think stories are like that...' Michele Roberts, author of Mud, in the
Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column. |
|
|
The winners of the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets have just
been announced. Selima Hill won the Michael Marks
Poetry Award for her pamphlet Advice on Wearing Animal Prints
and HappenStance
won the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award on the basis of
their publishing programme in 2009. More on
Poetry Bookshop
Online, including the Chair of the Judges' fantastic speech, and
from the British Library. |
|
|
An Editor's Advice is a useful series is based on the
advice Maureen Kincaid Speller, a long-serving WritersServices
freelance editor, has given writers over the years. The series
covers
Dialogue,
doing further drafts,
genre writing,
planning,
points of view,
autobiography and travel
and
manuscript presentation. |
|
|
'Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all,
has to make sense.' Mark Twain in our
Writers' Quotes. |
14 June 2010
|
|
Our reviewer, Maureen Kincaid Speller, said of the
The Arvon Book of Life
Writing by Sally Cline and Carole Angier: 'Many people
want to write about someone’s life, perhaps their own, and there are courses
to suit every level of interest, from university masters degrees to local
college qualifications' and concluded that it was: 'a brisk and
helpful guide on how to set about writing a life story... It is a sensible
account of life writing from experienced practitioners of what is both art
and craft, and I recommend it!' |
|
|
'A major recent study led by Nevada
University has showed that regular access to books in the home had a direct
effect on children’s long-term educational achievement. Involving
70,000 people in 27 countries, it showed that the effect of having 500 books
in the home was to increase by three years the length of time that these
children subsequently spent in education.'
News Review reports.
|
|
|
Zoe Jenny has just published her first novel written in English,
The Sky is Changing.
She
is the author of The Pollen Room, written at the age of 23, which was
translated into 27 languages and is the best-selling debut Swiss novel of
all time. Zoe wrote a
My Say article
for us on writing in a new language, Cutting the Cord. |
|
|
'Books are not dead. They may appear
besieged, ever more so as fragile retailers hunker down to re-examine their
own business models. There may be fewer new titles published over the next
several years... but I am confident that the book business will
evolve, as it has done for hundreds of years, and will occupy a considerable
position as a ongoing and valued medium.' Laurence Orbach, CEO of
Quarto, in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
Tips for Writers is
our new series for writers and covers:
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
and Submission to
publishers and agents |
|
|
'The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most
of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map
of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at
odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even
survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.'
George Orwell in our Writers'
Quotes. |
7 June 2010
| John Jenkins' June column
looks at the recent decision by Rupert Murdoch to take the Times Online
private. But will this work, or are we all just too used to getting
things for free online? |
| 'The excitement surrounding the arrival of the i-Pad
in countries outside the US has caught the attention of the media,
reinforcing the idea that a mass audience is waiting to buy one and start
using it to read e-books. The arrival of the Kindle aroused similar
expectations and many articles presaging the end of the printed book...
‘Reading the Future’, the Bookseller’s third annual survey into what
readers and book-buyers are thinking, contradicts this view and shows that
the publishing world is much more focused on e-books than book-buyers are.'
News Review investigates. |
| Our Contract vetting
service may be just what you need if you've got an agreement with a
publisher but are now faced with dealing with the contract. Our
contracts expert can advise and help you make sure you get a good deal. |
| Our Writing Opportunity this week is the Writer's Bureau Poetry and Short Story Competition, with
prizes of £1,000, a £5 entry fee and closing on 30 June. |
| 'I do try and remember what it was like writing books in the
void, back when I had to worry about whether they were even going to see
print. That was not a good place. I am very grateful not to be there. I feel
I not only narrowly escaped obscurity but also having to give up writing
novels altogether, which would have broken my heart. It is easy to be blase
about having a bigger audience. I don't take it for granted.' Lionel
Shriver, whose new book is So Much For That, in the Sunday
Telegraph's Seven. |
| Our
surveys, which are responses from people coming to the site, have
some fascinating information which has been garnered over the years. We look
at your reading and writing habits, and what you think about the future of
publishing. |
| 'All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it
goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors
don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that
gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy
for it?' Philip Pullman in our Writers' Quotes. |
31 May 2010
|
|
London
Book Fair 2010: Masterclass - Organising author events -Amanda Pollard, illustrator of
An
Illustrated History of 1066, attends a London Book Fair Masterclass
to find out what part authors can play in organising their own bookshop
events. |
|
|
'Stieg Larsson notwithstanding, what are the chances of a
translated author selling well in the big English-speaking markets
of the US and the UK? The received wisdom has always been that
translations into English are tough going financially, with it
proving virtually impossible to make the figures work without an
English-language publisher on both sides of the Atlantic to pay for
the costs of translation.' News
Review looks at writers in translation in the headlines.
