25 July 2016 - What's new
25 July 2016
- ‘If you are an emerging writer now, there are more channels for you to get in front of the eyeballs of a publisher but you have to do a lot of the work yourself. There's less work done by editors and publishers - they wait for writers to come to them with manuscripts that are fully formed. A writer will seek that support elsewhere - that's why writing groups have soared...' Sam Cooney, publisher of the Melbourne-based literary journal The Lifted Brow in our Comment column.
- Our Children's Editorial Services can help you get your work ready for publication or self-publishing. Have you found it difficult to get expert editorial input on your work ? Do you want to know if it has real commercial potential? Or are you planning to self-publish? Two reports and copy editing are available from our particularly highly-skilled children's editors, including essential advice on age groups and vocabulary.
- So what does summer mean for writers? For many it's a chance to use the break to work on that novel, in the hope of getting it ready to offer around or to self-publish in the autumn. For those who are at that stage, it can provide a chance to gather your thoughts and concentrate on the work in hand... For readers it's a time to indulge themselves and take away a stack of favourite books, all the easier now with the Kindle to take the strain... For publishers and agents the summer is a really quiet time, as work progresses on the autumn lists and most people head off on holiday. Agents don't submit much in July or August, for risk of being ignored, and agents don't pay much attention to submissions from authors in the summer. News Review on what summer means for writers.
- Finding an agent and Working with an agent - two practical pages on how to set up and maintain this vital relationship.
- Our links: more on how the digital revolution that flummoxed the music, movie and publishing industries has given rise to a surprising winner: the audiobook, The Fastest-Growing Format in Publishing: Audiobooks - WSJ; Donald Ray Pollock's The Heavenly Table is one of the most delightfully twisted novels of the year, here are his pointers on writing, 5 Writing Tips: Donald Ray Pollock; an especially notable arrival, considering the backstory, Amazon's Singles Classics: Another Turn of the e-Shorts Page; and if you based your ideas and knowledge of history only on textbooks and the available popular historical non-fiction, you would think history is one long story of war, with men achieving great things in the respites between battles, How Historical Fiction Does What History Textbooks Do Not.
- The Web as a Research tool - there are some sensational research resources for writers on the web. The search engines and other directories have made these accessible. But it helps to understand a little about how they work.
- More links: ever picked up an interesting-looking book, and wished you could just transfer the story or knowledge it contains directly into your brain, without the graft of actually spending hour after hour reading the thing? Not such a good idea for writers, Apps such as Blinkist and Joosr cram an entire book into a 15-minute read - but are readers and authors being short-changed? | The National; Author Earnings comes up with the latest on romance writers' income, How Romance Authors Are Really Faring; beyond the big books from big publishing houses, what else is going on? Why American Publishing Needs Indie Presses Like Graywolf, Coffee House Press, and Dorothy - The Atlantic; and it sounds quite bureaucratic, but is it a fairer way of doing things? Indian Culture Ministry Rates Writers and Artists for Festivals.
- ‘The stories we love best do live in us forever.' J K Rowling, back in the news with the latest Harry Potter story, in our Writers' Quotes.
- And, catching up, the January Magazine featured some great links to stories which are still of interest, From the Box Office to the Books: How Movies Create Better Writers | Mycah Haze; Popular history writing remains a male preserve, publishing study finds | Books | The Guardian and Getting Published: What To Do If You Can't Get An Agent.