What's New in 2017
- 'The successful growth of new British publisher Head of Zeus shows how an international approach to publishing can put a business in a strong position through challenging the traditional approach to publishing markets...' But it's through selling ebooks internationally that the firm is coming up with a new publishing model. News Review
- ‘I realize how decadent writing a novel is. You really own this world, you can do whatever you want to it. You can go inside people's minds. Gone Girl has a lot of internal monologues, so it was a big struggle to figure out how to have them show you who they were instead of like, "Here's about me." Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl and Dark Places in the Hollywood Reporter gives us this week's Comment.
- Our Inside Publishing series offers 19 articles offering an insider's perspective. On Copyright 'Many writers worry about losing their copyright. Before sending out your manuscript it is always advisable to put a copyright line consisting of the copyright sign ©, the year and your name on the title page...' On The Writer/Publisher Financial Relationship: 'There's no escaping the fact that publishers and authors are essentially in an adversarial position. Even in the very best and most supportive publisher/writer relationships there is the tension caused by the fact that authors would like to earn as much as possible from their writing and publishers to pay as little as they can get away with...'
- Our links: how a former police officer took a career break, reinvented herself as a freelance feature writer and wrote her first novel, I Let You Go, which was the UK's top-selling crime fiction novel in 2015, 'I See You,' A Conversation with Clare Mackintosh | The Huffington Post; in book reviews, where "readable" has risen to become the preeminent adjective of praise, The Millions: Against Readability - The Millions; and we are not all Neil Gaiman. We can't all just write in whatever genre we want, whenever we want, and hope our audiences will follow us there, How Crowdfunding Allows You to Experiment Outside Your Genre | Jane Friedman.
- Do you want to self-publish your work? WritersServices offers a suite of services which help writers get their work into shape before they self-publish, which includes Copy editing, Blurb-writing, Poetry Collection Editing, Typing manuscripts. Here's our page on Services for Self-publishers.
- More links: were the romance fans, with their voracious reading habits, cannibalizing profits under the subscription model? Why the Much-Hyped "Netflix of Books" Model Ended Up Flopping; Jack Henry Abbott was a talented writer and a convicted murderer. What made Mailer believe he wouldn't kill again? Norman Mailer's Fatal Friendship | New Republic; and who would have thought that the new retro spoofs would be so successful? Not Ladybird's own publisher, The Ladybird phenomenon: the publishing craze that's still flying | Books | The Guardian.
- If you've come to the site looking for a report on your manuscript, how do you work out which one would suit you best? Which Report? includes our new top-of-the range service, the Editor's Report Plus, introduced by popular demand to provide even more detail. This very substantial report takes the form of a chapter-by-chapter breakdown and many writers have found this approach helps them to get their book right.
- From our Writers' Quotes: 'When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.' Ernest Hemingway. For quotes fans we have More Writers' Quotes and Even More Quotes.
- 'Coming from the tech arena is a fairly hostile view of traditional publishing, which assumes that it is dead and will shortly be totally replaced by indie publishing. But is this really what is happening at present? It doesn't seem so clear-cut...' News Review on the debate about 'The black hole of modern publishing practices'.
- Our Comment on the same subject is from Mark Dawson, author of 24 books, including The Cleaner, his latest John Milton title, and the Isabella Rose series: ‘You have to be the writer and get the words down, then you've got to know to take off your writer's hat and put on your business hat. And this is why self-publishing is not for everybody... If you sign up to my mailing list, you get the first two books in the Milton series free - you need to shoot them a pill to get them to sign up... You want to take someone from being a customer to being a reader, then a fan and in the end you consider them friends...'
- If you're aiming at traditional publishing, Finding an agent and Working with an agent are two practical checklists to help set up and maintain this vital relationship. 'Try to find an agency which is ‘hungry' for new clients. To keep their workload under control, an established independent agent might take on something like four new authors a year (this figure came from two agents I spoke to recently), but only to replace four departing clients. This may seem obvious, but whether or not an agent is actively looking to build their list of clients is probably the single most important factor affecting how closely they are looking at unsolicited submissions...'
- Our January Magazine is ready, providing a summary of new material from last month to dip into. There are some great links: Authors Licensing and Copying Society 5 Ways to Make More Money from your Books in 2017, What being an editor taught me about writing and The State of Flash Fiction.
