15 April 2013 - What's new
15 April 2013
- Today is the first day of the London Book Fair, which is going to be an interesting occasion this year. The winds of change are sweeping through the publishing industry as digital developments bring a whole host of changes in their wake. It's all happening at a time of recession too, which is altering many of the traditional publishing relationships, creating both new threats and new opportunities. News Review reports.
- Links of the week: The Slow Death of the American Author - Scott Turow, president of the US Authors Guild, on a vital change and Ten ways self-publishing has changed the books business.
- If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look at our Services, especially our Copy editing, Editor's Report, Submission Critique and Children's Services. Also available is Synopsis writing, Contract Vetting, Manuscript Typing and our latest additions, Poetry Critique and Blurb-writing.
- 'If you think of the story that you tell that's your favourite personal story, or funny story, it doesn't have flashy sentences. It doesn't have too much detail. It just tells the story. That isn't, for whatever reason, the way most people write books, But it seemed to me that there was no reason that it couldn't be the way at least one person writes books. I said "I'm going to stop writing the parts that people skim..." James Patterson, author of a great many books, in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven, quoted in our Comment column.
- There's just time for young poets to enter the TLM Young Poets Competition, which is open to anyone aged 16-30 from anywhere around the world and closes on 30 April. Here's our latest Writing Opportunity.
- 'The thing that really really turns me on - and I've now been doing it for 40 years, and it still works in exactly the same way - is this: you are sitting at home reading a manuscript and your hair stands on end and you think, 'I know how to publish this and, with a bit of luck, it could really work. Dan Franklin, MD and Publisher of Jonathan Cape in our Writers' Quotes.