October 2015 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• 'Two of our links this week relate to AmazonCrossing's announcement of $10m to be spent on publishing translations, an impressive figure which shows how much translations are entering the mainstream. Whatever your view about Amazon's initiative, there's no doubt that translations in general are garnering much more international attention than they used to...'
• 'We had intended to report on the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. this week, but all we have been able to glean so far is that it was a busy fair, with a great many successful rights deals, and the new layout of the Fair was generally liked. Salman Rushdie spoke at the opening ceremony, saying freedom of speech is not just a human right but a "universal of the human race" which must be defended...'
• 'This week's story was to have been on the rise in support for short stories, until, that is, Marlon James had his stunning Man Booker Prize win last night. It might have been expected that an American would win this year for the first time since the Prize was opened to novels in English from across the world...'
• 'The announcement that the subscription service Oyster is to close down has prompted a lot of ruminating on the subject of how these services work. Simon Dunlop, CEO of the competing business Bookmate, said that Oyster had a flawed business model because of publishers' indifference towards the idea. In fact they were worse than indifferent and seem to have been hoping it would fail...' Oyster hits the rocks in our News Review.
• 'In an unusual move, the UK children's publisher Chicken House and US publisher Little Brown Young Readers have parted company with bestselling children's author Cornelia Funke, who both have published right from the beginning of her writing career. What's unusual about the split is that it's not about money, or more promotion, but about differences relating to editorial advice...'
• 'The speed with which Penguin Random House has moved to do a world English language deal for Ehrlin's bestselling picture book, The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep, is an indication of how much the big publishers are now relying on self-publishers to produce saleable books. Once the author has established a market, it's easy to see why the publishers want to jump on board...' News Review is entitled 'Penguin Random House swoops on Ehrlin's bestseller'.
• '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

• '...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.
• 'If I can make people think while also being accessible, and possibly make them laugh and cry a bit at the same time, then, frankly, I don't care what they call me. I'd like to be the Puccini of fiction...' Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You and After You in the Observer, provides this week's Comment.
• ‘When you have a new development in forensic science, as a crime writer your first thought is how do I work my way around that? Because these new developments do make for a slightly more complicated environment for us to be working in. If you look back 20 years even, what was available in terms of evidential analysis was really quite low level. The writer had a lot of leeway and could leave forensic traces that were never going to be picked up on...' Val McDermid, whose latest book is Splinter the Silence, in the Sunday Telegraph quoted in our Comment column.

Quote

'If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.'

Somerset Maugham