International organisation supporting the careers of both aspiring and published children's authors via mentoring, community platform, courses, awards, magazine, podcasts, and more.
Site focused on helping writers get in touch with their own creativity through drawing, story telling and personal memoir, with a view to developing 'expanded perception, innovative problem solving and new ways of looking at one's work'. International workshops. www.creativityworkshop.com
Site created to increase profile of UK children's books on the Internet. Useful articles on writing for children and free monthly newsletter. http://www.wordpool.co.uk/
The website for the friends' network supporting the Arvon FoundationThe celebrated Arvon creative writing courses cover four and a half days and range from Novel Writing to Starting to Write. Some grants are available. (http://www.arvonfoundation.org), which runs creative writing courses for writers. This has a miscellany of writers' own work and articles on associated topics. http://www.arvonfriends.org/
UK website set up by seven literature organisations which provides a mass of information about writing courses and professional development for writers, including funding, events and resources. www.literaturetraining.com
Based in London, this runs a number of courses for aspiring film-makers, including its flagship From Story to Screen course which can run over 8 weeks full-time, plus shorter courses on script-writing. http://www.metfilmschool.co.uk/
Major new initiative to establish a national academy in the UK. More than 100 established writer patrons support its aims and will be visiting the Academy to help deliver the programme. Applicants for the one year vocational course will have to submit a portfolio of writing. www.writingacademy.org
Well-organised and highly-regarded training centre for UK publishing, which has recently introduced online distance learning copy editing, proof-reading and copywriting courses. www.train4publishing.co.uk
London organisation running creative writing workshops for writers at all stages, with a focus on new writing and live literature, and encouraging innovation and experimentation. www.spreadtheword.org.uk
The celebrated Arvon creative writing courses cover four and a half days and range from Novel Writing to Starting to Write. Some grants are available. (http://www.arvonfoundation.org)
'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
In the third in a series on the implications of AI for publishing, Nadim Sadek argues that effective advertising is now feasible for everyone, and for all kinds of titles
A publishing friend of mine recently told me about a sales report they'd received from a major retailer in which some of their books had zero sales. It turned out that there had been plenty of sales, however-they just all went to counterfeiters. In case you think this is an outlier, it's not. Counterfeiting is a serious, nontrivial problem facing the industry.
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
The U.K. Publishers Association (PA) was established in 1896 and is a cornerstone of the British publishing industry, working with a diverse array of companies to promote innovation, collaboration, and commercial success. Read more
With English as a shared language, there is a natural relationship between the American and British publishing industries. Most of the world's top publishing companies, be they conglomerates or independent publishers, have operations in each country, typically in New York City and London. Literary traffic travels both ways across the Atlantic.
The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.
Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 - a "much stronger" growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Read more
"We don't understand the consequences of AI with regards to copyright," Brazil's Karine Gonçalves Pansa, president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said, when asked to name the most important issues facing publishing right now. "We can say, very easily, that our content is being used, without permission, and without license, by AI."
'As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.'