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2 December 2013 - What's new

2 December 2013
  • Do you want your book to be properly published? There's no reason why a self-publisher shouldn't have as good a chance of finding an audience as an author whose book is coming out from a publisher. But what really lets their work down is if it hasn't been professionally copy edited. Effectively a self-publisher who goes ahead without copy editing is just publishing a manuscript, a work-in-progress which readers will react against because of all the errors. Our new page looks at Copy editing for self-publishers.
  • Pan MacmillanOne of largest fiction and non-fiction book publishers in UK; includes imprints of Pan, Picador and Macmillan Children’s Books in the UK has just acquired Mary Wood, a self-published author of five historical sagas, taking on all five as well as two new books. Pan Macmillan will publish the novels in paperback and e-book throughout 2014 and 2015. The author's blog has played a major part in making her well-known and the ebook versions of all her titles have been in the Amazon Top Ten. News Review
  • To find a mass of useful material on the site, try this page Advice for Writers.
  • 'Proud? Frightened about the next book, actually, always frightened about the next book, If you've had 16 number ones in a row, you wonder if the next one will be. We can all think of a lot of authors who have died overnight. You see such big names disappearing and you think, 'That could be me'. There's always pressure. You sit down each day and say, 'this has to be better than anything I've done before', because these are real readers and they are sitting there waiting for it...' Jeffrey Archer, whose latest bestseller is Best Kept Secret, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.
  • This week's Wriitng Opportunity is the 2014 First Fictions Graphic Novel Competition, closing on 3 March 2014 and open to all cartoonists, writers and artists who have not previously published a full-length graphic work and are resident in the UK.
  • The Mslexia Writer's Diary 2014 is just the thing to put on your Christmas present list. Writing exercises, a table for tracking submissions, key dates in the literary year, nuggets of wisdom and fortnightly reading recommendations from top authors, all to help you keep your writing life on track.
  • Another good crop of links this week: Are There Books Too Private to Publish? Publish Faster, Publish Less: Futurebook's Big Ideas | Publishing Perspectives and Young adult readers 'prefer printed to ebooks' | Books | theguardian.com.
  • ‘There's a marvellous peace in not publishing... When you publish, the world thinks you owe something. If you don't publish, they don't know what you're doing. You can keep it for yourself.' - J D Salinger, two of whose stories have been stolen and published, in our Writers' Quotes.