Skip to Content

17 December 2012 - What's new

17 December 2012
  • 'The recent news of a £15m (over $24m) deal between Wilbur Smith and HarperCollins worldwide, a new publisher for the author, has caused some controversy this week. The deal is for six books but the Sunday Times claimed that Smith will not write them himself. The author, who turns 80 next month, will concentrate on plot lines and characterisation, whilst others do the writing...' News Review reports.
  • Our links of the week are: Publishers brace for authors to reclaim book rights in 2013 and Michael Morpurgo: What Michael Gove calls 'rigour' I call 'rigor mortis'.
  • 'The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future - and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a kind of time capsule - it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form...' Carol Ann Duffy in an interview in the Guardian, quoted in our Comment column.
  • This week's Writing Opportunity is the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, with a closing date of 15 February, a first prize of £5,000 and an entry fee of £7.
  • The Authors Licensing and Copying Society (ALCS) paid out over £2m to British writers of articles in magazines, journals and newspapers last year. Make sure you receive your share of any income they've collected by checking the criteria and making your claims for any articles by 31 December 2012. ALCS collects money for the secondary use of articles published in magazines, journals and newspapers, and pays this money out to writers, on a claims basis, providing their articles meet certain criteria.
  • 'Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.' Richard Curtis in our Writers' Quotes.