- Our Manuscript Polishing service is for anyone who wants additional editorial help to prepare their work for publication. Does your manuscript need polishing to get it into shape for submission or self-publishing? Our editors can polish it whilst copy editing it, and make sure it's ready for publication.
- Our links: a literary agent reflects on the changes in the agency world, Transparency, targeting, Twitter: what it means to be a literary agent now | The Bookseller; judge Andrew Holgate reflects on different ways of judging prizes, The beauty of blind reading - The Sunday Times Short Story Awards; interesting reflections on new opportunities and making novels into games, How, and why, I'm turning The Kraken Wakes into a game | The Bookseller; and there are not many literary genres as loved and loathed as romance fiction. For all its millions of female readers for hundreds of years, it has been dismissed as sentimental, sappy and trashy, as well as mad, bad and dangerous to read, Trashy, sexist, downright dangerous? In defence of romantic fiction | Books | The Guardian.
- The Web as a Research tool - there are some sensational research resources for writers on the web. The search engines and other directories have made these accessible. But it helps to understand a little about how they work.
- More links: when we first got Google's virtual reality headset at my house, called the Google Daydream, I can't say I was too excited, Turning the Virtual Page: Virtual Reality and Traditional Publishing - Publishing Trends; the terrible story of a much-loved YA author who was killed for her fortune, Helen Bailey murder: Ian Stewart jailed for at least 34 years for killing author | UK news | The Guardian and Five Pieces of Good Advice for M.F.A. Students.
- Writing - 'It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.' William Faulkner in our Writers' Quotes.
- 'If I've written the screenplay, I get a lot of say, or I make myself an executive producer and at least pitch in with it. I always think of the novel as a visual form. I think of people as visual creatures. It's our strongest sense. The key to an important scene is to get the visual details correct... There comes a moment when you just have to back off. Once it goes into pre-production, all the big decisions are made and you really don't want to be lurking around saying ‘it's not like this in my novel! Our Comment is from 'Ian McEwan, author of The Children Act and sixteen other novels and books of stories in Concrete Online.
- Closing on 15 May, the ten Winchester Writers Festival Competitions offer something for everyone. They are open to all writers across the UK and around the world regardless of whether or not you attend the Festival. Entry fees mostly £6, various prizes.
- An Editor's Advice is a series of seven articles by one of our editors on really useful subjects for writers such as Dialogue, Manuscript presentation and Doing further drafts: 'A rewrite is a huge investment of time, and faith in what you're doing, but it can pay dividends in terms of improving the novel. Here's why I suggest doing it. The trouble with writing a novel is that you're living cheek by jowl with the thing, day in, day out. After a while, you lose any sense of proportion where it's concerned.'
- In a very visible case, highly successful Australian author Kate Morton has accused the agent who kick-started her career of favouring her own interests. Morton is seeking a refund of up to $2.8 million paid to her agent in commission. Her well-respected agent Selwa Anthony is suing her former client for breach of contract relating to books on which she says she was entitled to receive her 15% commission. News Review
- Our article on How to get your book translated into English (without it costing the earth) asks writers with a manuscript which needs translating: "if your English is good enough, what about translating your book yourself, and then getting your translation polished and copy edited by a professional editor who is a native English speaker?" This could be a cost-effective way of reaching the international English-speaking market. It's also a good approach if your book is in English but needs polishing up for publication.
- Our links: for months, Ashton has been posting the same tweet - and getting nearly a thousand retweets each time - about a 19-year-old author from Sheffield's self-published book, Want to sell a bad book? Tap into Twitter's network of "influencers"; how finding out about the stories of real women can pitch you into writing about them, Emma Donoghue and Laird Hunt on Writing Historical Women | Literary Hub; are they playing fair with the average author dreaming of selling a million copies of his or her e-book? Is Amazon Kindle Cheating Self-Published Authors? - Authorlink; and another piece on the death of the novel, but also on a fractured, stupefied publishing industry, Stupid cultures: on our obsession with Literature | Overland literary journal.
- Top Ten Tips for non-fiction writers is a helpful checklist for writers, compiled by a Creative Writing tutor. No 1 is 'Story, story, story. Make sure that your story can sustain several chapters and tens of thousands of words. Keep asking yourself: Why would anyone want to read this story?' Now doesn't that sound like fiction? But it's not, it's non-fiction.
