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19 November 2012 - What's new

19 November 2012
  • 'After twenty years of rejection, Hilary Boyd certainly didn't expect to achieve phenomenal success with Thursdays in the Park. A 62 year-old grandmother, she was very much more used to failure. 'Fiction was always my dream, but at 60 I had lost heart – despite being repeatedly told about Mary Wesley' (the splendid British author who published her first novel at 70 and went on to have a very successful career as a novelist)...' News Review on a heartening success story.
  • This has certainly been a week of soul-searching about the future of publishing. Our links to this week's top stories include Book publishing crisis: capitalism kills culture and How Dead Is the Book Business?
  • If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look at our 18 Services, especially our Editor's Report, Submission Critique and Children's Services. Also available is Copy editing and Manuscript Polishing, for authors who are not native English speakers and Manuscript Typing.
  • You've just got time to take advantage of this week's Writing Opportunity to enter a story on the theme of 'autumn' into the PrinterInks Short Story Competition, closing on 1 December. It's free to enter and the first prize is getting your story published in hardback!
  • 'All my books work in the same way in that they draw upon a whole lot of experience that I've already had. I'm not just talking about life experience but knowledge of Chartres... I will already know about what I'm writing about. I will do some research a) to remind myself; b) to make sure I haven't got it wrong; c) to bring it to life again...' Salley Vickers, author of The Cleaner of Chartres in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.
  • For Creative writing tutors and their students there's a mass of useful information on the site, which we are very happy for you to print out, with due acknowledgement, please. You can find this in the listing under Advice for Writers, but we'd specially recommend our 7-part series Tips for Writers, Our Categories series, about Writing Crime, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Memoir and Autobiography and so on, our recently updated series Latest Changes in the Book Trade and our 19-part series Inside Publishing.
  • 'I never wanted to be a literary writer. I wanted to be an entertainer. All I wanted was to give what a lot of writers had given me: a good time on a bad day.' M C Beaton in our Writers' Quotes.