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11 March 2019 - What's new

11 March 2019
  • 'No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better... No writing is wasted: the words you can't put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.' Erin Bow, Canadian YA writer, whose books include Stand on the Sky, The Scorpion Rules and Plain Kate. Our Comment.
  • Last year we launched the Writer's edit, a top-level new service for writers who want line-editing as well as copy editing. Does your manuscript need high-level input from an editor to help you get it into the best possible shape for submission or self-publishing? This may be the service for you, offering the kind of editing which publishers' senior editors used to do in-house on their authors' manuscripts and which is now hard to find.
  • Veteran publisher Michael Legat's 19 Factsheets provide a pithy introduction to many topics of interest to writers, from Copyright to Revision, with writing advice on Plotting the novel and The First and Last Pages.
  • Our links: now it's becoming a major problem for writers, 'I can get any novel I want in 30 seconds': can book piracy be stopped? | Books | The Guardian; our first report from this week's LBF, London Book Fair 2019: Audiobooks Stay Hot; rape, infighting, secrets, financial malpractice; the scandal surrounding the Prize, Do We Still Need the Nobel Prize in Literature? - Electric Literature; and the list of too-hot-to-handle topics (as described by Ms Shriver) include "anything to do with gender, sex, race, immigration, disability, social class, obesity and Islam", Would any publisher dare to print Lolita now? | The Spectator.
  • Your submission package - 'Given the difficulty of getting agents and publishers to take on your work, it's really important to make sure that you present it in the best possible way. Less is more, so don't send a full manuscript, as it's very unlikely to be read. Far better to tempt them with a submission package that will leave them wanting to see the rest of the manuscript'. Here's a page on what you should send.
  • More links: digital books were once heralded as being a replacement for print and everyone in the bookselling and publishing industry was scared, but Our love affair with ebooks is over; this famous poet is 100 on 24 March, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, American Maverick; just hours before Prime Minister Theresa May's latest Brexit deal was heavily defeated in the U.K. House of Commons, writers at the London Book Fair criticized the decision to abandon the E.U. London Book Fair 2019: Ian McEwan Leads Writers Against Brexit; and writing a book is not what it used to be even 20 years ago, Council Post: Everything You Wanted To Know About Publishing Your First Book.
  • 'Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.' Aldous Huxley in our Writers' Quotes.