|
|
|
Our
Writing Opportunity this
week is The Tony Lothian Biographers' Club Prize, for an
uncommissioned first-time writer working on a
biography. The First Prize is
£2,000, there's an entrance fee of £10 and the closing date 1 August
2010. |
|
|
'I know it's somewhat of an unpopular opinion, but I think it's
unrealistic to expect that you can support yourself solely as a writer in this
economy... In the end, the better you make the book, the better the chances that
you'll get a healthy advance, and the harder you work with your publisher to
promote the book by publishing stories or nonfiction essays to raise your
profile, by blogging and keeping your website active, by thinking outside of the
box in terms of marketing and publicity, the better your book will do. But at
the end of the day it's the quality of the work that matters the most.' US
agent Julie Barer on mediabistro, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
We're proud of the good things writers have said about our site and have
collected them together on an Endorsements
page. |
|
|
'All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it
goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't
get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a
special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?'
Philip Pullman on writers' block in our
Writers' Quotes. |
24 May 2010
|
|
'The Penguin Group and the Pearson Foundation have launched an
interesting new charitable venture, designed both to get children reading
and to encourage them to become charitable givers. When a child reads a book
online, they are able to donate another book to be sent to a reading charity
and can choose from four options as to where their this book is sent. The
site is free, so the child can read a book, as well as giving one.
News Review reports. |
|
|
WiFi - Chas Jones looks at technical issues
relating to WiFi, explains how it works and investigates the security
issues which are involved. |
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'My job is to entertain. There is a contract between the reader and
the writer. The readers give me their hard-earned cash and I have to
entertain them... It's my role to come up with the goods. I work in an
entertainment industry. I tell stories, people read them and enjoy the
stories, so I get paid, and get to write more stories...' Jasper Fforde,
author of Shades of Gray, in the Independent on Sunday, quoted
in our Comment column. |
|
|
Our listing of
International
Book Fairs gives you the basic information about book fairs across
the world and links to their sites. |
|
|
This week's
Writing Opportunity is the
Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook
events for emerging writers
in London:
The Insider Guide to Hot to Get Published Saturday 19th June, 10am-4.30pm
and
Submitting Your Manuscript Wednesday 7 & 14 July 2010, 6-9pm. |
|
|
Our self-publishing site,
WritersPrintshop,
provides a first-rate service and, if you're still just thinking about it,
there's over 90 pages about self-publishing, providing the fullest
information available on the web. |
|
|
'Writing is not a job description. A great deal of it is luck. Don't
do it if you are not a gambler because a lot of people devote many years of
their life to it. I think people become writers because they are compulsive
wordsmiths.' Margaret Atwood in our
Writers' Quotes. |
17 May 2010
| Dark Web -
Charles Jones looks at the fascinating subject of the dark web and asks why you
might want to make your website invisible. |
| 'The case of Robin Price, a Devon-based literary agent who has just
appeared in court charged with stealing over half a million pounds from a number
of clients, is a salutary one for unpublished authors. Over a period of several
years, Price had bamboozled sums as large as £293,603 out of hopeful authors...
' News Review looks at fraudulent
agents and why you should beware of vanity publishers. |
| The BBC National Short Story Award 2010 is this week's
Writing Opportunity. It's the fifth
year of this award for a single short story and the first prize is £15,000. The
closing date is 18th June 2010. |
| Our 19-part
Inside Publishing
series offers a unique insider's look at the publishing industry and explains
how it works, with articles on
Advances and
Royalties,
the
English language publishing world,
Children's
publishing and much more. |
| 'This analogy between music and books is something that keeps popping up.
Many people are saying that digital file sharing "killed" the music industry and
that if the book industry isn’t careful, the same thing will happen to
publishing. But the book industry is not the music industry... Books... are
already their own device with no need for any sort of player.'
Mark Leslie in
The Mark, quoted in our Comment
column. |
| Interested in writers' software? There's a number of
packages which can help you with your writing reviewed in our
Writers' Software section. |
| ‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me,
I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken
off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any
other way?' Emily Dickinson in our
Writers' Quotes. |
10 May 2010
|
|
John Jenkins' May column
looks at how to kickstart writing a biography or family history, now a very
popular thing to write and something you can easily set out to do.
His May column shows how to get yourself started with websites,
books and magazines. |
|
|
'Every so often a completely unknown writer hits the headlines after
years of trying to break through and the dream come true provides fresh hope
for many others. Recently it was the turn of Australian Rebecca James, whose
new book Beautiful Malice was sold to Allen & Unwin, making her literally
cry with joy. The timing couldn’t have been more propitious, as she and her
partner had just closed down their struggling kitchen design business. This
was just the beginning though. A week later Faber acquired the UK rights,
then the German auction went through the roof.
