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4 August 2014 - What's new

4 August 2014
  • Our Success Story this week is that of Tina Seskis: an irresistible subject for a Success Story because she lives just up the road from WritersServices in north London and the reasons for her success as a writer are like a textbook illustration of how to do it. After university, she went on to work in marketing and advertising for more than 20 years and it was this experience which stood her in good stead when she found herself with a book to market. This was a book which she'd had the idea for whilst on holiday in Venice. Here's its brilliant starting-point: "It's funny how easy it is, when it really comes down to it, to get up from your life and begin a new one. All you need is enough money to start you off, and a resolve to not think about the people you're leaving behind..."
  • Is this 'the end of the publishing business as we know it'? This week's News Review: 'Amazon's launch of a subscription model for ebooks with its Kindle Unlimited has caused dismay amongst both publishers and agents. There has been a debate about whether this would be a sub-licence or a sale, with some agents insisting that it is a sub-licence and Amazon arguing that it is a sale. Authors will get a tiny amount of royalty...'
  • This week's Writing Opportunity is the 2014 Manchester Fiction Prize for a story of up to 2,500 words in length, open to all and closing on 29 August.
  • ‘Last month, if you will excuse the self-advertisement, I published a novella as an Amazon Kindle single. A mere £1.49 to download, but already a site called general-ebooks.com is offering the thing free. Call me a spoilsport, but this ripped-off author would prefer the authorities to send a policeman with a search warrant...' D J Taylor, columnist and author of The Windsor Faction and 10 other novels, and biographies of Thackerary and Orwell, in the Independent on Sunday, quoted in our Comment column.
  • Are you interested in Getting Your Manuscript Copy Edited? As well as this article we have one from Inside Publishing about Copy editing and proof-reading and we offer a Copy editing service, as well as Proof-reading and Manuscript Polishing, which involves more intensive work, 'polishing' and improving the text, and correcting the English if you are writing in English as a second language.
  • Our links this week start with a cynical but very relevant question: Can So Many Authors Be Earning Big Money? - Dana Beth Weinberg; Mashable on the latest from Amazon, How Amazon Brought Publishing to Its Knees - and Why Authors Might Be Next; this one might be useful if you're planning to publicise your own book, 6 Questions to Ask Before Publicizing Your Book | Publishing Perspectives; and A Short History of Self-Help, The World's Bestselling Genre | Publishing Perspectives.
  • Our series of six articles on writing in different categories covers a wide range of genre writing - Crime, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Romance, Non-fiction, Historical fiction and Memoir and Autobiography. So we it's likely that we have the genre you are interested in covered.
  • 'And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.' Sylvia Plath in our Writers' Quotes.