This is the first excerpt from Inspired Creative Writing by Alexander Gordon Smith from the brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series. This month, the first chapter, Limbering Up: Read more
This is the second excerpt from Inspired Creative Writing by Alexander Gordon Smith from the brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series. This month, Taking the Plunge. Read more
This is the third excerpt from Inspired Creative Writing by Alexander Gordon Smith from the brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series. This month, Learning to see the world in a new light. Read more
This is the fourth excerpt from Inspired Creative Writing by Alexander Gordon Smith from the brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series. This month, Style is everything! Read more
This is the fifth excerpt from Inspired Creative Writing by Alexander Gordon Smith from the brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series. This month, Who’s the daddy: character or plot? Read more
This is the sixth excerpt from Inspired Creative Writing by Alexander Gordon Smith from the brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series. This month, how to learn to let go. Read more
WritersServices Education Resource Centre has been produced to help those providing writing courses. There are nearly 80 pages formatted ready for use as handouts or in course material.
The simple format is designed to make it easy for you to print on A4 sized paper.
'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
In the third in a series on the implications of AI for publishing, Nadim Sadek argues that effective advertising is now feasible for everyone, and for all kinds of titles
A publishing friend of mine recently told me about a sales report they'd received from a major retailer in which some of their books had zero sales. It turned out that there had been plenty of sales, however-they just all went to counterfeiters. In case you think this is an outlier, it's not. Counterfeiting is a serious, nontrivial problem facing the industry.
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
The U.K. Publishers Association (PA) was established in 1896 and is a cornerstone of the British publishing industry, working with a diverse array of companies to promote innovation, collaboration, and commercial success. Read more
With English as a shared language, there is a natural relationship between the American and British publishing industries. Most of the world's top publishing companies, be they conglomerates or independent publishers, have operations in each country, typically in New York City and London. Literary traffic travels both ways across the Atlantic.
The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.
Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 - a "much stronger" growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Read more
"We don't understand the consequences of AI with regards to copyright," Brazil's Karine Gonçalves Pansa, president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said, when asked to name the most important issues facing publishing right now. "We can say, very easily, that our content is being used, without permission, and without license, by AI."
'The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.'