18 February 2013 - What's new
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 storiesThe 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.
