What's New in 2017
- Some sensational figures have just been released showing the trend towards book sales in print form as opposed to ebook is continuing, as sales of consumer ebooks in the UK dropped by a whopping 17%. These figures exclude self-published titles, which have contributed a large proportion of the ebook sales. But more than 50% of genre sales are now reckoned to be in ebook form. News Review
- ‘I refuse to be bullied by the idea that you have to have mental peace to write. I have no mental peace but I have written despite that. It's been from about the mid-Seventies that we've had this phenomenon of women with children writing. There's 2,000 years of that not being true, like literally never true...' Zadie Smith, author of Swing Time, NW and White Teeth, in the Evening Standard provides this week's Comment, ‘Women with children writing'.
- Our Success Stories series includes Darren Shan and Tina Seskis, of whom we said: 'an irresistible subject for a Success Story because she lives just up the road from WritersServices in north London and because her success as a writer is like a textbook illustration of how to do it'. We have other Success Stories on a wide range of authors.
- A new entry to our Endorsements page: 'I cannot thank you enough!! Your editor has worked her magic and I am delighted with the results!! Please thank her for me, I really appreciate what she has done!' Wendy White, whose Blue Rat rhyming children's stories we edited.
- Our March Magazine is now ready!
- Our links: too often, an independent author writing a memoir doesn't deliver the sort of book readers at large can appreciate, Writing A Memoir? Avoid These Mistakes | BookBaby Blog; the online retailer's rapid rise to prominence in the translation of foreign prose to English, Amazon expands its literary horizons, making big imprint in translation niche | The Seattle Times; the thing that can get a perfectly good story rejected by an editor on the first page, The Most Common Entry-Level Mistake in the Writing Game | Jane Friedman; and from today's paper, here are some things that you can't do with a Kindle, How eBooks lost their shine: 'Kindles now look clunky and unhip' | Books | The Guardian.
- A recent new page on the site is Our Services for Writers, listing all 20 editorial services offered by WritersServices, the widest range available on the web.
- More links: what is the one piece of advice you can give me before my book is published? Ask the Publicists: What's the One Thing I Can Do For My Book? | Literary Hub; forty years ago this month, a small group of campaigning writers founded an organisation which now pays out around £30 million a year to its writer members, Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society ALCS at 40 Small beginnings, big ambitions; there are different types of book editing - including proofreading, copy-editing, and developmental editing - for different stages of the publication process, What Type of Book Editing Do You Need - And When? BookBaby Blog; and Sarah Dalton writes young adult novels. She's earned a following among fans of YA genre fiction, but has now turned to crime fiction, The Secrets of Writing in Multiple Genres.
- 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.
- And from our Writers' Quotes, from W H Auden: 'But if a stranger in a train asks me my occupation I never answer 'writer' for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer 'poetry' would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.'
- Literary magazines with one week's response time is Sandeep Kumar Mishra's useful list, added to the site this week. They range from literary fiction to non-fiction and include science fiction and fantasy, popular non-fiction, politics, flash fiction, reviews, humour, social issues, the economy, lifestyle, horror, artwork and much more. If you've ever despaired at how long magazine submissions can take, this is the list you need.
- 'In a week when we're glad to publish this list of 36 magazines which reply within a week, it's also fair to consider the question of how much writers have to pay to make submissions, especially when so many of them are rejected...' News Review
- Tips for writers is our 8-part crash course for writers, taking you from Improve Your Writing to Promoting Your Writing (and Yourself), from Self-publishing: is it for you? to Submission to publishers and agents. 'Think about the market for your book. Research the category and read widely to see what other published writers in this area are doing. Which writers are successful and why? Visit bookshops and analyse what you find there. If you are reading this you are probably already writing, but it really is worth thinking right from the beginning about your readers, as that makes it far more likely you'll eventually find them...'
- This week's Writing Opportunity is The Sunday Times PFD Young Writer of the Year Award 2017, open to published and self-published British and Irish authors of fiction, non-fiction and poetry aged 18-35 and with a prize of £5,000. Closing on 2 June.
- Some other fabulous Writing Opportunities which are still open.
- As well as our highly-regarded Copy editing service, which will help you prepare your manuscript for submission or self-publishing, we have Manuscript Polishing, which provides a higher-level polishing service, Translation editing for those for whom English is not a native language and our new Writer's edit, providing line-editing. Get the right level of editorial support for your needs. Contact us to discuss what you want.
