22 August 2016 - What's new
22 August 2016
- Beyond the changes we discussed in last week's News Review, The changing role of the agent, there are several other trends emerging - the increasingly editorial role of agencies, the spread of support areas and other opportunities for writers' work and the ever more international approach agents take to selling their clients' work. News Review
- The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2017 is this week's Writing Opportunity. It's for an outstanding English-language story of no more than 6,000 words from a fiction author from anywhere in the world who has been published in the UK or Ireland and the First Prize is £30,000. Closing on 29 September.
- Other Writing Opportunities still open: The BookLife Prize in Fiction and the Mslexia Children's Novel Competition 2016.
- Our 19-part Inside Publishing series gives you an insider's take on the publishing world, covering everything from Copyright to copy editing and proof-reading, from advances and royalties to the writer/publisher financial relationship. From the Introduction to the series - 'It's a curious mixture of a business, an industry, a profession and a compulsion, but those who work in publishing find it hard to tear themselves away from that heady mix of books, authors and commerce.'
- ‘I feel more alien to book culture than I ever have, I think. Partly because of age. I don't care much for the literary world. I think people basically accept me now. To begin with I was stunned how rude people were...' This week's Comment is from Mary Gaitskill, author of a startling debut collection, Bad Behaviour, and her latest novel, The Mare, in the Observer.
- '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: as a writer of historical fiction, how could you tolerate filmmakers changing the history? Philippa Gregory insists on 'fact clause' in film contracts | The Bookseller; recordings of poems by W B Yeats by well-known actors and musicians, BBC Arts - Books Features - Rebel with a cause: Bob Geldof on WB Yeats; a new hashtag enables female writers to talk about their literary passions, careers and frustrations in response to sexism within the publishing industry, Online community provides safe space for women writers | The Bookseller; and in late July, a kind of spell fell over London's West End as the latest iteration of the Harry Potter saga opened, The Millions: British Humiliation and 'The Cursed Child' - The Millions.
- Advice for Writers is a really useful page which takes you into our archive and helps you explore more than 5,000 pages of information for writers.
- More links: German intellectuals and literary scholars have called on their federal government to purchase and preserve the house, Thomas Mann's Pacific Palisades Home Is For Sale And It's A HUGE Deal In Germany: LAist; some lessons I've learned from my own writing, The Pros and Cons of Getting Inside a Villain's Mind | Literary Hub; and not least because most publishers accept and commission direct submissions from authors in India, literary agents there are relatively new to the scene, Literary Agents in India: Not Your Traditional Gatekeepers.
- 'Writing is hard for every last one of us... Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.' Cheryl Strayed in our Writers' Quotes.
