31 March 2014 - What's new
31 March 2014
- A recent Bookseller interview with Tom Weldon, now CEO of Penguin Random House UKPenguin Random House have more than 50 creative and autonomous imprints, publishing the very best books for all audiences, covering fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, autobiographies and much more. Click for Random House UK Publishers References listing, suggested that the big publishers have accommodated ebooks and are actually doing quite well. He was positive about maintaining the different imprints, which must be good news for writers: ‘We need to protect and nurture the diverse centres of publishing excellence. We want them to get on and do their own thing...' News Review
- This year's Diagram Prize winner is announced!
- From our Archive there's the serialisation of How Not to Write a Novel: Confessions of a Midlist Author by David Armstrong: 'Every week, agents and publishers receive hundreds of manuscripts from would-be authors. Of these, fewer than 1% will make it into print. David Armstrong was one of these, his first crime novel, Night's Black Agents, was plucked from the slush pile at a major publisher and published to acclaim. So far, so good. But what rapidly became clear to Armstrong was that being a published novelist is not always as glamorous as it seems from the outside...'
- This week's links: a report from the Twitter Fiction Festival BookBrunch - Behind the hashtag - genuine creativity and innovation; an article on those key opening lines of a novel How technology distractions are making novels' first lines even more important - Telegraph; from the New York Times, a look at how poorly children from diverse backgrounds are served in books The Apartheid of Children's Literature - NYTimes.com; the Amazon debate rumbles on Why Book Publishers Need to Think Like Amazon | Publishing Perspectives; and a positive report on Quick Reads Tech gives strugglers the confidence to read more | Books | The Observer.
- A Printer's View 1 is the first in a series of occasional articles looking at self-publishing from the printing perspective. In Self-publishing? How do you prepare your files for print? Andy EdmonsonManaging Director, Purely Digital, a quality digital printing service based in Derby; over 20 years' experience in printing industry; written for various publications including Print Week and popular blog Just Creative, Managing Director at Purely Digital, looks at this central question. 'You've considered the arguments for and against self-publishing and decided that it's the best option for you. Great; you've got over one of the many difficult hurdles of getting your book out to the world, the next step is to transform the files on your computer into a physical printed book.
- 'Dickens is the best example of someone who, I think, did what I do, or what I try to do, which is to take a difficult or contentious moral or social issue and get people to think about it through fiction. You see highbrow reviews of highbrow books that no one has ever heard of. You see what awards are given at the National Book Awards. But I really wonder 500 years from now, or even 100 years from now, what's going to stick around? Is it going to be those books, or is it going to be, as we've seen in the past, what was read widely...' Jodie Piccoult, author of The Storyteller, in The Times., quoted in our Comment column.
- 'Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.' Leonard Cohen in our Writers' Quotes.