News Review reports. |
|
|
| USB:
Chas Jones guides us through this useful gadget:
'Released in April of the millennium year, this connection has been
a part of a revolution in the way we connect items to our computers.
Before USB connecting was an unreliable process but coupled with the
arrival of USB we had versions of Window that could support 'plug
and play' which made the business of attaching things to your
computer at least an order of magnitude simpler.... ' |
|
|
|
|
Rotten
Rejections lists the famous writers who had their work rejected:
The Diary of Anne Frank (‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have
a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the
“curiosity” level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which
was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell
about 25 million copies) was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about
an artist.’ |
|
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'The sudden rush of Kindles, tablets and readers strikes me as
strangely illogical. Reading is supposed to be in danger, in decline. And
yet somehow these devices are going to make it more attractive... Call me
old-fashioned or just call me old. But you can keep your e-book ancillaries.
Stories are enough for me.' Anthony Horowitz, author of The Power of
the Necropolis in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
Does your book need
copy
editing, either to prepare it for submission or so that you can
self-publish with confidence? Our team of skilled copy editors is ready to
help. Here's an article about
UK and American copy editing
and another about
the
difference between proof-reading and copy editing. |
|
|
'I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all,
they are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.' Somerset Maugham in our
Writers'
Quotes. |
3 May 2010
|
|
'Unable to make it across the Atlantic to deliver a speech in London
because of the ash, Mike Shatzkin asked someone else to deliver his speech
and it can be found on his blog. And uncomfortable it certainly is this
time. In a sobering analysis of the next 20 years, he says there is one
inexorable truth: ‘The price consumers will be willing to pay for content is
going to go down because of the laws of supply and demand.’
News Review investigates. |
|
|
The
Digital Rights Management debate - Chas Jones looks at the way the views
on digital rights management are changing. Is generosity a good
sales strategy and what about piracy? |
|
|
Ready to submit? Our page on
Making
submissions helps guide you through the process and
Your
Submission Package shows you what to send. |
|
|
'Writing fiction is inevitably much more personal. Not necessarily
autobiographical, but much closer to your way of seeing the world, and much
more demanding. I find it much harder... It’s a personal form of expression
as opposed to a screenplay where I think you’re second-guessing the director
or the producer or the audience.’ David Nicholls, author of One Day
and many TV scripts, in the Bookseller, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
Are you a poet who is trying to get your work published?
Have a look at
Getting your poetry
published and there's also a review of Chris Hamilton-Emery of Salt
Publshing's
101 Ways to Make Poems Sell, the best book on the subject. |
|
|
There's just time to enter this week's
Writing Opportunity if you
hurry. The Templar Poetry Pamphlet and Collection Prizes close on 8
May and have an entry fee of £18 and you can enter online. |
|
|
'The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul
with the simplicity that can be universally understood.' Allan Sillitoe,
author of Saturday Night and Saturday Morning, who died last week, in
our Writers' Quotes. |
26 April 2010
| 'It’s been a rather surreal week in the publishing world, as the
suspension of flights destroyed what was to have been the best London Book
Fair ever... The second half of the week has been enlivened by the
extraordinary story of Orlando Figes, distinguished historian known for his
books on Russia. Poisonous reviews of his rivals’ books had been posted
anonymously on Amazon, but using the pen-name ‘Historian’ aka
Orlando-Birkbeck’.' News Review reports. |
| Our latest Success story
is that of Rosie Alison, who has just been
shortlisted for the all-female 2010 Orange Prize for fiction with her first
novel, a great vindication for this author whose first book was eight years
in the writing. |
| If you want editorial input from our professional
editors, have a look at our
Services, especially
our Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing
and our new service,
Indexing. |
| 'We're back to who can tell the best story. Will it be you, about
your own life? Or will you let others tell your story for you? Literature
offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and
retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and
surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not
the facts, but the interpretation.' Jeanette Winterson on her first
book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in The Times, quoted in
our Comment column. |
| Are you writing poetry but finding it difficult to get it published?
Look at our page on
Getting your poetry
published. |
| 'Once a book has been declared a bestseller, its sales accelerate -
like the freshwater polyp the best seller breeds from itself - and the
book-buyer can happily accept the judgement of the great majority.'
