Skip to Content

25 March 2013 - What's new

25 March 2013
  • Last week's annual Books and Consumers research from Bowker showed some interesting trends in book-buying both in the UK and the US. In 2012 British consumers bought 296m books, compared to 288m in 2011, but for the fifth year in a row spend declined from £2,137m ($3.226) to £2.1086 ($3.182) as the lower prices for ebooks started to affect the overall price mix. News Review
  • This week's links: Exploring Accessible Publishing for the Print Disabled, Sixty Years of Sterling Wisdom from the "Lord of Publishing" and The Most Influential Children's Publisher You've Never Heard Of.
  • Our reviewer, Maureen Kincaid SpellerMaureen Kincaid Speller a reviewer, writer, editor and former librarian, is our book reviewer and also works for WritersServices as a freelance editor., said of the The Arvon Book of Life Writing by Sally Cline and Carole Angier: 'Many people want to write about someone's life, perhaps their own, and there are courses to suit every level of interest, from university masters degrees to local college qualifications' and concluded that it was: 'a brisk and helpful guide on how to set about writing a life story... It is a sensible account of life writing from experienced practitioners of what is both art and craft, and I recommend it!'
  • 'Philip Roth once said to me years ago, when he took an interest in me as a young writer: you've got to write as if your parents are dead. It was very good advice, and I stuck to it, and now I look back with some horror. My father, especially, was torn between exultant pride that I'd published a book and sheer horror at what was in it. So I must have had a steely bit of detachment then. But I've never done what Bellow did in Herzog, or Roth, or Hanif (Kureishi)... put their ex-wives in books. I couldn't do that. My chip of ice is a bit... slushy.' Ian McEwan, whose latest book is Sweet Tooth, in the Observer, quoted in our Comment column.
  • 'Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand. It is immodest and greedy to want more.' Gore Vidal in our Writers' Quotes.
  • There are more pages of writers' quotes to be found on the site on this page.