5 March 2012 - What's new
5 March 2012
- 'This week’s there’s an interesting story from the US about writer Kate Alcott, whose first novel The Dressmaker has just sold 35,000 copies in hardback and been sold for translation in five countries... But, as News Review explains, Kate Alcott was actually a pseudonym and her story shows why new authors may have an advantage over previously published ones.
- Links to stories of the week - Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world. This week, it's all about Amazon: How to counter Amazon: Create a one-World Book Alliance - A global answer to Amazon and Amazon, Innovation, and the Rewards of the Free Market from the US Authors' Guild.
- Are you having a problem with Making Submissions? Here is our page on Your submission package and we can also help with our Submission Critique service. You could also think about having a report, our Editor's Report will help you with a professional editorial assessment of your work.
- 'How could the author who had cut out ALL the middle-men with the invention of Pottermore, jump back onto the ship she appeared to have left aground? The answer is relatively simple, but one often neglected in a world of Kindle-mania. Rowling wants the new book to be a success: and success is not just measured in units sold...' Philip Jones, Futurebook, the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.
- Our Writing Opportunity this week is the MsLexia Women's Short Story Competition, open to women all over the world and closing on 19 March.
- Bob's Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer offers entertaining insights into the life of an aspiring writer. It's a WritersServices exclusive and you can go back to the start in 2001 and right through to its end in December 2007, when he reflected: 'Still haven’t broken through my writer’s block. No longer even sure I want to. Why write? What’s writing for? Have absolutely no idea. How can one add anything worthwhile to the work of writers like Oscar Wilde? Yet the internet grows more vast by the minute with the words of the millions who are certain their opinions are worth airing.'
- 'Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.' Walter Savage Landor in our Writers' Quotes.