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Reading to an audience

10 June 2013

Will Self's recent comments at the Hay Festival suggest that the literary world has changed out of all recognition: ‘What has changed in the past 30 years is that it has become impossible for the rump of the literary profession - those middling sorts (of sales, that i  Read more

Pottermore not just pottering

14 May 2012

J K Rowling’s Pottermore site seems to have succeeded all expectations. The ebook store has sold £3m worth of Harry Potter ebooks in its first month. Sales appear to have been driven by pent-up demand and sales values are high because many fans are buying the complete ebook bundle, which is priced at £38.64.  Read more

Caine Prize shortlist showcases African writers

16 May 2011

The shortlist for the £10,000 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing - the twelfth 'African Booker' - has just been announced.  Read more

Now it's National Short Story Week!

29 November 2010

This week has been UK National Short Story Week and we've all been invited to join in as readers, writers and listeners by a new website with that name.  Read more

Pitchapalooza - pitching your book

22 November 2010

A recent posting on Publishing Perspectives took the reader to their article on Pitchapalooza, written by authors David Henry Sterry and his wife Arielle Eckstut, the duo known as The Book Doctors. The Book Doctors invented 'Putting Your Passion Into Print', now known as Pitchapalooza.  Read more

Spotlight on new prizes

12 July 2010

Following on from our look at prizes and what effect they have last week, this week's column will be devoted to new prizes. There has been a proliferation of new prizes launched over the last few years, so there's quite a lot to evaluate. Some of them focus on new work but only a proportion of them are open for entries from unpublished writers.  Read more

What price literary prizes?

5 July 2010

The literary world is awash with literary prizes, with new ones being set up every year. But what effect do these prizes have and do they actually sell more books?  Read more

Launch of We give books

24 May 2010

The Penguin Group and the Pearson Foundation have launched an interesting new charitable venture, designed both to get children reading and to encourage them to become charitable givers. When a child reads a book online, they are able to donate another book to be sent to a reading charity and can choose from four options as to where their this book is sent.  Read more

Prizes, prizes

29 June 2009

Not a day seems to go by without a literary prize announcement. Even so the news that this week the author Siobhan Dowd has won the Highly-regarded CILIP Carnegie Prize was unusual, for Dowd died in 2007. Her book Bog Child is set in Northern Ireland in 1981, at the height of the troubles, and is about a teenager who discovers a child's body which has lain undiscovered in t  Read more

Children's books still booming

12 January 2009

Children's books are still doing well in spite of the recession. In the UK Christmas sales were up by 8.5% (£4 million - $6 million) on the previous year.  Read more

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15 July 2019 - What's new

July 2019
  • 'The best books come from someplace deep inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to. Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either. Those of us who write do it because there are stories inside us burning to get out. Writing is essential to our well-being. If you're that kind of writer, never give up!
  Read more

'For me, writing [was] a question of survival...I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.'

— Gao Xingjian, refering to writing during the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse-Tung

Write from the Inside

15 July 2019

'The best books come from someplace deep inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to. Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.
  Read more

1 July 2019 - What's new

July 2019
  • ‘There's been a great democratisation of the world of poetry, In the past, it was seen as only certain kinds of people wrote poems, but now there isn't that same divide. There's all sorts of different forms: spoken-word poetry, Instagram poetry... Poets like Hollie McNish have taken off and are selling lots.
  Read more