17 April 2017 - What's new
17 April 2017
- Literary magazines with one week's response time is Sandeep Kumar Mishra's useful list, added to the site this week. They range from literary fiction to non-fiction and include science fiction and fantasy, popular non-fiction, politics, flash fiction, reviews, humour, social issues, the economy, lifestyle, horror, artwork and much more. If you've ever despaired at how long magazine submissions can take, this is the list you need.
- 'In a week when we're glad to publish this list of 36 magazines which reply within a week, it's also fair to consider the question of how much writers have to pay to make submissions, especially when so many of them are rejected...' News Review
- Tips for writers is our 8-part crash course for writers, taking you from Improve Your Writing to Promoting Your Writing (and Yourself), from Self-publishing: is it for you? to 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...'
- This week's Writing Opportunity is The Sunday Times PFD Young Writer of the Year Award 2017, open to published and self-published British and Irish authors of fiction, non-fiction and poetry aged 18-35 and with a prize of £5,000. Closing on 2 June.
- Some other fabulous Writing Opportunities which are still open.
- As well as our highly-regarded Copy editing service, which will help you prepare your manuscript for submission or self-publishing, we have Manuscript Polishing, which provides a higher-level polishing service, Translation editing for those for whom English is not a native language and our new Writer's edit, providing line-editing. Get the right level of editorial support for your needs. Contact us to discuss what you want.
- 'Writing about sex is very difficult. I did not set out to write lots of sex scenes - they kept recurring and I realised they were intrinsic to the story of the relationship. And yet, I wanted it to be the opposite of pornography - even literary sex can be pornography. In this novel, it was the characters' way to speak to each other about what they could not verbalise...' Our Comment is from Eimear McBride, author of The Lesser Bohemians and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and is from the Observer.
- Our links: top publishing guru Mike Shatzkin on the practical power of the author brand in marketing, Authors need help with their digital presence that they still are not getting - The Idea Logical Company; there are some things we expect from a certain kind of story. Nobody goes to a sports movie to see the heroes lose the big game; nobody goes to a superhero movie to see the superhero die, Subverting Genre Conventions | Script Society | Create a Screenplay; the crime writer on saving her dog, which had fallen through the ice, 'It was Little Women that trained me how to handle this crisis.' Sara Paretsky: From Joan of Arc to Little Women, a History of Heroes | Literary Hub; and, a bit focused on the start-up Thought Catalog but asking the interesting quesion: can we create an enclave where creative and intellectual sophistication still matter? Book publishing in the digital age | TechCrunch.
- Top Ten Tips for non-fiction writers is a helpful checklist for writers, compiled by a Creative Writing tutor. No 1 is 'Story, story, story. Make sure that your story can sustain several chapters and tens of thousands of words. Keep asking yourself: Why would anyone want to read this story?'
- More links: it's all down to a short story she wrote while studying creative writing at college, New YA sensation Angie Thomas: "Publishing did something pretty terrible. They made the assumption that black kids don't read"; a lot of crime fiction is about exploring things you don't know. For me, it was the lure of the completely unfamiliar: the urban gangster, Malcolm Mackay: Life in the Golden Age of Scottish Crime Fiction | Literary Hub; and two links relating to the same story, explosive claims in unseen correspondence written in the bitter aftermath of one of literature's most famous and destructive marriages, Unseen Sylvia Plath letters claim domestic abuse by Ted Hughes | Books | The Guardian; and 'the calcification of two camps: those who do not see Hughes's poetic genius as exculpating his behaviour, and the others who see it as exactly that', Plath's letters probably won't harm Hughes's reputation | Rafia Zakaria | Books | The Guardian.
- And from Susan Sontag in our Writers' Quotes this week, 'We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.'