- 'Writing about sex is very difficult. I did not set out to write lots of sex scenes - they kept recurring and I realised they were intrinsic to the story of the relationship. And yet, I wanted it to be the opposite of pornography - even literary sex can be pornography. In this novel, it was the characters' way to speak to each other about what they could not verbalise...' Our Comment is from Eimear McBride, author of The Lesser Bohemians and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and is from the Observer.
- Our links: top publishing guru Mike Shatzkin on the practical power of the author brand in marketing, Authors need help with their digital presence that they still are not getting - The Idea Logical Company; there are some things we expect from a certain kind of story. Nobody goes to a sports movie to see the heroes lose the big game; nobody goes to a superhero movie to see the superhero die, Subverting Genre Conventions | Script Society | Create a Screenplay; the crime writer on saving her dog, which had fallen through the ice, 'It was Little Women that trained me how to handle this crisis.' Sara Paretsky: From Joan of Arc to Little Women, a History of Heroes | Literary Hub; and, a bit focused on the start-up Thought Catalog but asking the interesting quesion: can we create an enclave where creative and intellectual sophistication still matter? Book publishing in the digital age | TechCrunch.
- 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?'
- More links: it's all down to a short story she wrote while studying creative writing at college, New YA sensation Angie Thomas: "Publishing did something pretty terrible. They made the assumption that black kids don't read"; a lot of crime fiction is about exploring things you don't know. For me, it was the lure of the completely unfamiliar: the urban gangster, Malcolm Mackay: Life in the Golden Age of Scottish Crime Fiction | Literary Hub; and two links relating to the same story, explosive claims in unseen correspondence written in the bitter aftermath of one of literature's most famous and destructive marriages, Unseen Sylvia Plath letters claim domestic abuse by Ted Hughes | Books | The Guardian; and 'the calcification of two camps: those who do not see Hughes's poetic genius as exculpating his behaviour, and the others who see it as exactly that', Plath's letters probably won't harm Hughes's reputation | Rafia Zakaria | Books | The Guardian.
- And from Susan Sontag in our Writers' Quotes this week, 'We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.'
- 'Two new initiatives from Amazon are worth checking out, one which may help get your books out there and one which seems largely to benefit Amazon's drive to grow its Amazon Prime business. Plus there's also an author outlining how you can get your own ebooks out to an international audience...' News Review
- You've got until 21 May to enter the Virago/The Pool New Crime Writer award, open to women writers resident in the UK who have not had a book published or self-published. There's no entry fee and the prize is a publishing contract with Virago including a £7,500 advance.
- From our 19 part Inside Publishing series, The Relationship between Publishers and Agents: 'Why do publishers need agents? Actually they don't need them, although they have come to rely on them. In many ways publishers would prefer to deal direct with unagented authors. It's authors who need agents. Writers need someone to sell their work and then to look after their relationship with their publishers...'
- Print on demand is a now widely-used printing technology which delivers, literally, print on demand. It has the power to change the way books are published radically, and even publishers are using it on a very much greater scale. Some writers are still not yet familiar with its possibilities. Print on demand.
- 'I actually say I write books about adults or about young people. I think it's an important distinction. But in the young people's books I've never tried to use simpler language, simpler stories or simpler themes. I've written the book I would normally write, but with a young person at the centre of it. Most writers for young people these days aren't thinking about children as being little kids. They're tackling serious subjects, writing about issues that are really faced by young people today, and that's what they want to read....' John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Heart's Invisible Furies, in the Observer provides this week's Comment.
- Getting your poetry published: 'Don't even try to approach publishers until you have a collection-length amount of material to offer. Your chances will be much better even then if you can point to publication of your poems in magazines. Don't waste any time trying to get a literary agent to represent you. Only the best-known poets have literary representation, because there is just so little money in it that agents don't bother. If you can muster any kind of contact or referral, it is a way of getting your work noticed, but it is still a long, hard road to publication... You may feel that it is better to go the self-publishing route...'
- Our links: I read your piece in the Guardian last weekend - about being a "failed novelist" - with a mounting sense of disbelief, Do two unpublished books make you a failed author? No, you're a quitter | Books | The Guardian; a long but fascinating interview with Canada's most famous writer, Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia - The New Yorker; it is actually self-published indie authors that are taking over the book market, The Inequality of Indie Authors - The State Times; and forget plot or characters. Don't worry about voice or structure. If you believe the internet, there's nothing more important in fiction than worldbuilding, Against Worldbuilding - Electric Literature.
- Do you want some help with your writing but don't quite know what you want? Are you a bit puzzled by the various services on offer, and not sure what to go for? Choosing a service can help you work out which service is right for you.
