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3 August 2015 - What's new

3 August 2015
  • 'The longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize is both diverse and international, with a wide range of different kinds of writers and a number of debuts. The longlist features three British writers, five US writers and one each from the Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, India, Nigeria and Jamaica... News Review looks as the internationalisation of the Prize.
  • 'It's all to do with fiction: life is mysterious, human beings are opaque - even your family, spouse, children, you don't know what goes on in their heads. How do you find out what makes people tick? The answer is the novel. That's why it endures and thrives, it's the best art form for making sense of the human condition. It deals with the messy, random business of our lives, this common adventure we're on, the human predicament. Fiction's the best way of getting at the truth, however paradoxical that sounds.' Our Comment is from William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart and the forthcoming Sweet Caress, in the Bookseller.
  • Tips for writers is an eight-part series which goes from Improve your writing to Submisson to agents and publishers, and includes Self-pubishing - is it for you? and Keep up to date. Effectively it's a crash-course for writers who are starting out.
  • Our Writing Opportunity this week is the MslexiaStylish and lively site for quarterly UK literary magazine read by 12,000 'committed' women writers. Good range of quality writing, information and advice with news, reviews, competitions and interviews, all presented in a friendly fashion. Praised by Helen Dunmore as 'astute, invigorating and above all an excellent read.' www.mslexia.co.uk Women's Novel Competition, closing on 21 September and open to unpublished women writers from across the world. The winner of this highly-regarded Prize gets £5,000 and there's an entry fee of £25.
  • 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? This article will show you how to work out which is the right editorial service for you. Choosing a service.
  • Our links this week: in our age of media saturation and, for all practical purposes, limitless entertainment options, how does a specific book find the right reader at the right time? Book Media Amplification is Key to Small Press Success - Publishing Perspectives; the US Authors' Guild has moved on to an attack on term of copyright, Authors Guild Urges More Book Contract Changes; and a publisher's research into which writers have influenced you, Publisher finds that writers' influences are mostly male | Books | The Guardian.
  • More links: is the publishing world moving towards using freelancers on a large scale? In the Future, Will We All Be Freelancers? - Publishing Perspectives; a site which offers reviews of self-published writers, IndieReader's Top 10 Five-star Reviews of Self-Published Books - Publishing Perspectives; and the Zimbabwe Book Fair, once the key event in African publishing, has recently declined. This year, a focus on growing the knowledge economy is giving it new life, The Buzz at the Zimbabwe Book Fair is Growth.
  • Getting Your Poetry Published has some suggestions on how to get started with this. '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... You may feel that it is better to hedge your options by going the self-publishing route. Fortunately this is now very much cheaper than it used to be and the final result is much more satisfactory...'
  • From our Writers' Quotes, Philip Larkin: 'It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.'