9 August 2021 - What's new
9 August 2021
- ‘The outlook may sound bleak. But the internet has been a lifeline, enabling authors to lean on their peers. With fewer events and chances to meet face-to-face, the virtual author community has never been more important. And boy, have we needed moral support the past year or so!... More people turned to reading during the pandemic, in particular using their e-readers when they couldn't get to physical stores. A lot of authors I know have seen this reflected in their digital sales, which have positively boomed during this time.' Tracy Buchanan, creator of Savvy Writers, a blog which offers help and resources for published authors, in Bookbrunch.
- From our 19-part Inside Publishing series, we have The Writer/Publisher Financial Relationship: 'There's no escaping the fact that publishers and authors are essentially in an adversarial position. Even in the very best and most supportive publisher/writer relationships there is the tension caused by the fact that authors would like to earn as much as possible from their writing and publishers to pay as little as they can get away with...' and Vanity Publishing: 'It is natural for writers to be eager to get published but it pays to be wary of the vanity publishers who will take your money and give you very little in return...' Vanity publishing is quite distinct from Self-publishing, you need to be aware of the differences.
- Our Children's Editorial Services help you to get your children's book 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 might find a publisher? Or are you planning to self-publish?
- The Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2021 is open to all. Entry fees: Poetry entries £12 and Short Fiction entries £18. £2,500 is awarded to both the Poetry and Short Fiction winners and publication in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology is awarded to 60 writers, shortlisted by the judging panel. Closing 31 August.
- Links from the writers' world: Creative writing courses have always been viewed sceptically, and yet more than 100 universities in the UK, and many more in the, US now offer them, Creative writing: a 'con job'?; it's as basic as a bar-room brawl. They're fighting over a woman, Pat Barker on The Silence of the Girls: ‘The Iliad is myth - the rules for writing historical fiction don't apply' | How I wrote | The Guardian; it's increasingly making the life of an author a little easier, but Can technology help authors write a book? - BBC News; 'It was incredibly difficult to find a publisher... I finished the novel in 2017. And no one was interested.' ‘I've been poor for a long time': after many rejections, Karen Jennings is up for the Booker | Books | The Guardian; 'Revision is my favorite part of the writing process. I relish the creative problem-solving more than the rush of getting it down', Maggie Smith on How to Revise Poems Without Losing the Initial Spark ‹ Literary Hub; and should we be expected to write free stuff as part of a publisher's ‘PR' plan? Savvy Writers - Blog.
- Advice for Writers is a really useful page which takes you into our archive and helps you explore our more than 8,000 pages of information for writers.
- 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.' More endorsements.
- More links from writers: narrative and imagination, this comes from science fiction, Militaries plunder science fiction for technology ideas, but turn a blind eye to the genre's social commentary; 84% majority for this recognition of how crime-writers work now, CWA now open to self published authors; should archives be closed because of their embarrassing content? Lownie campaign sees some Mountbatten archives released but tribunal looms | The Bookseller; and as we teach computers to use natural language, are we bumping into the inescapable biases of human communication? The Chatbot Problem | The New Yorker.
- Which service should I choose to help me get my work into good shape for submission or self-publishing? This is the question our page Which service? answers and it then goes on to give a quick rundown on our 20 editorial services for writers, which we think is the biggest and most comprehensive you can find on the internet.
- Writing Biography & Autobiography is a serialisation from our Archives of the book by Brian D Osborne published by A & C BlackClick for A & C Black Publishers Publishers References listing. In the first excerpt, Managing the matters of truth and objectivity, the author says: 'Just as you need to remember that letters, reports, census forms, legal documents and so forth were not created simply for our convenience, so you also need to remember that what is written in them may not be true...'
- Links from the publishing world: growth has cooled, Amazon Sales Only Rose 27% in Q2; you're really only renting, not buying, Sell This Book! | The Nation; encouragingly, book sales rose last year because people were reading more, Reading Time Rose 21% in Second Half of 2020; and the literary agent who is successfully getting Korean writers to the world, 'Zitwer factor': Before her, few readers outside Korea heard about Korean thrillers.
- ‘It's an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.' William Goldman in our Writers' Quotes.