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4 February 2014 - What's new

4 February 2014
  • WritersServices Guide to Self-publishing 5 is about EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing.: Distributing to Other Eretailers. Joanne PhillipsUK-based freelance writer and ghostwriter. She has had articles published in national writing magazines, and has ghostwritten books on subjects as diverse as hairdressing and keeping chickens. Visit her at www.joannephillips.co.uk: 'Now we've explored how to format your book for Kindle and upload to the Amazon KDP platform, it's time to look at the virtual shelves of other eretailers. There are two options here: upload to each eretailer direct, or use a distributor like Smashwords to do it for you. Why Sell Across Other Platforms? Amazon is not the only fruit! Although the Kindle ereader and Kindle apps do seem to be taking the lion's share of the market, many readers are using the Nook or Kobo devices instead, or are reading on their iPads and iPhones via the iBooks app on the Apple store. If you make your book available to Kindle users only, you are missing out on a section of the market...' The series to date.
  • News Review asks: Are brands in decline? 'As recent figures have shown, this last year has shown the lowest sales for brand name authors for five years. It's easy to assume from this figure that it's all over for the big brands, in print at least, but the truth is that they have shown their durability over many years. Brands do come and go and no-one stays at the top forever. New authors come to the forefront and, although the older brands may not be so visible, they do still provide the mainstay of many publishers' lists. Every time a brand-name author has a new book, their whole backlist - backlist which may consist of a great many titles - gets a boost...'
  • Our listing of 2014 International Book Fairs is invaluable if you're planning a visit to one near you.
  • Our Writing Opportunity this week is the 2014 Cardiff International Poetry Competition, which offers one of the largest monetary prizes for a poetry competition of its kind. First prize is £5,000, there's an entry fee of £15 and it closes on 14 March.
  • 'This is certainly not the writer's life I anticipated when I opened that first acceptance latter, when I first met someone who'd read me. This isn't what I aimed for when I sneaked out short stories between working in all kinds of centres and hospitals and facilities. The workshops taught me that you move beyond your fears, find the words to name yourself, make demands, celebrate joys, protest pains, then you can start to move your world. I grew up as a writer seeing that language is a monumental force, that it constantly works upon us, for good and ill, that it can redefine us, rehearse the changes we want, establish our humanity...' A L Kennedy, author of What Becomes? in The Times, quoted in our Comment column.
  • Links of the week: after a surprise First Novel win, Costa Book Prize 2013: Why Nathan Filer deserves his win - Telegraph, in Bread and Roses | Hugh Howey stands up for writers, the social networks tell it like it is in Quill & Quire » Twitter trend declares 2014 the year of reading women and where are we all going? Issues on the Ether: Profit-Sharing Authors | Publishing Perspectives.
  • Writing Biography & Autobriography is a serialisation from our Archives of the book by Brian D Osborne published by A & C BlackClick for A & C Black Publishers Publishers References listing. In the first excerpt, Managing the matters of truth and objectivity, the author says: 'Just as you need to remember that letters, reports, census forms, legal documents and so forth were not created simply for our convenience, so you also need to remember that what is written in them may not be true...'
  • 'There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so, I am a storyteller.' William Trevor in our Writers' Quotes.