From carrying a computer between flat shares in her 20s to working with a Hollywood director on a screen adaptation of Hamnet, O'Farrell reflects on the last 25 years.
Links of the week January 13 2025 (03)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
20 January 2025
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Maggie O'Farrell's debut novel, After You'd Gone. Now with nine novels, one memoir and three children's books to her name, this year also marks 25 years for O'Farrell as a writer who has achieved both critical and commercial success with every book. To celebrate, Headline, her publisher since the very beginning, will reissue eight of her books on 27th March with gorgeous new cover designs: After You'd Gone, My Lover's Lover, The Distance Between Us, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, Instructions for a Heatwave, This Must Be the Place and the memoir I Am, I Am, I Am.
The UK Poetry School's very useful listing of poetry publishers, online sites and magazines where you can submit and publish your poetry
Submitting your poems to a magazine, journal, or press is the first step to sharing your work with an audience and building up a readership, which is crucial if you're looking to publish your work in a pamphlet or collection later down the line. To help you in this process, we have compiled a list of places to submit your wonderful poems for 2025!
Many independent authors design and format their own books to save money. Working with a professional book designer for your print book interior can cost between $2.00 and $3.50 per page, and there's no guarantee that a book will sell enough copies to earn back that fee.
However, some authors may have good reason to hire a professional to work on their book interior. Even if you decide to design and format your own book, I hope to make you aware of important elements of book composition.
A professional designer can select the best fonts and graphic elements to showcase your work. Book designers often draw inspiration from the book cover design elements and fonts for the interior. Most professionally designed books use the cover design font treatments for the half title and title interior pages and often for titles and subheads. Designers typically use two main fonts for most books unless there is a reason to include other fonts. The main text is almost always set in a serif font. Times New Roman is a common default for word-processed files, but professional designers rarely use it for books. Some commonly used fonts are Garamond, Minion, Sabon, and Caslon, but there are many other fonts that work well for the main text. Designers may use a sans serif font for chapter titles and subheads.
My predictions for the trends that will dominate children's publishing in 2025.
As we look ahead into 2025, the ongoing realities of global instability and economic uncertainty are not going away any time soon. Adaptation will be essential as we navigate these persistent issues, demanding resilience and innovative solutions from individuals and communities alike.
In the creative realm, we are witnessing a significant shift toward authenticity. There is an increasing desire among audiences to trust the true identities of those who created the work - writers, artists, illustrators and actors.
In a time where digital imagery and AI often raise questions such as: is that real, did it actually happen or is it fake? The importance of knowing the voices behind the work becomes paramount. As a result, we can anticipate a celebration of transparency and trust in creative expression. What that means is a striving towards building an artist's name, audience and credibility to own the copyright so they can be recognised as the original creator of their work across all platforms.
A hand-picked digest of news stories from the past month that emerging writers should know about.
Dear writers and emerging multi-hyphenates,
Happy New Year! 2024 was a time, wasn't it? I think the general consensus is that it was fair to middlin' - but especially tough for those of us in the book writing business. With an increase in author requests for hardship grants and the constant announcement of the next "big best-selling celebrity book", the industry has felt a bit like an unwelcome desert for aspiring authors, with only a mirage of book deals seemingly on offer.
But for 2025 I'm proposing we find new ways to throw caution to the wind and move forward with purpose. And you cannot know where you are going until you know where you have been, so let's look back at a few headlines from December 2024 and make something out of them, shall we?
Convincing antagonists can add vital conflict to your book.
Not every book that you write is going to have an "evil villain" character, but your story does need an antagonist, because it's essential for pushing your protagonist's growth as a character. But what exactly are antagonists, and how can you make them convincing?
Why do books need antagonists?
An antagonist is the character in your book that complicates or gets in the way of your protagonist and what they want to accomplish. Antagonists up the stakes of your story while also forcing your protagonist to get more creative and committed to their goals. You might love your protagonist and want them to succeed, but we can't make life too easy for them. Antagonistic circumstances push our protagonists to commit to their mission, and to achieve meaningful growth.
Sandra Chwialkowska on her career in TV writing and her move to writing a novel.
I'm a TV writer by profession, and when I'm not staffing a show, I develop TV series adaptations with the goal of selling one to a buyer. My favorite novel genres to adapt are mysteries and thrillers because I love suspenseful, propulsive storytelling and because thrillers make damn good TV.
TV shows demand action and surprises that compel a viewer to keep watching, and since suspense novels are built around twists, with chapters that end on cliffhangers, they lend well to adaptation. In the Age of Streaming, where thousands of TV shows across 400 networks compete for attention, it's incredibly difficult for a series to gain traction, but a delicious thriller can quickly amass an audience.
While the Australian book market was down 3% last year, genre fiction - popular on BookTok - was among the rare categories that grew.
Since 2020, BookTok has been increasingly influential in how people (especially young people) read. Books popular on BookTok were among the top ten bestselling Australian titles of 2024.
