Chris Holifield runs WritersServices. She has spent her working life in publishing, employed by everything from global corporations to start-ups. Read more
Ideally, you will have thought about your market while you were writing your book. You should have already talked to those who are going to sell copies of your book. Read more
For many writers self-publishing may be the solution to getting their book into print and putting an end to time-consuming submissions to agents and publishers.
But first, do think about whether your book will find an audience. Do you want a second opinion?
‘The way to tackle writer's block is to not believe it exists. If you run out of steam on something, switch to something else and come back later. Also, I don't get writers block because I am not writing - I am just typing, thinking, pushing into something to see what's there. I never sit down to produce a novel. I work a line or two, redraft endlessly, improvise.
Literary retellings of classics have exploded in the past few years, not least thanks to BookTok's enduring love for Madeline Miller and her feminist takes on the Greek myths. Read more
After four years of hard work with a well-known New York City literary agent, around Christmas 1999, I gave up on the traditional route and decided to publish my first novel, a Silicon Valley cyberpunk thriller called Acts of the Apostles, myself.
Ava Glass thought she had made her first work friend. An American now living in London, she had just started her first job as a civil servant, working in counter-terrorism communications. She was waiting for security clearance when, one morning, about three weeks in, she got talking to a colleague in the kitchen. The woman was in her late 20s, and also new, she said. Read more
Before I became a full-time writer, I spent a decade working as a criminal defence attorney. It was rewarding, exhausting, heart-breaking work. I'm glad not to be practising any longer, but I also feel lucky to have had the experiences I did during those years. Read more
Ken Follett's The Armor of Light is now available from Viking, so we asked him a few questions about his writing practice, his favorite books, and more.
The Authors Guild and 17 authors including George R R Martin, John Grisham and Jodie Picoult have filed a class-action suit against OpenAI for copyright infringement of their works of fiction and "on behalf of a class of fiction writers whose works have been used to train GPT". Read more
Yet another group of authors has filed class action copyright infringement lawsuits against artificial intelligence pioneers Open AI and Meta, claiming the companies' AI services used unauthorized copies of their books to train their AI models, including copies that were allegedly scraped from notorious pirate sites. Read more
A specter is haunting the landscape-the specter of generative AI. First came fears that student cheating would explode, plus that artists and actors would be unemployed. Then the ante was upped: Some of the very technology's creators warned that AI's potential risk to humanity as we know it was on par with pandemics and nuclear war.
We're living in a new age of discovery. One in which readers are more quickly and organically discovering new books and authors. And yes, I'm talking about how TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and social media in general have emerged as the premier way for readers to build/join communities, and for authors to connect with their fans. Read more