August 2006 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• 'It had become a bestseller thanks to direct, personal communication with potential readers that has been made possible by the Internet.'  News Review looks at Anthony Thornton's account of how he promoted his bestselling book online.


• ‘The language does belong to everybody, but the way things are going, there will be just a small elite that’s been trained how to use it effectively. That can’t be right. We’ll be back in the Middle Ages.’ Truss tackles the comma in her new children's book, Why Commas Really Do Make a Difference.


• 'As affluence has increased readers’ ability to buy the books they want to read, the libraries’ ageing stock has relegated them to a lower level of use for readers, many of whom will only use a library if they have to.'  News Review reports on the continuing decline in the libraries


• 'After the dotcom boom and bust it was easy for the book trade to think it could go back to business as usual. It has taken six years for the huge potential of the Internet to become apparent to everyone – and to smash that thinking to pieces.' News Review looks at poor sales from the chains.

Comment

• 'If you're going to get scared, you can't become a publisher... we have to be as businesslike as larger publishers - it's just as important for independents to make money.' Andrew Franklin, MD of Profile Books, in The Bookseller


• 'I think that the best books are often written within the pressures of daily life.  What is happening is that creative writing courses are promulgating the idea that you have to be a professional writer, but that is not true and it is increasingly hard to be…' Heather Holden Brown in MslexiaStylish and lively site for quarterly UK literary magazine read by 12,000 'committed' women writers. Good range of quality writing, information and advice with news, reviews, competitions and interviews, all presented in a friendly fashion. Praised by Helen Dunmore as 'astute, invigorating and above all an excellent read.' www.mslexia.co.uk


• 'The facts are brutal: unless you produce the kind of assured bestsellers that will encourage your publishers to pay for chain-store promotions, you have no guaranteed sales... if an author wants his to find its readers, he has to go out there and grab them.' Will Self in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven


• 'A novel has an energy of its own.  In that sense, it is like riding a horse.  It talks back to you.  It isn't always transient. Sometimes, you wrestle with it.' Jane Smiley, author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel in the Observer.

Writers' Quote

'All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.  Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.'

George Orwell in England, Your England

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