- More links: while writing her first memoir, The Liar's Club, Mary Karr was so exhausted she napped every day like a cross-country trucker, What Happens to Your Memories When You Write a Memoir -- Science of Us; an annual summing-up from a veteran of the Fair, Bologna Report 2017 By Mary Hoffman; there was the usual flurry of excitement about various titles announced at the London Book Fair last month. But what has been the fate of titles that were similarly hyped at previous fairs? Whatever Happened To The Last Big Things; once your voice is real and audible, people's attitude to your writing will change, Finding Your Voice As A Writer | Writing Advice | BookBaby Blog.
- For some lighter reading over what may be the holiday weekend for you - Rotten Rejections: The Letters that Publishers Wish They'd Never Sent. - Most of these are taken from Andre Bernard's wonderful little book Rotten Rejections: The Letters that Publishers Wish They'd Never Sent. This extraordinary collection of rejection letters sent by publishers to writers - many delivered to now famous authors of classic books - will make you laugh and provide comfort in the face of your own struggles to get published. Do send your own rejections.
- 'There ain't nothing more to write about and I'm rotten glad of it, because if I'd knowed what a trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn't a tackled it.' Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides a great addition to our Writers Quotes.
- ‘My experience of becoming a writer... I was a little too late to the game. I wrote when I was younger but I could never get anything to really cohere, so for me the big revelation, before my first book... was that I had to really restrict myself. I had to really constrain myself and write in a very narrow vein - comic, very contemporary, maybe a little futuristic...' George Saunders, author of just-published Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December, which won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2014, in the Bookseller. Our Comment.
- Closing on 5 May, here's a really attractive competition, although only for UK residents unfortunately, the Daily Mail/Penguin Random House New Crime Novel Competition. No entry fee and the prize is a £20,000 advance and a publishing contract with Century, an imprint of Penguin Random House UKPenguin Random House have more than 50 creative and autonomous imprints, publishing the very best books for all audiences, covering fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, autobiographies and much more. Click for Random House UK Publishers References listing, and the services of literary agent Luigi Bonomi. Other Writing Opportunities.
- A must-read for children's authors - Suzy Jenvey's special series for WritersServices, the four-part Essential Guide to Writing for Children. The first article looks at the all-important question of age groups and what you should be aware of in writing for each one. The second part is - Before You Write: What is My Story Going to be? The third part deals with Starting to Write and the fourth part is about Submitting Your Work to Agents and Editors.
- The Bologna Children's Book FairThe Bologna Children's Book Fair or La fiera del libro per ragazzi is the leading professional fair for children's books in the world. this week has been attracting a good number of visitors and there is ever-increasing interest from outside the publishing word, from media and film companies. Reflecting the solid growth and current stability of children's publishing, the Fair offers an opportunity for everyone involved in children's publishing to gather for the biggest annual bash. This week's News Review.
- Have you ever wondered why you don't win any of those competitions? Our check-list gives you tips on Entering Competitions.
- Our links: very simply, people publish because they can. Anyone can, Going it alone: Why there has never been a better time to be a self-published author | The Bookseller; six years after it won the Man Booker prize, The Sense of an Ending is being told again, courtesy of a plush new BBC Films adaptation, Julian Barnes: 'I told the film-makers to throw my book against a wall' | Film | The Guardian; many of the writers I work with now I have been working with for what seems like centuries. It's probably more like 20 years, My advice to writers? Glue yourself to an editor who is also starting out; and "Nobody makes money self-publishing, it's basically an ego trip. Sad!" Fake News! In Self-Publishing - The Book Designer.
- Our February Magazine is now ready, providing access to a whole month's news, links and Comments to browse through.
- More links: sales of books (touchy feely books) have increased by 4% year on year, Why the paperback fought back... and what's next in digital marketing | The Bookseller; and a short digest of the Author Earnings Report, Should Authors Go Exclusive with Amazon? The full deal - and therefore a bit indigestible - February 2017 Big, Bad, Wide & International Report: covering Amazon, Apple, B&N, and Kobo ebook sales in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - Author Earnings; and Indexers are like badgers: they are seldom sighted in the wild, they do their work in the darkness, and when you see one it's usually because they've been run over by an 18-wheeler, In our Google era, indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world | Books | The Guardian.
- We recently launched our unique Writer's edit, a top-level new service for writers who want line-editing as well as copy editing. Does your manuscript need high-level input from an editor to help you get it into the best possible shape for submission or self-publishing? This may be the service for you, offering the kind of editing which publishers' senior editors used to do in-house on their authors' manuscripts and which is now hard to find.
- 'By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.' Max Beerbohm in our Writers' Quotes.