Frank Muir, in our Writers' Quotes.
|
19 April 2010
|
|
New
agents' listings - our brand-new, up-to-date agents' listings
have been compiled from agents' own websites and other information
they publish about what they're looking for. You can use them to
research which agents to submit to. The listings cover UK and US
agents, with separate listings for children's agents in the UK, and
international agents from all over the world. |
|
|
Use these listings to find the right agent for your work and
then our pages on Finding
an Agent,
Making submissions and
Your submission package
will help with your submissions. |
|
|
Become a biographer - Chas Jones looks at why you might decide
to become a biographer,
covering searching out the right subject, dealing with celebrity and
whether you should make your book fact or fiction, footnote of
history or a piece of literature. |
|
|
Also on the site are
Writing a biography or autobiography and
Writing Memoir or Autobiography. |
|
|
'The subject of this week’s News Review was to have been the
London Book Fair (LBF) how it has grown in importance and numbers
and what its role is in relation to other international book fairs.
But nature, with supreme indifference to the problems of human
beings, has decreed that the volcanic eruption in Iceland should
make it impossible for anyone to fly in and out of the UK... '
News Review reports on how
this disaster is affecting the Fair. |
|
|
Read Michael Legat's 19 incredibly useful 19
Factsheets on everything from plotting your novel
to publishers' contracts. |
|
|
'The electronic book offers me a convenient extra way to read
while on the move. Given a good enough screen I am sure that I will
use it, and I certainly like the idea of being able to buy and
download difficult-to-locate texts at any time of the day or night.
This may also be the device that will allow newspapers and magazines
to survive as revenue-earning businesses. But I do not expect to
stop using physical books.' Lisa Jardine in 'A Point of View' on
BBC Radio Four, quoted in our Comment column. |
|
|
Our checklist on
Entering competitions helps you to review how you approach
competitions and to make sure you give yourself the best possible
chance of winning. |
|
|
‘If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I
wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.’ Isaac Asimov in our
Writers' Quotes,
the best
listing on the web. |
12 April 2010
|
|
Online advertising for writers
- Chas Jones looks at how writers can
benefit from using the web as an advertising medium, including using
Google ads and display ads to promote your book online. |
|
|
‘It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world --
it's going to be a game changer’, said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.
‘iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close
to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad’. But is it
really game over for Amazon's Kindle, and how are e-books faring
anyway? News Review reports.
|
|
|
In
John Jenkins' April column
he ruminates on what writers can learn
from the great Anthony Trollope and concludes: His success is an inspiration to those
who feel they have failed early in life and fear failure more than
failure itself... he would set himself a target
of 5,000 words a day – or 28,000 words a week – and keep to it.
|
|
|
Self-publish your way through the
recession - Our article by Chris Holifield, first published
in The Self-Publishing Magazine, looks at what's going on in the
publishing world and why it might make sense to consider self-publishing. |
|
|
'You could argue that all novels stand or fall on how
convincing and engaging their plot and characters are, but with
crime fiction and thrillers these ingredients don't just underpin
the story: they are the story.' Stephanie Merritt, aka S J
Parris, the author of Heresy, in the Observer, quoted
in our Comment column. |
|
|
What does it take to
market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today?
Joanne Phillips
provides the answer, which is that the
internet is a fertile ground for writers. You just need to know how to
make it work for you... |
|
|
'I think readers who aren’t used to reading contemporary
poetry are surprised to find it’s about our world now, our
experience; it talks about movies and pop music and stuff. It’s not
some fuddy-duddy thing, and most of it contains a good deal of
imaginative brilliance. My experience is that when people read
contemporary poetry they are engaged and interested in a way they
did not expect to be.' John Stammers in our
Writers' Quotes. |
5 April 2010
|
|
This year’s National Poetry
Competition (which actually has an international entry although it is
run by the UK Poetry Society) has been won by Helen Dunmore for her poem
‘The Malarkey’. Better known as a novelist, Dunmore has produced nine poetry
collections and a number of novels. This poem was submitted on impulse just
before the closing date, so it was a great surprise for the poet when she
won the £5,000 prize. News Review
reports. |
|
|
If you're thinking about making sound recordings of your work,
either podcasts or an audiobook, take a look at our
Audio Publishing
section. |
|
|
The 2009 Diagram Prize winner,
of the wonderfully barmy
Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year for 2009 has just been announced.
