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21 September 2015 - What's new

21 September 2015
  • 'In an unusual move, the UK children's publisher Chicken House and US publisher Little Brown Young Readers have parted company with bestselling children's author Cornelia Funke, who both have published right from the beginning of her writing career. What's unusual about the split is that it's not about money, or more promotion, but about differences relating to editorial advice...' This week's News Review.
  • '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
  • ‘When you have a new development in forensic science, as a crime writer your first thought is how do I work my way around that? Because these new developments do make for a slightly more complicated environment for us to be working in. If you look back 20 years even, what was available in terms of evidential analysis was really quite low level. The writer had a lot of leeway and could leave forensic traces that were never going to be picked up on...' Val McDermid, whose latest book is Splinter the Silence, in the Sunday Telegraph quoted in our Comment column.
  • Amongst the entries in our Endorsements page: ‘The site covers EVERYTHING a new writer, established writer, or a wannabe writer could possibly want or need to know.' Hester Mundis, author many books, including My Chimp Friday, Heart Songs For Animal Lovers and The Vitamin Bible.
  • Our links this week, an especially rich trawl: author Ian Graham's dissatisfaction with his publisher led to A manifesto on working with authors | The Bookseller; an interesting but perhaps over-long series of views on the great crime writer, Agatha Christie: genius or hack? Crime writers pass judgment and pick favourites; a useful article giving self-publishers a perspective on selling their books internationally, How Self-Published Authors Can Go Global - Publishing Perspectives; and in its first study on author income since 2009, the Authors Guild delivers some jarring, if unsurprising, data, New Guild Survey Reveals Majority of Authors Earn Below Poverty Line.
  • From our Archive, a two-part serialisation of Linda Strachan's Writing for Children: 'One of the most exciting things about writing for children is the sheer diversity. You have different ages to choose from; you can write picture books, easy readers, short books for more confident readers, or novels - each quite different in length and often in content... Do you want to write for the educational market - books written for use in schools - or would you rather write poetry or plays, a series or a ‘stand alone', or perhaps a picture book for the very young?...'
  • More links: some help with getting started each day on your writing, 10 Tips to Help Writers Actually Write; the Daily Telegraph says: 'What a fascinating job this year's Man Booker committee is doing, and how difficult they're making life for the poor souls charged with calling the odds' in The Booker Prize shortlist 2015: the best for years; and more tips, from a very successful and well-respected author, William Boyd: my advice for budding authors | Books | The Guardian.
  • 'In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.' Ursula K Le Guin in our Writers' Quotes.