27 January 2020 - What's new
27 January 2020
- ‘I do feel that the world in which I grew up and have lived all my life is ending. And that's true in all the countries that I've cared about in my life and written about: India, England and here. What I thought was the given, how the places worked, has changed in all three cases...' Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, Quichotte and Shame in The Times. Our Comment.
- An endorsement from Anthony Fitzgerald for our English Language Editing Service: 'The result? A book that reads like it's written by a native speaker for only 13% of the price a complete translation would have costed. Thank you, writersservices.'
- Closing on 28 February, the Myriad First Graphic Novel Competition 2020. It's open to all cartoonists, and writers and artists working as a team, who have not previously published a full-length graphic work and are resident in the UK. Entry fee £10. The prize is publication on the Myriad list.
- Four other live Writing opportunities.
- Tips for writers is our 8-part crash course for writers who are starting out, taking you from Improving your writing to Self-publishing: is it for you? to Keep up to date and Submission to publishers and agents. 'Be prepared to redraft your work and to rethink it. Many new writers assume that their work will immediately be ready for publication, but the truth is that many highly successful writers produced several drafts of their first work before they got it published.' and 'When you've got your work into the best state you can, put it on one side for a few weeks and then look at it afresh. You'll be amazed what difference a fresh eye will make.'
- Our links: based on what you're seeing here, should I bother to pursue this? How to Tell If You Have What It Takes to Succeed as a Writer | Jane Friedman; for the first time since 2011, the news about book publishing has seemed less than dire (an interesting article in spite of the strange title), Smorgasbords Don't Have Bottoms | Issue 36 | n+1; Netflix's adaptation of his Witcher series is a sensation, Toss a Coin to Your Author: PW Talks with Andrzej Sapkowski; in his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner famously wrote that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." What We Write About When We Write About the Past | CrimeReads; and, surprising news perhaps, UK Publishers Association Study: Women Hold 55 Percent of Top Roles.
- Last year we launched the Writer's edit, a top-level new service for writers who want line-editing as well as copy editing. Does your manuscript need high-level input from an editor to help you get it into the best possible shape for submission or self-publishing? This may be the service for you, offering the kind of editing which publishers' senior editors used to do in-house on their authors' manuscripts and which is now hard to find. Our other copy editing services.
- More links: "Anyone can be a critic." It's a common lament these days, now that the book review landscape is changing, Everyone Can Be a Book Reviewer. Should They Be? | Literary Hub (there's a riposte below); "My writing has always been where I've gone to work through my problems," In N.K. Jemisin's Next Trilogy, the City Is On Fire; why is literary Twitter piling on Jeanine Cummins' book? American Dirt controversy, explained; although I've been reviewing books for half a century, this little treatise caused me to do some anxious head-scratching, Inside the Critics' Circle by Phillipa K Chong review - rickety scaffolding | Books | The Guardian.
- 'It's a common enough fantasy for writers: maybe now I can leave that dreary job and devote myself whole-heartedly to writing... But how practical is it? Is it something you can realistically aspire to, or just a distant fantasy? What are your chances of making your dream come true? Don't give up the day job.
- 'If you're going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones... After all, there are better ways to starve to death.' Gabriel Garcia Marquez in our Writers' Quotes.