And here's where
you can find the
shortlist. |
|
|
Have you looked at our Problem Page? You can
send in your own problem to us, but
this one is pretty interesting because it's about problems with finding
an agent. |
|
|
'What keeps you writing
is that you don't ever enter a place that feels like home at last. You're still
going uphill. There's still a little glowing light in the distance that you're
trying to get to.' Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog
in the Night-time in the Daily Telegraph, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
We've just updated our very useful
Printing and Publishing Glossary. |
|
|
'The "greatness" of literature cannot be determined solely by
literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or
not can be determined only by literary standards.' T S Eliot in our
Writers' Quotes. |
22 March 2010
|
|
Chas Jones looks at the tricky subject of
Defamation ,
the defences against it, defamation and free speech, and how it works in
different parts of the world. It's all too easy to defame someone, so authors
should be wary about the risks. |
|
|
At the report back from the annual UK Books and Consumers report this
week, Book Marketing Limited’s Research Director Steve Bohme pointed out
some interesting changes in consumer behaviour relating to books. Nearly
half of all book purchases were gift purchases, an increase from one-third
in 2005, a stunning proportion which shows that books have not lost their
attraction as gifts... Purchases were down 4% in 2009, compared with 2005.
News Review reports. |
|
|
Hilary Mantel is the subject of our latest
Success Story. After
25
years of writing and eleven books published it's good to that winning the
Booker has transformed the career of this
excellent writer. Wolf Hall has now sold 196,463
copies in the UK alone and it is being widely translated. |
|
|
Tips for Writers
is our latest 8-part 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
and Submission to
publishers and agents |
|
|
'(Historical novels) are just novels that have a past location and
are therefore not swept away by the tide of present day life so fast. This
is the great agony of trying to capture the present in a novel - it's a very
slow thing to write and present life moves on in a hideously unexpected and
overtaking kind of way.' Rose Tremain, whose new novel is Trespass,
in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column. |
|
|
'Writing is a dog's life, but the only one worth living.'
Gustave Flaubert
in our Writers' Quotes.
|
15 March 2010
|
|
Our latest review covers the
4th Edition
of Giles Clark and Angus Phillips'
Inside Book
Publishing. Reviewer Chris Holifield
commented that it had been substantially revised and that it 'provides
an excellent introduction to anyone with a professional interest in
publishing... No writer equipped with this book need ever feel
like an ignorant outsider again.' |
|
|
'This year’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair runs from 23 to 26
March and provides a good opportunity to have a look at the
children’s publishing industry. Not everything in the garden is
lovely but children’s trade (general) publishing is undoubtedly
doing a lot better than its adult counterpart.'
News Review on the
biggest children's book fair. |
|
|
If you want editorial input from our professional editors,
have a look at our
Services,
especially our
Editor's Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's Services. Also available is
Copy editing,
Manuscript Typing
and our new service,
Indexing. |
|
|
'Whatever the future, a new generation of agents and
publishers sees the old publishing model as broken. There must, they
say, be a marriage between virtual and old text worlds. This
generation speaks the jargon of "disintermediation" (roughly,
commercial streamlining). The boom days are over. Writers will have
to adapt.' Robert McCrum in the Guardian, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
Our latest
Writing
Opportunity is the Bridport Prize, with prizes for poetry,
short stories and flash fiction. Entry is open to everyone over 16,
there are entry fees and the closing date is 30 June 2010. |
|
|
What does it take to
market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today?
Joanne Phillips
provides the answer, which is that the
internet is a fertile ground for writers. You just need to know how to
make it work for you... |
|
|
‘It really is most extraordinary, having lived all these
years as a cheerful but inconspicuous blue-stockinged, gray-haired,
backseat publishing lady, to become a sort of show- stopper.’
Diana Athill, 92-year-old author of Somewhere Towards the End in our
Writers' Quotes. |
8 March 2010
|
|
Latest
changes in the book trade 7: in the latest part of this series, Chris Holifield
looks at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses
might transform authors' capacity to the license use of their books for
all sorts of purposes. |
|
|
The rest of the series covers
Bookselling,
Publishing,
Print on Demand and the
Long Tail, Self-publishing - career
suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences
and Copyright. |
|
|
John Jenkins'
March column covers the writing of memoirs and shows how his students
have approached writing in this genre. He then provides an elegant essay on the
semi-colon. |
|
|
'The staggering number of 285,000 new titles and editions were
self-published and published by community presses in the US last year, balanced
against a slightly lower figure of 275,000 coming from traditional publishing
houses... The Nielsen figures for the UK are 133,224, quite modest by
comparison... So, what do these huge figures mean for authors? At a time when
it’s increasingly hard to get published, why are there so many titles coming
out? The main answer of course is self-publishing and print on demand in
general. News Review reports. |
|
|
An Editor's Advice is a useful series is based on the
advice Maureen Kincaid Speller, a long-serving WritersServices
