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5 August 2013 - What's new

5 August 2013
  • Two press articles this week have raised an interesting debate about the role of writers and what it's reasonable to expect them to do, and the importance of readers in the writing-and-reading continuum. News Review
  • 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 HolifieldManaging director of WritersServices; spent working life in publishing,employed by everything from global corporations to start-ups; track record includes: editorial director of Sphere Books, publishing director of The Bodley Head, publishing director for start-up of upmarket book club, The Softback Preview, editorial director of Britain’s biggest book club group, BCA, and, most recently, deputy MD and publisher of Cassell & Co. She is also currently the Director of the Poetry Book Society; During all of this time aware of problems faced by writers, as publishing changed from idiosyncratic cottage industry, 'occupation for gentlemen', into corporate business of today. Writers encountered increasing difficulty in getting books edited or published. Authors create the books which are the raw material for the whole business. She believes it is time to bring them back to centre stage. looks at how to set about writing your memoir and how to publish it.
  • 'I don't see female characters as vicious. In literature, you find so many instances of male characters who are immoral, tormented or angry - all the things that male characters seem very freely able to be...' Gillian Flynn, the author of Gone Girl, who has sold the film rights and will be writing the screenplay, in The Times, quoted in our Comment column.
  • This week's Writing Opportunity is the National Poetry competition, open to all adult poets across the world writing in English, whch has a closing date of 31 October.  First Prize: £5000, Second Prize: £2000, Third Prize: £1000, Seven Commendations: £100.
  • The view from a publisher's desk is the first in a series of articles by Tom Chalmers, MD of Legend Press, giving a publisher's view of the submission process and what a publisher is looking for.
  • ‘I think what I love most [about writing] is that feeling that you really nailed something. I rarely feel it with a whole piece, but sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line. ‘ Andrew Dubus III in our Writers' Quotes.