In China, one of the world's largest book markets and most digitised nations, social media is influencing what and how people read in new and evolving ways - through two super apps.
Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, is the nation's third most popular app, at 900 million monthly active users. Its version of BookTok is even more influential than its Western counterpart. Douyin integrates online sales directly into its platform, allowing publishers to pay for promotions and influencers to earn commissions on the books they sell.
WeChat, China's most popular app, at over 1.3 billion monthly active users, is integrating ebooks and social reading into the platform. This not only effectively encourages public reading, but boosts app usage and strengthens WeChat's central role in Chinese people's digital life.
Nicola Solomon, a special adviser and former chair of the Creators' Rights Alliance (CRA), and the former chief executive of the Society of Authors (SoA), says the UK government is being "beguiled by big tech" into "giving away" authors' work to train generative Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Solomon, a solicitor with an in-depth knowledge of the publishing industry and the many associated legal areas, from copyright and defamation, to privacy, data protection and contract, was awarded an OBE in the 2025 King's New Year's Honours List for services to literature and the creative industries.
This accolade does not mean she is going to be giving the government a break anytime soon, however. She told The Bookseller: "I've worked for creators, often individuals, to help empower them, and to help their working life to be a bit better so they can continue to inspire us. If the government is prepared to recognise that services to creators are a good thing, then it ought to think that their work is important enough to put in some legislation in place that makes the lives of creators better, so they can continue to create. That's the spirit in which I'm accepting the OBE."
The CRA is a 500,000-strong cross-industry members' body. It is part of the Creative Rights in AI Coalition, along with the Publishers' Association, SoA and Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and 30 other members' bodies.
Sarah Silverman and others file court case claiming CEO approved use of dataset despite warnings
Mark Zuckerberg approved Meta's use of "pirated" versions of copyright-protected books to train the company's artificial intelligence models, a group of authors has alleged in a US court filing.
Citing internal Meta communications, the filing claims that the social network company's chief executive backed the use of the LibGen dataset, a vast online archive of books, despite warnings within the company's AI executive team that it is a dataset "we know to be pirated".
The case for an AI-authored book format
The House of Lords recently debated current worries about generative AI raised in the book trade and beyond by the likes of Kate Mosse and Sir Paul McCartney. Baroness Kidron has proposed amendments that would require operators of internet bots that use existing published work to train generative AI models to comply with copyright laws. It seems that the AI rubber is about to hit the publishing road, with radical thinking needed to overcome what is becoming an overwhelming challenge. Here are some lateral ideas designed to initiate conversation in the trade.
With generative AI technology now readily accessible, a surge of AI-generated books is already flooding the market, authored by non-professional writers wielding sophisticated tools to create surprisingly good-quality content. Startups companies like BookBud and Kidzbook and influencers like the Nerdy Novelist cater to this new non-writer market.
Imagine scrolling through an online bookstore and not knowing if the book you're eyeing is crafted by a human or synthesised by AI. The line is blurring, and with it arises a compelling question: should we create a distinct category for AI-authored books? Such a move could simultaneously honour the creativity of human authors while embracing AI-generated innovation.
From 'Cosmo' to crime, magazine editor Kate White worked her way up one slice at a time.
MY FIRST THRILLER
It started with a Sunday morning phone call to Kate White, editor-in-chief of Redbook magazine. Her boss at the Hearst Corporation asked her to come to the office immediately. Kate had never been invited to a Sunday meeting and worried the news wasn't good. She was at her weekend home in Pennsylvania, so she had no work clothes with her. She arrived at the office dressed casually, wearing white sneakers when she was asked to be the next editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine.
Article continues after advertisementThat's right, Cosmo--at the time Hearst's most recognized monthly pub, as in famed women-like-sex-too Editor Helen Gurley Brown. Under Brown's thirty-two-year reign, it had become the biggest ship navigating what was then the bottomless ocean of women's magazines. Kate would become the second editor to succeed Brown following a two-year stint by Bonnie Fuller. Kate edited Cosmopolitan from 1998 to 2012
A Dangerous Game author Mandy Robotham on iconic characters - including her own, journalist Georgie Young and detective Harri Schroder
We all know that readers love a good series - that moment of discovering a new character spanning several books, plenty of pages to sink get your teeth into. Bookshelves are full of iconic characters in literature, commercial and crime fiction who have sustained multiple outings, arguably becoming more of a focus than the story itself: Sherlock Holmes, George Smiley, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Harry Potter, Inspector Morse, Kay Scarpetta and Vera Stanhope. The list goes on and on.
As a writer, and a voracious reader of some, I've often wondered if those authors set out to make their creations a common fixture, or whether the continued reappearance took the writers themselves by surprise, in the way some characters have a habit of stamping their authority on the page. In other words, how do you know if your character has 'legs' enough to trudge off the last page of one book... straight into the opener of another?
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