UK-based organisation which has campaigned since 1993 to improve literacy standards across all age groups. Excellent research information and details of the many initiatives the charity is currently involved in. www.literacytrust.org.uk. Read more
At www.booktrust.org.uk a UK organisation which promotes books, supports writers groups, awards literary prizes and offers factsheets on Getting Published and Tracing Copyright, and a directory of UK publishers. Also free information service about books, authors and publishers. Phone mornings 020 8516 2977.
Useful site which offers facility to search for copyright holders or contacts for authors and artists whose archives are in libraries and archives in North America and the UK. www.watch-file.com
Supports Welsh writing and literature. Their editorial department provides Welsh writers and writers in Welsh with advice on how to get their manuscripts published. When last visited there was little to see, as the site was in the process of being rebuilt. http://www.aber.ac.uk/~wbcwww
This government-supported body is best-known for its activities overseas, but in fact provides a great deal of information which is of interest to writers. http://www.britishcouncil.org/ Read more
CLA is the UK's Reproduction Rights Organisation. It is responsible for looking after the interests of rights owners over the copying of books, journals and periodicals. A non-profit making company, it is owned by its members, the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society and the Publishers Licensing Society. www.cla.co.uk
This international agency is based in Berlin. You can find the agent for your part of the world and download manuals explaining how the system works. www.isbn-international.org
'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
In the third in a series on the implications of AI for publishing, Nadim Sadek argues that effective advertising is now feasible for everyone, and for all kinds of titles
A publishing friend of mine recently told me about a sales report they'd received from a major retailer in which some of their books had zero sales. It turned out that there had been plenty of sales, however-they just all went to counterfeiters. In case you think this is an outlier, it's not. Counterfeiting is a serious, nontrivial problem facing the industry.
If you read the recently unsealed materials from the federal antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, you'll see why the company wanted to keep them under wraps. According to the unredacted notes from one meeting, Jeff Bezos directed his team to stuff more ads into search results, even if it meant accepting more ads internally categorized as irrelevant to what users were looking for. Read more
The U.K. Publishers Association (PA) was established in 1896 and is a cornerstone of the British publishing industry, working with a diverse array of companies to promote innovation, collaboration, and commercial success. Read more
With English as a shared language, there is a natural relationship between the American and British publishing industries. Most of the world's top publishing companies, be they conglomerates or independent publishers, have operations in each country, typically in New York City and London. Literary traffic travels both ways across the Atlantic.
The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies.
Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023 - a "much stronger" growth than the overall increase in UK-based listings over the same period. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Read more
"We don't understand the consequences of AI with regards to copyright," Brazil's Karine Gonçalves Pansa, president of the International Publishers Association (IPA), said, when asked to name the most important issues facing publishing right now. "We can say, very easily, that our content is being used, without permission, and without license, by AI."