freelance editor, has given writers over the years. The series
covers
Dialogue,
doing further drafts,
genre writing,
planning,
points of view,
autobiography and travel
and
manuscript presentation. |
|
|
'If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for
writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading,
jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer’s share of a
book that sells for £10, after his or her agent’s fee, hovers between 35p and
40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer.' Henry
Porter in the Guardian, quoted in our Comment
column. |
|
|
'The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The
intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great
doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out.' Lillian Hellman in our
Writers' Quotes. |
1 March 2010
|
|
Writing Memoir and
Autobiography - if you want to write a memoir you’re in good
company – lots of writers want to try their hand at this category. In the latest
in our new Categories series Chris Holifield looks at how to set about
writing your memoir and how to publish it. |
|
|
Other articles in the series are
Writing
Historical Fiction, Writing Romance,
Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy,
Writing Crime Fiction
and Writing non-fiction. |
|
|
'Quick Reads recently surveyed over 30,000 of their readers and found
that 100% said Quick Reads had made a positive impact on their lives. 88%
were more confident and 41% felt their job prospects had improved since
reading a Quick Read. Significantly, in terms of encouraging book reading,
82% said they were more likely to read another book after reading a Quick
Read.' News Review investigates
Quick Reads with World Book Day coming up on 4 March. |
|
|
Real Time Web for Old Time Books:
the Benefit of Social Media for Publishers and Authors - Fauzia
Burke explores the online activities you can do in real time -- from status
updates on Facebook, to microblogging on Twitter to uploading photos and
videos on other social media sites. If you want to explore how social
networking can help you market your book, her article provides a
starting-point. |
|
|
Does your manuscript need
Copy
editing? Do you know the difference between
copy
editing and proof-reading? Divided by a common language - are you
wondering about the difference between
American and British copy editing? |
|
|
‘Books are not a threatened species. They are ordinary features of
the ordinary world... 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, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
From our archive, five excerpts from
Inspired Creative Writing
by Alexander Gordon Smith from the
brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series. |
|
|
'If you steal from one author, it's research; if you steal from many,
it's research.' Wilson Mizner in our
Writers' Quotes. |
|
|
The March Magazine is here! |
22 February 2010
|
|
‘I am saddened that yet another claim has
been made that I have taken material from another source to write Harry.
The fact is I had never heard of the author or the book before the first
accusation by those connected to the author's estate in 2004; I have
certainly never read the book.' J K Rowling.
News Review looks at the latest plagiarism claim. |
|
|
The 2009 Diagram Prize
shortlist - Click through to find the shortlist for the oddest title
of the year. Will it be Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter or Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich?
Your chance to place your
vote on the Bookseller website. |
|
|
'I think John Irving said in an interview something which nobody says
about writing, which is that writing is sitting down and typing that
sentence, and that sentence creates the next sentence and the character
grows and the story grows from the physical act of typing what is going on
in your head.' Deborah Moggach in Scriptwriter, quoted in our
Comment column. |
|
|
My Say 9 is from Zoe Jenny,
who was born in Switzerland but is shortly publishing her
first book written in English:
'Now that I am writing in English I have to start all over again, earning
my credentials in a new market. I am essentially back to square one. But
maybe that is the most exciting place to be.' |
|
|
The latest
addition to our fictionalised stories
about our services - how Alison used our children's editorial services
to get her magic unicorn story right. |
|
|
Plus how an
Editor's Report helped
Catherine, How
Copy editing turned
Tony's
work into a publishable manuscript, how
Makito benefited from
Manuscript Polishing to get his PhD into
shape, Self-publishing helped promote
Annie's
cake business and how Manuscript Typing helped John to get
his father's wartime diary into
good shape for publication. |
|
|
Thinking about subscribing to a writers' magazine?
Our Magazine Reviews offer a
unique service, guiding you through what's available for writers: Writers' News, Mslexia, Writers' Forum, Writer's Digest, Scriptwriter
and Self-Publishing Magazine. |
|
|
'Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within
three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most
implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended
for.'
Mark Twain in our Writers'
Quotes. |
15 February 2010
|
|
Latest
changes in the book trade 6: in the sixth part of this revised
overview of what's going on in the book world, Chris Holifield tackles
the thorny and currently highly contentious subject of copyright. |
|
|
As e-books move into the mainstream and the parties involved in the
Google Settlement continue to slug it out, copyright is at the centre of
publishers' and authors' anxieties. Is this the end of the slush-pile?
News
Review looks at the problems facing unpublished authors who are
trying to get their work into print. |
|
|
Is a creative writing degree
really worth it? Having completed a creative writing degree, Josh
Spears thought he would become a bestselling writer or at least be able
to get a job.
