May 2004

News Review

Book Aid makes a real difference. ‘If education is the road out of poverty, books are the wheels needed for the journey.’
Eats, Shoots - and Sells. Lynne Truss's book powers on to achieve international sales in its home-grown English.
Bad news/good news: declining book sales in the US contrasted with a growing market in the UK.
Free Culture is free on the web. Will it help sales and is free download the right way to go?
Crisis in the libraries - could they cease to exist in 15 years' time?

Comment

‘That's why you get up in the morning with a bounce in your feet. You've discovered a new author you think is marvelous. Roger W Straus of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who died last week
'The more I tried, the more I realised that I was involved with a book in which I would have to find a way to write myself in.'
Sue Miller on writing about her father's Alzheimer's
'Everything in the book has to be pulling the story forward, and anything that is just there because it's quite fun to write has to go.' N M Browne on children's writing
'Is literary fiction better than genre fiction? 'Novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.’ Mark Haddon
'Cheap books are suddenly less attractive if they jeopardise bookshops.' David Blow quoted on 'an impossible race with the supermarket sector'.

Writers' Quotes

‘It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.' Nietzsche

Poster

This month's new poster deals with Working under Pressure

Festivals

Courtesy of Writers' Forum magazine, an up-to-date listing and description of of the 2004 book and writers' festivals in the UK.

How Not to Write a Novel; Confessions of a Midlist Author

Our second excerpt from David Armstrong's entertaining book

'The same publisher. The same book. A different publisher's reader, maybe...

Reports from the London Book Fair:

3 Standards

Competition

with copies of the Writers' Guides as prizes

Bob's Journal goes into its 4th volume

Macbeth strikes Bob as similar to Eastenders. 'With 27 scenes it uses almost the same pace of cutting, and the plot fairly whistles along in the way TV viewers have come to expect, so much so I can hardly keep track of the bodies mounting up.'

This week

Inside Publishing

A new article in this series deals with copyright and how to protect your writing.

Reviews

The second in our new series focusing on writers' magazines looks at Writer's Digest.

Writers' Forum Column

Did you know that Shakespeare had a vocabulary of 28,000 words whereas the average person today gets by on 10,000? The Editor's View from the Editor of Writers' Forum magazine.

Competition

Read about the Allison & Busby Writer's Guides

We Watch the web for writers

Got a virus? Here's what to do about it.

WritersPrintShop

Our design, print and distribution service for self-publishers.