7 November 2016 - What's new
7 November 2016
- 'After the turmoil of the Brexit vote in the UK referendum, 2016 has now delivered another stunning and unexpected political turnaround in the United States. It's impossible at this stage to gauge what the effect on writers and publishing of a Donald Trump presidency will be, but many writers have spoken out to voice their anxieties and hopes...' News Review
- ‘After Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School I took a pause and was thinking about the future. Should I continue? Or should I stop and do something else? I'm only about halfway through (he can envisage at least 20 books in the series). If I can keep them fresh, I will definitely keep going. I'm committed to this series...' Jeff Kinney, highly successful author of the Wimpy Kid series, as his eleventh book comes out, provides this week's Comment from the Bookseller.
- 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...'
- From our Endorsements page: 'Today I only want to say, "thank you". DM has done a truly great job. I have worked with her suggestions which have brought clarity and depth to my subject. Her work on my punctuation is brilliant. As I read through the manuscript now, it is like gliding on silk.' Helena Dodds
- Our links: can sophisticated machine learning techniques uncover what makes certain books sell more than others? BookBrunch - The bestseller formula - solved? Tips on getting traction for your online presence, How to Get 10,000 Visits to Your Blog in One Day with No Platform | Jane Friedman; regular US and UK studies examine the role that books play in children's lives and look at how reading fares against other leisure activities, digital and physical, BookBrunch - Children's engagement with books; and (Bookbrunch yet again!) Edward Glover reports on his experiences as the self-publisher of three novels, BookBrunch - On being a self-published author of printed books.
- If you've come to the site looking for a report on your manuscript, how do you work out which one would suit you best? Which Report? includes our new top-of-the range service, the Editor's Report Plus, introduced by popular demand to provide even more detail. This very substantial report takes the form of a chapter-by-chapter breakdown and many writers have found this detail helps them to get their book right.
- Our page of Picture library links provides a good starting-point for finding an image for your book, whether it's for the cover or inside. Gograph has just been added with its 18 million stock links.
- More links: an illuminating article about what it's really like to be a small publisher, 10 Lessons from 10 Years Running a Small Press | Literary Hub; despite the increasing realisation that digital and print can easily coexist in the market, the question of whether the ebook will "kill" the print book continues to surface, The myth of the disappearing book: Misplaced hype over ebooks dates back to the phonograph in 1894 | The Independent; and can a ‘gateway to worldwide subscription services' for self-published authors up the ante for those services? Denmark's New Palatium: Curating Indie Books for Subscriptions.
- 'Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed.' Leo Rosten in our Writers' Quotes.