Neither of these has happened, so was it worth it and would he
advise other writers to put themselves through the course? |
|
|
The great writers and the canon... The idea of what constitutes literary value has
changed or become less consensual. It’s harder to establish what is good and
what is not, and that is one of the things that forms the canon. Barnes, Amis,
McEwan were the last people through the door, and then the door closed, and then
the building fell down.’ Giles Foden, author of Turbulence, in the Bookseller,
quoted in our Comment
column. |
|
|
Why do non-fiction books need an index? In
The Ins and Outs of Indexing
Joanne Phillips provides an answer, explains why it's a specialist job and why
computers can't achieve the same result as a skilled indexer. |
|
|
Our new
Indexing service. Are you an author planning to compile your own
index? Have you been asked by your publisher to provide an index for
your book? Or are you self-publishing your work? If so, don’t let your
readers down by offering them a sub-standard index. A professional
index will set your work apart from other self-published books.
|
|
|
'This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake
up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.' Martin Amis, in our
Writers' Quotes.
|
8 February 2010
|
|
Don't procrastinate!
- 'Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always
easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on
the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from
procrastination.'
Chris Holifield looks at how to get yourself going. |
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Figures for 2009 just released by the big UK
publishers show just how tough a time they had and what a difficult book market
we’ve had in the past year. Seven of the top UK publishers had negative sales
growth last year... The only one of the top four to do well was the market
leader Hachette and that was because of Stephenie Meyer, whose £29.4m ($46m) of
sales accounted for an extraordinary 10.2% of the group’s total UK sales.
News Review reflects on what all this means for authors. |
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Poem for Haiti -
from Gillian Clarke, National Poet for Wales, a beautiful poem which
is a lament for Haiti. |
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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 on finding agency clients through the web,
quoted in our Comment column. |
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Our
review of FAQs: Frequently
Asked Questions from ambitious writers and the answers by John Jenkins,
our columnist and the former editor of Writers’
Forum, is packed with answers
to all the questions you have ever thought of asking.
Chris Holifield's review concludes that: 'All in
all, this is a valuable resource, especially for the new writer, but
also for anyone who has tried to work their way through the writing
jungle.' |
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If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a
look at our Services, especially our
Editor's
Report,
Submission Critique and
Children's
Services. Also available is
Copy
editing, Manuscript Typing
and our new service,
Indexing. |
|
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'The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to
bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of
state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic
schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his
fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.' W H Auden
in our Writers' Quotes. |
1 February 2010
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News Review looks at the battle of the titans which has just commenced: 'This has
been one of those weeks when there’s been so much happening that it’s
difficult to cover it in a single column. Apple has broken the news of its
iPad and, amidst the buzz about that, Amazon has already started to fight
back. This could be a turning-point and how publishing, books and authors
come out of all this is hard to predict...' |
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In
his latest column John
Jenkins deals with the famous piece of advice to writers: 'Show, don't
tell'. If you've ever wondered exactly what this means in practice, John's
examples provide a quick tutorial and will help you to make your own writing
work much better. |
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Bob's Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer
offers entertaining insights into the life of an aspiring writer.
It's a WritersServices exclusive and you can go back to
the
start in 2001 and right through to its
end in
December 2007, when he reflected: 'Still haven’t broken through my
writer’s block. No longer even sure I want to. Why write? What’s writing
for? Have absolutely no idea. How can one add anything worthwhile to the
work of writers like Oscar Wilde? Yet the internet grows more vast by the
minute with the words of the millions who are certain their opinions are
worth airing.' |
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‘According to Amazon Kindle's vice-president, Ian
Freed, the success of the Kindle signals the end of physical books: 'The only
question is does it take three years, five years or 20 years?' I remain to
be persuaded that e-readers are capable of matching the varied activities we
engage in when reading. More is required to satisfy the dedicated reader than
replicating the content and appearance of a printed book, or emulating the
action of "turning pages" using a tap on a touch-sensitive screen.'
Lisa Jardine in A Point of View on BBC Radio
Four, quoted in our Comment column. |
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Is your progress as a writer stymied by the fact that you have old
typewritten or even handwritten manuscripts that you can't face retyping
onto a computer? Our Typing service
can help with this. |
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This week's
Writing Opportunity
is the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, offering
£5,000 for a poetry pamphlet published in the UK in 2009. Self-published
work is eligible. |
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'The very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget
that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth
anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been
read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can
refer to the passages you want in it.' John Ruskin in our
Writers' Quotes. |
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The new February
Magazine is
ready!
