17 September 2012 - What's new
17 September 2012
- 'The Booker shortlist is unusually interesting this year because of the presence of books by comparative newcomers, including two authors who have struggled to find a publisher at all and are now published by small presses...' News Review reports on this year's surprising shortlist.
- This week's Writing Opportunity is The New Media Writing Prize 2012, a unique prize which can be awarded by partners Bournemouth University and if:book to Excellent storytelling (fiction or non-fiction), Creativity, work written specifically for delivery and reading/viewing via digital media. Closing 5 October.
- 'What moves you is usually what is going to move a reader - a reader who is interested in your work of course. I'm not a market research king, what I have to do is look to myself and write something that moves me and that I believe in. Cecelia Ahern, author of PS I Love You and four other novels, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.
- There are three extracts from the excellent Writing a Biography or Autobiography by Brian D Osborne in our Archive.
- Links to this week's top stories Children 'too embarrassed' to pick up books, alarming study says, and (a follow-up to last week) Authors condemn fake internet reviews.
- The Publisher's View is a four-part series by Tom Chalmers, MD of Legend press. The first article deals with What a publisher wants from submissions and what a writer can do about it. Then there's Judging a book by its cover and synopsis, The Writer's X Factor and The changing face of publishing.
- 'The reason we read poetry is that it has the ability to penetrate both solar plexus and between the eyes, simultaneously, in a way that prose doesn't.' Owen Sheers in our Writers' Quotes.