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26 September 2016 - What's new

26 September 2016
  • Bestselling children's author Michael Morpurgo has savaged school reading culture by attacking the over-testing of children at school and saying it is sucking the joy from reading and putting weak readers off for life. Morpurgo is one of the most celebrated of contemporary children's writers and his opinions are likely to be listened to. News Review
  • Our Writing Opportunity this week is the rather unique Notting Hill Essay Prize 2017, which is open to all writers. The entry fee is £20 and the prize is £20,000 with £1,000 for 5 runners-up. There's plenty of time to write the essay, it doesn't close till January.
  • Several other competitions are about to close: Writing Opportunities.
  • ‘I could never imagine being a writer. I come from a generation for whom writers were either very old or dead. We could not imagine that we could have that magical profession. But I could imagine illustrating because I had drawn since I was a child. When I started illustrating, I found the stories I had to work with so boring that I started writing in order to do the illustrations I wanted to do!' Cornelia Funke, author of the Mirrorworld and Reckless series in Bookbrunch provides this week's Comment.
  • Do you need to get your material typed up, but can't face doing the job yourself? We can provide a clean typed version of your work at very competitive rates. Our service offers help for writers who have an old or handwritten manuscript, or audio tapes, which need re-typing before the writer can proceed with submission or publication.Typing Manuscripts
  • Our links: writing is work. Work deserves pay, Yes, Writing Is a Job (Even if it Doesn't Pay Well); when it comes to writing and publishing, indie authors face a unique disadvantage: they foot the bill for everything, Why Indie Authors Have to Spend Money to Make Money; a new way of approaching poetry publishing Getting Paid for Poetry in the Digital Age | Literary Hub; and one of the cold, hard truths of short story writing is that you only get one read, How to Write a Short Story with Clarity and Economy.
  • A while ago we thought it might be fun to add some fictionalised stories of how out editorial servoces work. So we have 13 stories, from How an Editor's Report helped Catherine to How Copy editing turned Tony's work into a publishable manuscript and Manuscript Typing helped John to get his father's wartime diary into good shape for publication.
  • More links: when 21-year-old Alfie Deyes released his first book, it was No 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list for 11 weeks, the age of self: the strange story of how YouTubers saved publishing; the festival's global appeal, and literature as "the most dissenting art form", Hay Festival's Peter Florence: 'A Huge Canvas To Work On'; and an excllent article on literary agents, Once a complex market, India is now opening up to the idea of well-connected literary agents - Firstpost.
  • 'Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.' Kurt Vonnegut in our Writers' Quotes.