22 June 2015 - What's new
22 June 2015
- The brilliant British author Jim Crace has just won the International 2015 IMPAC Dublin Award, which at €100,000 is the world's largest literary prize for a single work published in English. His 2013 novel Harvest, published by Picador, won out of a shortlist of ten novels. But is he retiring from writing? News Review
- Our article on Working with an agent gives a useful introduction to what you get out of it and how to handle it.
- 'Amazon has done one good thing, which is to make books available to everyone. But they've done it at terrible cost to authors by selling books so cheaply. It gives the impression that books don't cost very much to create...' Our Comment this week is from Philip Pulman, author of His Dark Materials and The Ruby in the Smoke.
- Have you ever wondered why you don't win any of those competitions you put your work in for? Our tips on Entering Competitions might give you some suggestions on how to improve your chances.
- Our links of the week: Mark Billingham on what crime-writing and comedy have in common, Killer timing: why comedy and crime writing share a secret weapon | Books | The Guardian; Futurebook's survey of how much self-publishing there is, but still no agreement, How big is self-publishing - the results | The Bookseller; some astonishingly successful authors point the way, Is This the "Golden Age" for Chinese Web Authors? - Publishing Perspectives; and is the software industry eating publishing for breakfast, How to Survive the Death of the Book | Digital Book World.
- A few more links: inventing a new category of 'embellished' biograpy or memoir, When Authors Embellish: Let's Dub Such Books 'Beautiful Stories'; in the US the Authors Guild has outlined some of the "egregious terms" of current contract boilerplates it plans to address in its Fair Contract Initiative, Guild Calls for Higher Royalties, Contract Limits; and, of particular interest to self-publishing poets, Amazon Changes the Structure of KDP Select.
- Do you want to self-publish your work? WritersServices offers a suite of services which help writers get their work into shape before they self-publish. Copy editing, including specialist Copy editing for children's work, Poetry Collection Editing, Manuscript Polishing, Blurb-writing, Indexing and Manuscript Typing. Our Services for Self-publishers.
- 'The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He's entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you're in violation.' Larry Niven in our Writers' Quotes.
