Skip to Content

12 December 2016 - What's new

12 December 2016
  • Poetry is not often the focus of attention, but this week we've chosen to feature two links to substantial articles which look at the state of poetry and how poets can be supported, from different sides of the Atlantic. Both are worth reading by anyone who is concerned about the state of the poetry world. News Review
  • The Mogford Food and Drink Short Story Prize is something different and perhaps appropriate for the festive season. It's open to all writers from across the world with a £10 entry fee, a prize of £10,000 and closes on 15 January.
  • Our Children's Editorial Services can help you get your work ready for publication or self-publishing. Have you found it difficult to get expert editorial input on your work ? Do you want to know if it has real commercial potential? Or are you planning to self-publish? Two reports and copy editing are available from our particularly highly-skilled children's editors, including essential advice on age groups and vocabulary.
  • Our links: now here's a novelist with an innate talent to cause outrage, A conversation with Martin Amis - Livemint; when novelists move to big publishers once they hit the big time, you have to wonder - Are small publishers doing all the hard work for the big ones? | Books | The Guardian; why is this author driven to write such dark stories? BookBrunch - Why we love psychological suspense; and how do you write across different genres? Idra Novey, Hannah Sanghee Park, Gregory Pardlo, and Mark Richard Talk to Olivia Clare About Multiple Genres - Los Angeles Review of Books.
  • 'The agent works for the writer. He's the writer's interpreter, business adviser, and ideally the stable element in the writer's life - always available at the end of the phone, always ready to read and respond. The agent is the gardener on an author's estate. A writer is like a convict, spending a good part of their time in solitary confinement. So the writer is idiosyncratic, a-socialized, isolated, insecure...' Andrew Wylie, aka ‘The Jackal', of The Wylie Agency, speaking at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, provides this week's Comment on the role of the literary agent.
  • Our article on How to get your book translated into English (without it costing the earth) asks writers with a manuscript which needs translating: "if your English is good enough, what about translating your book yourself, and then getting your translation polished and copy edited by a professional editor who is a native English speaker?" This could be a cost-effective way of reaching the international English-speaking market.
  • More links: a very helpful to-do list to guide your self-publishing project to completion, from a real authority, The Self-Publishing Checklist: Editorial, Production, Distribution; a single book created the "bodice ripper" as a concept and cultural phenomenon, 1972's The Flame and the Flower, The Sweet, Savage Sexual Revolution That Set the Romance Novel Free; a friend recently said to me, "Poetry is the non-profit of literature", How Do We Pay the Poets? | Literary Hub; and poetry and poetry publishing in the UK, Public Poetry - Like This Press.
  • Rotten Rejections - Most of these are taken from Andre Bernard's wonderful little book Rotten Rejections: The Letters that Publishers Wish They'd Never Sent. This extraordinary collection of rejection letters sent by publishers to writers - many delivered to now famous authors of classic books - will make you laugh and provide comfort in the face of your own struggles to get published. Do send your own rejections.
  • Continuing the poetry theme with this week's Writers' Quotes: 'A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of spring, love, and dogs.' George Jean Nathan.