20 August 2012

'The recent news that Amazon's Kindle sales of ebooks have surpassed sales of print books led many commentators to assume that ebook sales are now outstripping print book sales. But, even in the States, where the growth in ebook sales has been extraordinarily fast, print books still outsell ebooks to a large extent, in fact they currently only constitute about 25% of total sales...' News Review reports.
The National Association of Writers in Education offers two new articles in its Turning the Next Page resources for writers, both of them for poets, but it's worth also looking at the existing resources.
'I was surprised at the success of Chocolat. I was told that sort of book wouldn't sell as it was too old-fashioned and stuck between literary and commercial fiction, but the public voted with their wallets. (It sold more than a million copies.) And just when I was getting used to it being a bestseller, I had to come to terms with the surreal progress of it becoming a movie...' Joanne Harris in the Independent on Sunday in our Comment column.
There's still time to enter the new MsLexia Children's Novel Competition, closing on 10 September.
An Editor's Advice is a useful series is based on the advice Maureen Kincaid Speller a reviewer, writer, editor and former librarian, is our book reviewer and also works for WritersServices as a freelance editor., a long-serving WritersServices freelance editor, has given writers over the years. The series covers Dialogue, doing further drafts, genre writing, planning, points of view, autobiography and travel and manuscript presentation.
'Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.' Orson Scott Card in our Writers' Quotes.