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25 January 2010
| International Book Fairs 2010 -
our updated line-up of the year's book fairs across the world, a
unique feature of the site which is much in demand. Is there a
book fair near you? It might be worth planning to attend it if so. |
| 'So are agents really feeling the pinch now? Long
regarded as the fats cats of the industry, there are signs that the London
agency constituency is really beginning to join in the pain. You cannot
escape the conclusion that there will be redundancies, closures and mergers of
agencies... some of the larger agencies have
become quite big businesses and they will find it difficult to sustain their
cost bases. News Review examines the latest news from the agency world. |
| There's just time still to enter the Cardiff International Poetry
Competition 2010 if you do it online. It closes on 29 January, so
hurry! This week's
Writing Opportunity has a prize
of £5,000 and is open to all. |
| 'We all know the adage of 'everyone has a book in them'
- but how many truly have the commitment, courage, tenacity - and skills - to
write a series of novels? Writing a novel is not about ‘burning ambition’ -
where ambition is solely about publication or money or fame. For a novel to be a
good novel - and worthy of the generous readers who part with their cash to buy
it - it can only arise from the author’s absolute desire to write that story out
of their system - and being blessed with the necessary talent to do so...'
Freya North, in a Bookseller blog, quoted in our
Comment column. |
| Sell, don't tell: 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 some
pretty strict ‘rules’ which you need to follow if you are to maximise your
chance of success. Read Chas
Jones' two part article. |
| 'Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry
is given to us by those who do.' Cyril Connolly in our
Writers' Quotes.
|
18 January 2010
| There's better news from the UK book trade. 2009 was down just 1.2% down in value and only 0.5%
down in volume in a year which has seen a contraction in the overall economy of
5%, so the book trade can justifiably claim that book sales have held up
reasonably well. News Review reports. |
| This week's Writing Opportunity
is the
Biscuit International Short Story Prize 2010 for
stories of 1000-5000 words. The deadline is 14th April 2010, it's open to all and there's a £10/£11 entry
fee, so get writing! |
|
The
winner of
the 2009 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry is announced! |
| ‘Self-publishing has taken a huge leap forward in
recent years. It’s always existed, but with all the technological changes from
desk-top publishing systems to POD to blogging and so forth it’s now more
acceptable than ever before... The trend is hardly surprising: mainstream publishers have cut back and
cut back, so that even authors who had niche titles published and might have
been in print for some years now find it harder and harder to keep their books
available.' Eileen Campbell, Mind, Body and Spirit expert and
author of 6 books, in Bookbrunch, quoted in our
Comment
column. |
|
Thinking about publishing your own book?
Is
self-publishing for you?
helps you think this through and our
WritersPrintShop provides the best writers' resource on self-publishing on the web,
90 pages of information, as
well as a first-rate service. |
|
Here are answers to the essential
questions:
How much will it cost?
How long will it take?
& How much might you earn? |
| 'One man is as good as another until he has written a book.' Benjamin Jowett in our
Writers'
Quotes.
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11 January 2010
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'Americans are buying fewer books because of the economic downturn, and purchase
cheaper books when they do buy... Knocking on the head a favourite publishing theory
that books do well in recession, only 2% of consumers said that they were
choosing to buy books as an alternative to more expensive kinds of
entertainment. So, green shoots of recovery notwithstanding, the American book
trade is still experiencing tough times.' News Review looks at the American
book business. |
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John Jenkins' January
column
looks at a Robert Altman film, The Gingerbread
Man, based on a discarded story by John Grisham: 'Although it wasn’t Grisham’s best story, I enjoyed it. But the moral of this
story is: never throw anything away.
I realise that Grisham could probably sell his laundry list to a publisher but
for your new year resolution, dip down into that drawer and see what you can
salvage. You may find a gem.
And after you have done that go through stories and features you have sold in
the UK and see if you can sell them on for the American and other rights.' |
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'So you want to write historical fiction? Your timing is good, because historical fiction is fashionable
again after many years in the doldrums. In fact it’s so popular that it
has virtually reinvented itself as a category...' The latest article in
Chris Holifield's Categories series explores the market and approaches
to
Writing Historical Fiction.
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Other articles in the series cover
Writing Romance,
Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy,
Writing Crime Fiction
and Writing Non-fiction. |
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'My life changed when I took control of my time.
Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, I sit down to write for three
hours every day. It's much more effective - it's about giving yourself the
space for creativity to come.
Esther Freud, author of Love Falls in the
Sunday Times' Style magazine, quoted in our
Comment column. |
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We were very honoured recently that the British Library asked to archive
www.writersservices.com in its web archive, where
you can find it at British Library web archive. The UK Web Archive is a corpus of websites selected by leading UK
institutions for their historical, social and cultural significance in the UK.
Also listed in this article on
their archive are other international web archives. |
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'I have never know any distress that an hour's reading
did not relieve.'
Baron de Montesquieu in our Writers' Quotes. |
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The January
Magazine is here! |
Track all previous
updates to the site in the weekly archive back to 2001
2001
2002 2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
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