- More links: 'Very atypically, I can pinpoint an exact moment where I had a damascene conversion - where poetry very suddenly entered my life properly, for the first time', Rishi Dastidar - The Asian Writer; 'The indie romance community has a great bond between readers and authors. There's a real passion for our genre.' Three Award-Winning Romance Novelists Discuss Their Craft - BLARB; caling for publishers to oppose crackdowns on free speech and the rise of so-called fake news, Faber CEO speaks out after winning indie trade publisher of the year | Books | The Guardian; these advising angels - part fact-checkers, part cultural ambassadors - are new additions to the book publishing ecosystem - how "sensitivity readers" from minority groups are changing the book publishing ecosystem, Is My Novel Offensive?
- 'I think poetry should be alive. You should be able to dance to it.' Benjamin Zephaniah in our Writers' Quotes.
- ‘Wonderfully, out of that private box of miracles that is a writer's life, I just wrote that sentence [that now opens the book]: "The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake." The whole damn book was just lying in behind that sentence.' There followed ‘four or five joyous months where, for once in a decade, you are going down to your work room like a 22-year-old instead of a 61-year-old, and being very surprised...' Our Comment is from Sebastian Barry, author of Days without End, which recently won the Costa Award and which paints a fascinating picture of a slice of American history.
- Short Fiction Competition 2017 is our Writing Opportunity. Open to all published and unpublished authors over 16, entry fee £7, closing date 31 March and First Prize £500 + publication, Second Prize £100 + publication, Third Prize place on their masterclass.
- For anyone thinking about or embarked on self-publishing, our ten-part WritersServices Self-Publishing Guide by 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 is an essential starting-point, taking you through the process step-by-step. 'Self-publishing has changed so much over the past few years it's hard to believe it was once looked down upon by the publishing industry as the last resort of the vain and desperate. At the time of writing many self-publishing authors are identifying with the term ‘indie author', which acknowledges that to professionally publish today, you don't actually have to do everything yourself!'
- It's been a lively week on the children's publishing and reading front, with an attack on the "joyless education" which is putting children off reading, an intervention from the Children's Laureate demonstrating that drawing and illustrating help children's literacy and authors complaining about celebrity signings for children's books. The week's News Review, is Should celebrities be signed up for children's books?
- 'Hardly any authors can copy edit their own writing. It is notoriously difficult to spot the errors in your own work. So professional copy editing does make sense, either if you are trying to give your work its best chance when submitting it or, even more crucially, if you are planning to self-publish...' Getting your manuscript copy edited
- Our links: many years as a crime reporter in the UK's historic port city of Hull have provided him with darkly tinted lenses with which to peer through as a crime novelist, David Mark on the Clarity of Good vs. Evil in Crime Fiction | Literary Hub; five critical reasons for spending some of your invaluable "off-writing" time reading advice about the craft and process of writing Why You Should Read About Writing | BookBaby Blog; this dwarfs any other sector for the online retailer, pulling in $861m compared to the $255m Amazon makes in North American sales and the $541m it loses internationally, Amazon Web Services: the secret to the online retailer's future success | Technology | The Guardian; and at twenty-seven she'd written three drafts in six months, followed by nearly a decade trying to get it published, here's a really tough writer, Eimear McBride Is Not Afraid of Cruelty.
- How to put together Your submission package - 'Given the difficulty of getting agents and publishers to take on your work, it's really important to make sure that you present it in the best possible way. Less is more, so don't send a full manuscript, as it's very unlikely to be read. Far better to tempt them with a submission package that will leave them wanting to see the rest of the manuscript...'
- More links: whatever I'd accomplished in my 20-year career and over five books, the reviewer seemed to imply, I was still apparently a writer of "chick lit," What Was Chick Lit? A Brief History From the Inside | Literary Hub; successful self-published authors are tapping into larger markets, Book Distribution For Self-Published Authors Beyond Amazon & Kindle | BookBaby Blog; for her, reading, writing, and thinking are more than just sources of pleasure. A child of postwar austerity, she embraced literature and history as ways out, A.S. Byatt: I Have Not Yet Written Enough | Literary Hub.
- Ever wanted to understand what's involved in indexing? The Ins & Outs of Indexing by Joanne Phillips shows how you could produce an index for your non-fiction book yourself or what you might gain by having a professional tackle the job.
- 'Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.' Neil Gaiman in our Writers' Quotes.
