14 December 2015 - What's new
14 December 2015
- This article in the Guardian, Are books getting longer, shows that in both commercial bestseller lists and literary lists (measured by Booker Prize winners), the books that feature are tending to get longer. But this goes against a number of trends which you would expect to be pushing readers in the opposite direction. News Review on Big books in demand.
- Our 19-part Inside Publishing series gives you an insider's take on the publishing world, covering everything from subsidiary rights to the world English language market, from advances and royalties to the writer/publisher financial relationship. From the Introduction to the series - 'It's a curious mixture of a business, an industry, a profession and a compulsion, but those who work in publishing find it hard to tear themselves away from that heady mix of books, authors and commerce.'
- 'I've written poems as long as I've been able to write - obviously, since long before blogging existed. It's about language for me, and the play of light, if you will, on an idea or a feeling or something so inchoate you can only make it flesh in the form of a poem. It's like gathering smoke together and giving it embodiment in the form of words. A poem is like a little miracle...' Katy Evans-Bush, the author of the Baroque in Hackney
Katy Evans-Bush's elegant blog about poetry, arts and culture, which has become a must-read for many. baroqueinhackney.com/
blog, talks about her collection of essays Forgive the Language: Essays on Poets and Poetry, and provides our Comment. - Which Report? gives the details of the three reports we offer: the full Editor's Report, the basic Reader's Report and the most substantial Editor's Report Plus. There's also our specialist Children's reports, part of our Children's Editorial Services. If you want a professional editor's assessment of your work, here's the place to start.
- Our links of the week: the oddly persistent myth that genre fiction is "popular fiction" and that literary fiction is pointless and obscure, When Popular Fiction Isn't Popular: Genre, Literary, and the Myths of Popularity | Electric Literature; a remarkably positive view of what's to come in publishing, Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch on the Future of Publishing - WSJ; a survey which has found the average number of pages in a book has grown by 25% over the last 15 years, The big question: are books getting longer? | Books | The Guardian; and a report back from Author Day, Authors need to 'engage' in the publishing process | The Bookseller.
- How to market your writing services online is a useful article from Joanne PhillipsUK-based freelance writer and ghostwriter. She has had articles published in national writing magazines, and has ghostwritten books on subjects as diverse as hairdressing and keeping chickens. Visit her at www.joannephillips.co.uk about selling yourself as a writer. 'Recently someone commented to me that I seem to be doing a pretty good job of promoting my writing services on the internet. I was touched by the observation - we writers get so many rejections that a little praise is especially gratifying. And I began to wonder - what does it take to market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today?...'
- More links: as One Hundred Years of Solitude turns 50, Paul Elie interviews Gabo's longtime agent-just weeks before her death, at 85 - and discovers the events that led to a literary revelation, The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude | Vanity Fair; a serious and quite lengthy look at writing and gender, Knausgaard Writes Like a Woman ‹ Literary Hub; and, as a little light relief, Morrissey's win of the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award | Literary Review.
- 'The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader.' Paulo Coelho in our Writers' Quotes
