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8 December 2014 - What's new

8 December 2014
  • 'Two extremely different but very successful novels have launched new book-writing careers. On the more traditional side there is Milena Busquets' This Too Shall Pass, a thinly-fictionalised second novel about her relationship with her mother, the publisher Esther Busquets, who developed the Catalan family publishing house, Lumen, into a successful business with an international reputation for literary publishing, and died in 2012. Milena's book is now sold in 26 countries and will be publishing in the UK and the US next spring...' News Review
  • This week's Writing Opportunity is the Skylark Literary Magical Competition for new, unagented and unpublished fiction authors who are writing for middle-grade (aged 8-12) readers. It's closing on 24 December.
  • Our Children's Editorial Services offer a Reader's and Editor's Report and Copy editing, all from expert children's editors.
  • Thinking of becoming an indie author and publishing your own book? 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' fantastically useful WritersServices Self-publishing Guide consists of ten articles which guide you through self-publishing from the writer's point of view, with many useful tips and a lot of good up-to-the-minute advice.
  • 'I grew up in London for the first 10 years, then my parents divorced, which was agonising. But it was while I was at boarding-school that I made the connection between putting my mind into some imaginative world and finding solace for homesickness and sadness. If I did that, I felt better. It would be like crying. I discovered this miraculous thing that has held true all my life, which is that writing can take me out of myself to such an extent that it's a great palliative for bad times. Rose Tremain, author of Restoration and The American Lover, in the Sunday Times magazine, quoted in our Comment  column.
  • The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton, the subject of our last Success Story, has been chosen by British chain Waterstones as its Book of the Year. See our other Success Stories, which over the years have included newcomers like Evie Wyld and big sellers such as Darren Shan.
  • Links of the week: a riveting and rather scary interview, which makes essential reading, Andrew Keen's dark web | The Bookseller; a major breakthrough for scientists, academisc and students, Nature.com research papers made freely shareable | The Bookseller; are publishers only buying bestsellers? Are book publishers blockbustering themselves into oblivion? - The Globe and Mail; a new appraoch of writers helping each other, Mentoring helps close publishing 'chasm' | The Bookseller; does it make sense to combine bookshops and libraries, Deborah Emin's Theory: Integrating Libraries and Bookstores; and that annual jolly, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
  • 'Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.' Leonard Cohen in our Writers' Quotes.