It was another era. Not easier, but maybe not quite so crazy hectic as today. The stakes were still high, and in their day - the early 1980s-getting your first book published was still hard work. In many ways, harder.
'Reading thrillers is like solving a puzzle. I enjoy the challenge of trying to peer beyond the author's smoke and mirrors and identify what's really going on' Read more
Whenever I teach on nonfiction book proposals, I open up the conversation by talking about market potential ($) and how to convince agents or editors that your project has it.
I'd been querying agents for nearly two years when I got a promising email. After some kind rejections and a couple of "I really like this but-" close calls that break your heart, this agent's enthusiasm made my pulse race. "Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw your name," she wrote, describing herself as a fan of my newsletter. Read more
Writers are the lifeblood of the publishing industry. I would expect agents and publishers, who work with them every day-and whose livelihood depends on them-to understand and respect writers. Most agents and publishers would claim that they do. But an industry practice that began some time ago, and has increased dramatically in recent years, belies that. Read more
So, you've finished your manuscript and are eager to share your work with literary agents. One question I'm always asked by students is: How do you write the perfect pitch letter to a literary agent? Here are my top 15 tips on how to make your submission pitch letter stand out from the pack:
Pitching a manuscript isn't for cowards, the thin skinned, or those with no endurance. Believing your project is worthy, truly believing in it, is required, as is the patience of a saint.
'I did something which I haven't done before, which was really just play. I went into the British Library, looked at a whole load of books about subjects I was interested in, and just waited to see anything that jumped out at me.
Kate Thompson was horrified to discover that her book, The Sunday Times bestseller, A Mother's Promise, had been plagiarised and rewritten by AI - just days after publication. And then it happened again.
On Saturday, the Trump administration fired Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright OfficeThe US copyright office has information on its website about how to register and what advantages there are in doing so. www.copyright.gov/register/, just two days after the dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, under whose auspices the U.S. Copyright Office operates. Perlmutter was appointed by Hayden in 2020.
Protection of copyright has always been a top priority for the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies, and that point was driven home again during the organization's annual meeting held via Zoom on May 8. Read more
Mark Price has said he has been advised that there are "two grounds on which a legal case could realistically be pursued" against Meta in the UK for the company's use of pirated books to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Read more
When readers first met her in The Golden Compass (first published in the U.K. in 1995 as Northern LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/), Lyra Belacqua was a young orphan, hiding in a wardrobe at Oxford's Jordan College, spying on the scholars she lived among in a world with some parallels to our own. Read more
'Sleep on your writing: take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.'