April 2017 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• 'Some sensational figures have just been released showing the trend towards book sales in print form as opposed to ebook is continuing, as sales of consumer ebooks in the UK dropped by a whopping 17%. These figures exclude self-published titles, which have contributed a large proportion of the ebook sales. But more than 50% of genre sales are now reckoned to be in ebook form...'
• 'Two new initiatives from Amazon are worth checking out, one which may help get your books out there and one which seems largely to benefit Amazon's drive to grow its Amazon Prime business. Plus there's also an author outlining how you can get your own ebooks out to an international audience...'
• The Bologna Children's Book FairThe Bologna Children's Book Fair or La fiera del libro per ragazzi is the leading professional fair for children's books in the world. this week has been attracting a good number of visitors and there is ever-increasing interest from outside the publishing word, from media and film companies. Reflecting the solid growth and current stability of children's publishing, the Fair offers an opportunity for everyone involved in children's publishing to gather for the biggest annual bash.
• 'In a week when we're glad to publish this list of 36 magazines which reply within a week, it's also fair to consider the question of how much writers have to pay to make submissions, especially when so many of them are rejected...'
• The recent death of Colin Dexter has produced plaudits from fellow-authors and editors alike. In the UK he was one of our best-loved crime writers inspiring a uniquely affectionate response amongst readers and the publishing world alike. Quoted in Bookbrunch, fellow crime writer Peter James praised him highly: 'I think Colin Dexter truly changed both the landscape of British crime fiction and also its stature in the canon of literature...' News Review on the Death of a crime writer.
• 'World Poetry Day has been marked by the publication of some encouraging sales figures from the UK, showing sales up 16% on last year in the first quarter. But a lot of these sales seem to be driven by social media and to feature poets who are appealing to a young female audience. Rupi Kaur's self-published Milk and Honey, which was mentioned on WritersServices last September in link to an article entitled How To Sell Nearly a Half-Million Copies of a Poetry Book, is a case in point and her sales spiked after International Women's Day... News Review on World Poetry Day and new ebook platform Bookgrail.

Comment

• ‘I refuse to be bullied by the idea that you have to have mental peace to write. I have no mental peace but I have written despite that. It's been from about the mid-Seventies that we've had this phenomenon of women with children writing. There's 2,000 years of that not being true, like literally never true...' Zadie Smith, author of Swing Time, NW and White Teeth, in the Evening Standard.
• 'Writing about sex is very difficult. I did not set out to write lots of sex scenes - they kept recurring and I realised they were intrinsic to the story of the relationship. And yet, I wanted it to be the opposite of pornography - even literary sex can be pornography. In this novel, it was the characters' way to speak to each other about what they could not verbalise...' Our Comment is from Eimear McBride, author of The Lesser Bohemians and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and is from the Observer.
• 'I actually say I write books about adults or about young people. I think it's an important distinction. But in the young people's books I've never tried to use simpler language, simpler stories or simpler themes. I've written the book I would normally write, but with a young person at the centre of it. Most writers for young people these days aren't thinking about children as being little kids. They're tackling serious subjects, writing about issues that are really faced by young people today, and that's what they want to read....' John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Heart's Invisible Furies, in the Observer.
• ‘My experience of becoming a writer... I was a little too late to the game. I wrote when I was younger but I could never get anything to really cohere, so for me the big revelation, before my first book... was that I had to really restrict myself. I had to really constrain myself and write in a very narrow vein - comic, very contemporary, maybe a little futuristic...' George Saunders, author of just-published Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December, which won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014, in the Bookseller.
• Our Comment is some advice from Selina Walker, Publisher of Century and Arrow, which starts with: 'Once you have your idea for a story, write yourself a rough outline and You will need to work out who your characters are, what type of ‘journey' you're taking them on, what's going to kick their story into gear (your opening), and how it's going to end...'
• 'I used to worry that I'd run out of ideas. But as I get older I know it's not ideas; it's energy. As long as the job involves words and story - and it's what I really want to do - I'll give it a go. I enjoy the contrasts between the different forms. Writing a film script is so different to writing a novel, I find it quite easy to give proper attention to both in the same working day...' Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments and The Guts provides this week's Comment from Bookbrunch.
• 'Outside the bubble of hype are authors in various genres quietly working away with large and valuable readerships. They are producing books and working in areas that might raise eyebrows or even a hint of derision at many acquisitions meetings. Yet readers still love it, they will keep coming back for more. In this respect then I think the ebook market can buck mainstream fashion; and the entire book market is all the better for it...' Our Comment is from Michael Bhaskar, Co-Founder of Canelo and author of Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess and is from in PW's London Show Daily 15 March, which is sadly not available online.

Quote

'But if a stranger in a train asks me my occupation I never answer 'writer' for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer 'poetry' would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.'

W H Auden