27 July 2020 - What's new
27 July 2020
- ‘Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Now you are ready to sub your first work. Criticism is hard to take at first. Trust me, I've been there. But learn to think of crit marks as a knife...' Inez Kelley, author of 16 novels, romance and general fiction, including Beauty and the Badge and If Only in Our Dreams. Our Comment.
- From our 19-part Inside Publishing series, Publishing and Pricing: 'Pricing can be a fraught subject, as it is something which publishers like to control and regard as an integral part of selling the book. It is quite common for authors to find that their book is not priced as they think, or had expected, it would be. Even your editor will not have the final say on this, which will be the decision of the sales department.' From Copy editing and Proof-reading: 'Perhaps, as an author, you feel you do not understand what copy editing is, or why you should need it. Copy editing is the painstaking job of going through a manuscript line by line to correct the spelling, grammar and punctuation...'
- How can you give yourself your best chance when entering competitions? Here's a set of tips to make sure you make the most of the opportunities.
- There are seven competitions and prizes we've featured which are still open. Writing Opportunities.
- Our links: it's definitely a very feel-good and motivational thing to say everyone has a book in them, but I do not believe this, How to Write an Email Well Enough to Land a Book Deal | Literary Hub; for five years, I both wrote and worked, squeezing in the writing on nights and weekends, Jessica Barry: the road to publication; plenty of writers swear by them, Is This the End of Writing in Cafés? | Literary Hub; and more highbrow. More participatory. More investigative, True Crime Has Been Having a Moment for Three Centuries. But the New Era Is Different. | CrimeReads.
- Do you want to get your script accepted and produced for the stage or screen? This is one of the most competitive areas to get into, with very few open doors. The glamour and potential financial rewards are contrasted with the reality of rejection, or no response at all, which is what is actually experienced by many aspiring scriptwriters. Get your TV script, screenplay or play professionally assessed. Our Scriptwriting assessment service.
- More links: a Nigerian-British writer has won the £10,000 award, Irenosen Okojie wins the Caine prize for 'stunning' short story Grace Jones | Books | The Guardian; the British Civil Wars of the mid-17th century are my passion, Grown up history for the fiction writer; WorldCon, where the winners of the prestigious Hugo awards are announced, has been running every year since 1946, but Authors condemn Saudi Arabia's bid to host World Science Fiction Convention | Books | The Guardian; and as hard as it may be to believe, not too long ago, it was actually quite difficult to sell a book about him, but Donald Trump Has Permanently Changed the Publishing Industry | The New Republic.
- An editor's take on why they are so difficult to use: So what's wrong with PDFs? If you need your file to be edited, PDF is not the ideal format; in fact, it is practically the worst format you can choose...'
- Meagan Spooner tells it like it is in our Writers' Quotes: '"Writer's block" is just a fancy way of saying "I don't feel like doing any work today."'
