Stephen Aucutt, formerly contracts manager at Hodder & Stoughton, draws on his thirty years experience to provide a contracts checklist when agreeing terms with trade publishers. Read more
I‘ve just signed a publishing contract with Ben Fenton, a Fleet Street veteran and director for creative industries at Edelman. His book is on the concept and practicalities of fairness-and that concept's history, science, law, politics, and morality, as well as an explanation of the number 42.
My independent press Mensch Publishing is to release it in March 2021, all going well. Read more
Many aspects of publishing-including arrangements with authors, agents, illustrators, freelancers, employees, printers, binders, and distributors-involve contracts. The terms of a contract vary depending on the situation, but in every case, the nature of legally binding agreements is the same.
Agents are under increasing pressure from the big corporates to make world rights deals - not because those publishers are suddenly more expert or passionate than we in rights selling - but because the corporate strategy is to spread their risk and to aggregate their profits and losses across multiple territories and activities. Read more
In the UK a new digital publisher called Canelo releases its first titles this week and will discover over coming months whether its bold, innovative approach will work. It is operating in a different way to most publishers in that it is not paying advances, but offering its authors much higher royalties, starting at 50% and going up to 60%. Read more
The Authors Guild has outlined some of the "egregious terms" of current contract boilerplates it plans to address in its Fair Contract Initiative, first announced May 28 during BookExpo AmericaBookExpo America, commonly referred to within the book publishing industry as BEA. The largest annual book trade fair in the United States.
'We've only been publishing for three years, having started just before the pandemic did... The digital vision we had formulated was vindicated and validated by the pandemic - but that doesn't mean it's not still relevant. As we grow, we're doing a bit more print, but we'll continue to adapt and survive.
In 2017, we learned that Eleanor Oliphant was completely fine. As you may recall, there was a bestselling novel all about it, titled, appropriately enough, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Soon, a wave of syntactically similar book titles followed, all involving simple sentences containing the female protagonist's name: Evvie Drake started over. Florence Adler swam forever. Read more
Kate Clanchy's memoir about teaching won the Orwell prize. Then, a year later, it became the centre of a storm that would engulf the lives of the author, her critics and dozens of people in the book trade. So what happened?
Writers buy plotting books by the dozen and do their best to create the plottiest plot that the world has ever seen. They stuff their novels with action-packed sword fights, explosions, fist fights, and screaming matches. Plot points, pinch points, and grandiose climaxes abound. Read more
In my 15 years of teaching English to hundreds of children in various parts of England, there are four books that have been on the curriculum in every school I have found myself in, with no exception: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Animal Farm by George Orwell, An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley and Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo. Read more
The Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo says she fears that publishers' interest in black authors may be only a "trend or fashion" that could wane unless the business becomes more diverse. Read more
Waterstones Children's Laureate Cressida Cowell has revealed the "transformative" impact on the pilot primary schools taking part in her "Life-changing Libraries" initiative, including an increase in a love of reading, motivation towards learning, well-being and feelings of self-worth. Read more
Every writer has had it drilled into them at some point. It's one of the most familiar bits of writing advice there is: "Write what you know." And it makes so much sense-it worked for John Grisham and Kathy Reichs, right?
Another May has come and gone without BookExpo or any other in-person, industrywide spring show taking its place. As the pandemic eases, more and more publishing and publishing-related conferences, meetings, and fairs are moving from online-only events to either in-person or hybrid affairs. Read more
Meanwhile, I was working on my column for Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/. The theme: influencing readers-beyond BookTok. I certainly didn't expect to find a point of intersection with these two shows. Did I? Bear with me.
'The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out.'