16 June 2014 - What's new
16 June 2014
- This week we have some entertaining additions to Rotten Rejections, a look at the opening of a big new bookshop on London's famous Charing Cross Road, an interesting Comment from Khaled Hosseini and the Foyle Young Poets, plus a good range of links to stories of the week.
- The opening of the wonderful new Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road in London has shown a tremendous act of faith in bricks and mortar bookselling. The iconic bookstore has been suffering badly due to a drop in footfall relating to the building of Crossrail, a major new east-west underground line cutting through the heart of London's West End. It will though also benefit markedly when the line opens in 2018. It's hard to take the long view, but Foyle's is in a good position to do so. This bookstore has endured in private ownership for 111 years but the move to two doors away, whilst tremendously encouraging, is also very risky at a time when the book trade is in a state of upheaval and bookshops seem under particular threat from Amazon and the supermarkets...' News Review
- Our Writing Opportunity this week is The Foyle Young Poets Award 2014, the biggest international competition for young poets aged eleven to seventeen. It closes on 31 July and entries in English are accepted from anywhere in the world, so make sure that all young poets of your acquaintance get the chance to enter.
- We've just added some new gems to Rotten Rejections, our page of awful rejections suffered by writers and administered mostly by publishers.
- ‘After publication, nothing much happened for over a year. I didn't have much hope. Then I began to notice people reading it - even on aeroplanes when I was travelling. It was everywhere, it was surreal. I was proud of it yet it was so dark and its central character so spineless and set in a country people in the US knew little about... I didn't think this was what bestsellers were about...' Khaled Hosseini, author of And the Mountains Echoed and The Kite Runner, in the Observer, quoted in our Comment column.
- Our links this week, HarperCollins SF and fanstasy imprint increases its publishing of new authors in ebook after a successful open submission, Harper Voyager Expands Digital-First Publishing; a look at two important and contrasting book markets, Global Book Market Snapshots: France and Germany | Publishing Perspectives; contrasting critical views, Why Are Literary Critics Dismayed by Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and Its Success? | Vanity Fair; more on the market for translations, Yawn No More: Americans and the Market for Foreign Fiction | Publishing Perspectives; and a clarification of the economics of ebook publishing, Dr. Syntax: Why Are Publishers Telling Us E-Books Are So Profitable? Another Book-Business Fallacy.
- First excerpt - How to Open Doors and Get Noticed the First Time Around - The ABC Checklist for New Writers is a six part series of extracts from this useful book by Lorraine Mace and Maureen Vincent-Northam, from our Archive.
- 'I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged...I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.' Erica Jong in our Writers' Quotes.
