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18 June 2012 - What's new

18 June 2012
  • 'Last week's BookExpo AmericaBookExpo America, commonly referred to within the book publishing industry as BEA. The largest annual book trade fair in the United States 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 Services, especially our Editor's Report, Submission Critique and Children's Services. Also available is Copy editing, Manuscript Typing and 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 PhillipsUK-based freelance writer and ghostwriter. She has had articles published in national writing magazines, and has ghostwritten books on subjects as diverse as hairdressing and keeping chickens. Visit her at www.joannephillips.co.uk 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.