November 2015 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• 'Lizzie Kremer's amusing article about being a nerd, which we link to this week, disguises a greater truth about agents, which is that behind the showmanship and flair that many of the better-known and possibly more successful ones show there is a great deal of attention paid to the detail of their clients' affairs, particularly their royalty statements and subsidiary rights sales...'
• 'The news from the independent publishing sector is good. The UK Independent Publishers Guild has just published its first report into the independent sector in the UK. What it shows is a thriving picture, with 600 independent publishers and just 15% of the respondents saying that their business is contracting...' Our News Review looks at good news from indie publishers.
• 'The fuss that's been sparked off by the recent publication of Philip Henscher's selection of short Stories in The Penguin Book of the British Short Story suggests that short stories may be achieving more traction and visibility than they did even a few years ago. The 90 short stories included in the two volumes come from the eighteenth century (Daniel Defoe) up to the present day (Zadie Smith). Henscher trawled trough thousands of short stories by hundreds of writers. Top authors such as Rose Tremain, Julian Barnes and William Boyd, surprisingly, didn't make the cut...'
• 'The recent Digital Census 2015 revealed some surprises in the responses. In the book trade in general there's been much talk of a slowdown and reversal in the speed of ebook adoption, accompanied by a revival in the fortunes of print. So what exactly did the Census reveal? Digital Census has plenty of surprises...'
• 'To self-publish or to go for a publisher? To publish your own book confidently as an indie author or to feel that only a publisher will be able to give you what you want? Views on this are gradually changing and the major success of self-publishing authors - who often then turn to traditional publishers - has altered a lot of writers' views on the subject. Self-publishing or traditional publishing, which is best?...'
• 'It's the colouring books and a self-published sleep aid which are making the headlines and topping the charts as summer moves in to autumn in the northern hemisphere - not that those of us in the UK feel we've had much summer... News Review looks at surprise bestsellers for the silly season.
• It's sad to see the end of Authonomy, which HarperCollins UK has decided to close at the end of September. The first of the author submission sites, it worked through peer review in that submissions were ranked by users and the best-ranked were considered for publication by HarperCollins. I remember talking to the staff member at HarperCollins who had been given the job of setting it up. I thought it sounded a great idea from the point of view of authors, offering a real opportunity to get published for those whose work was really good.

Comment

• Our Comment is from Robert Harris, author of Dictator, Pompeii and many other historical novels, in the Bookseller: ‘I wouldn't have gone back to the period, if I hadn't felt it had something to say to us. You have a double benefit (when you write a historical novel): you re-create that world for the reader, yet at the same time it's a commentary on our own time: whatever you select to write is inevitably trying to hold up a mirror to our own age, whether consciously or unconsciously...'
• ‘Short story is a terrible term, I much prefer the French term conte. I looked up the word "short" in the OED, and it is almost always used pejoratively. Short stories are nearer poetry than anything...' Jane Gardam, whose 10th short story collection The Stories recently won the Charleston-Chichester Award for a Lifetime's Excellence in' Short Fiction
• ‘It is a mark of the importance that still attaches itself to biography as an art form that practically every example of it that appears in a publisher's catalogue tends to cause offence to someone... All this raises the associated questions: who is the biographer writing for, and to whom is he or she ultimately responsible? If the answer to the first question hangs tantalisingly out of reach, the second's answer is "the subject". D J Taylor in the Independent on Sunday provides this week's Comment.
• 'Well, I wrote one and nobody wanted it. I wrote a second and nobody wanted it. I wrote the third and nobody wanted it. And then I went back to the newspaper to see if I could get a job. I thought, you've really failed. Like usual. Loser, loser, loser...' Patricia Cornwell, whose latest book is Depraved Heart, in the Observer magazine provides our Comment, Becoming a writer, the hard way.
• 'I remember telling myself that I had yet to live an interesting life. What could this twenty-something woman who'd lived only in Massachusetts write about? Weren't there enough poems singing the praises of New England leaves? I decided to stop writing. I needed to go out and extend the margins of my world before I'd know anything worthy of a poem...' Susan Rich provides this week's Comment.
• '...Downton has been a big thing for me. It's been a worldwide sensation to a degree that is unknown in most careers. I consider myself lucky to have had one; I would be astonished if there was another.' Julian Fellowes, creator and writer of Downton Abbey, in the Sunday Times provides this week's Comment.
• 'Read voraciously and read forensically, whether it's stories you admire or stories you detest. There is a lesson in every one, tricks to steal, potholes to avoid. Treat every story like a crime scene. Take it to pieces. How many adverbs are there? How much does the narrator know? How long are the sentences?...' Mark Haddon, nominated for the 2015 BBC Short Story Award for Bunny is this week's Comment.

Quote

'You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.'

Larry Niven