April 2013 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• Amazon was one of the major talking-points at the London Book Fair. Earlier in the month the internet retailer had bought the book recommendation site Goodreads. Apple had been discussing with Goodreads the possibility of integrating its content into the iBookstore, when suddenly things went quiet, then Amazon's purchase of Goodreads was announced. Amazon is also rumoured to be preparing its own phone, which would bring a direct challenge to Apple's iPhone.
• Today is the first day of the London Book Fair, which is going to be an interesting occasion this year. The winds of change are sweeping through the publishing industry as digital developments bring a whole host of changes in their wake. It's all happening at a time of recession too, which is altering many of the traditional publishing relationships, creating both new threats and new opportunities.
• The fiftieth anniversary Bologna Book Fair was a cheering occasion. Eminent children's publisher Klaus Flugge, the founder and publisher of Andersen Press, was awarded the honorary citizenship of Bologna for his services to children's books and to the Fair. He has attended every Bologna Book Fair to date.
• Discoverability seems to be the word on everyone's lips at the moment in the book business.　 By this is meant how people find books and it's evident from recent research that bookshops play a very important part in this. This may not be a great comfort to them, as it must be incredibly irritating to be used as a showroom for internet retailers from whom the customer often ultimately buys because they offer the lowest price.

Comment

• 'In his essay Politics and the English language George Orwell set out a series of rules for writing that are worth repeating in full: 1 Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print. 2 Never use a long word where a short one will do. 3 If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 4 Never use the passive when you can use the active. 5 Never use a foreign phrase or jargon word if you can think of an everyday equivalent. 6 Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.' Damian Whitworth in The Times
• 'If you think of the story that you tell that's your favourite personal story, or funny story, it doesn't have flashy sentences. It doesn't have too much detail. It just tells the story. That isn't, for whatever reason, the way most people write books, But it seemed to me that there was no reason that it couldn't be the way at least one person writes books. I said "I'm going to stop writing the parts that people skim..." James Patterson, author of a great many books, in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven
• 'I don't have a choice. If there's a story there will always be another story. There's always the Other Story. If you write fiction, your job is to apprehend the truth, something real, and be sensitive enough to give back, a reflection　that is both a mirror and beyond the real: so we can use the real and the reflection and be able to survive both. There is nothing singular. We exist at multiple points...' Ali Smith, author of There but for the in The Times
• 'The holy grail for a historian is having three things come together. First is new material, second is a good story with a tight narrative and great characters, and third is something that has global and contemporary appeal.　I was lucky enough to have all three...' William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals and Return of a King, in the Bookseller　
  

Writers' Quote

'Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.'

Thomas Gray