16 September 2013 - What's new
16 September 2013
- We've just launched our latest new service, which is our Poetry Collection Editing service. Intended for poets who want to prepare their poetry collection for self-publishing or for those who just want to get their poetry into the best possible shape before submitting it to publishers, this will provide a skilled editor to copy edit your work, correcting grammatical and spelling errors, and also to edit it, providing suggestions for improving the poems and the collection as a whole.
- 'It's 60 years since T S Eliot, acting on a suggestion from his friend the poet Stephen Spender, worked with his friends to set up the Poetry Book SocietySpecialist book club founded by T S Eliot in 1953, which aims to offer the best new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Members buy at 25% discount. The PBS has a handsome new website at www.poetrybooks.co.uk to encourage poetry readers and bring the best new poetry to them. As every poet knows, getting to your audience is still a difficult task - it's hard to get published and then hard to find an audience to read to...' News Review on the T S Eliot Prize 20th Anniversary Tour.
- Our Writing Opportunity this week is a very international one, the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which is open to writers who are citizens of the Commonwealth and aged 18 or over and closes on 30 November. The overall winner will receive £5,000, with five regional winners getting £2,000 each.
- 'It took a while to get the tone right. In YA everything has to be filtered through eyes and experience of the young adult, there can't be an intervening adult that comes down like a deus ex machina providing useful information or a weapon... adults can't do anything to resolve the critical issues in the plot. I didn't know that getting into it; it took me five drafts to figure that out...' Elizabeth George, author of The Edge of Nowhere (YA) and Just One Evil in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.
- Inside Publishing is a 19-part series about publishing, which will help writers understand what goes on inside the business. From Subsidiary Rights to The Sales Department, from The Relationship between publishers and agents to Advances and Royalties, this series is packed with information about how publishing works.
- 'I have discovered that I cannot burn the candle at one end and write a book with the other.' Katherine Mansfield in our Writers' Quotes.
