10 December 2018 - What's new
10 December 2018
- 'I've always thought that writing poetry has very little to do with the intellect. It's not something one can explain and chat about very easily: certainly not about the making of it. It's very resistant to explanation. It comes from a place that is occult, in the sense of being hidden. It attends to some of our deepest anxieties and hopes in the same way that dreams do...' Robin Robertson, who has published six poetry collections, and whose latest book, The Long Take, has just won the Goldsmiths Prize. He is also an editor at Jonathan Cape, in the Observer. Our Comment.
- Tips for writers is our 8-part crash course for writers who are starting out, taking you from Promoting Your Writing (and Yourself), from Self-publishing: is it for you? to Keep up to date and Submission to publishers and agents. 'Think about the market for your book. Research the category and read widely to see what other published writers in this area are doing. Which writers are successful and why? Visit bookshops and analyse what you find there. If you are reading this you are probably already writing, but it really is worth thinking right from the beginning about your readers, as that makes it far more likely you'll eventually find them...'
- In an interesting initiative involving the London-based Hachette Children's Group, sister company Orion and 22 of their authors, they have worked together to run advertisements in their books encouraging readers to share the love of reading with children. News Review reports on publishers and authors working together on this children's reading initiative. News Review.
- Last year we launched the Writer's edit, a top-level new service for writers who want line-editing as well as copy editing. Does your manuscript need high-level input from an editor to help you get it into the best possible shape for submission or self-publishing? This may be the service for you, offering the kind of editing which publishers' senior editors used to do in-house on their authors' manuscripts and which is now hard to find. Our other copy editing services.
- Our links: dealing with a tricky problem for writers, I'll Bet You Think This Story's about You: When People Keep Finding Themselves in Your Fiction - The Millions; Amazon continues to expand far beyond its current terrifying $1tn etail presence, grabbing an even bigger piece of the bookselling pie, Amazon is more dangerous than ever-and publishers need a plan | The Bookseller; an SF author who wants to talk about cities, N.K. Jemisin Is Trying to Keep the World From Ending - GQ; and the average American reads 12 or 13 books a year, but with over 3 million books in print, the choices they face are staggering, A data scientist cracks the code to landing on the New York Times Best Seller list - MarketWatch.
- Finding an agent, our tips for this key search: 'There are two types of agency: purely literary and multi-media agents. Look carefully at the entries and consider whether you would prefer to be represented by a big professional agency with all-singing, all-dancing film and TV departments to back up the book agents, or whether you would be better served by a small independent agency...'
- More links: in American poetry, politics was the domain of the few and the fearless, Political Poetry Is Hot Again. The Poet Laureate Explores Why, and How. - The New York Times; the 11 biggest-earning authors sold 24.5 million print books combined in the U.S. during our scoring period, logging $283 million, World's Highest-Paid Authors 2018: Michael Wolff Joins List Thanks To 'Fire And Fury'; female authors have managed to avoid including bad sex scenes in their novels this year - at least according to the Literary Review, Haruki Murakami and James Frey lead all-male shortlist for bad sex award | Books | The Guardian.
- From our Writers' Quotes, Cornelia Funke: 'Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?'
