What's New in 2019
- ‘I get gendered questions about the violence. I'll give you a case study: a few years back, I got an email from Lee Child - who I love - saying he just read my recent book and he had just finished writing something with a similar theme. When I was doing press for that book, I got a lot of questions about the violence; Lee didn't get any. And there's Jack Reacher, going around killing around 3,000 people and beating everybody up... Karin Slaughter, author of The Last Widow (to be published in June), Fractured, Faithless, Pretty Girls and 15 other novels in the Bookseller. Our Comment.
- The Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize 2019 is open to all new writers of Fiction, Poetry and Life Writing. There's an entry fee of £6, 2 entries are £10 and 3 entries £15. The prizes are £1,000 for each category and it closes on 28 June.
- Tips for writers is our 8-part crash course for writers who are starting out, taking you from Promoting Your Writing (and Yourself), to Self-publishing: is it for you? from Keep up to date to Submission to publishers and agents. 'Your research into publishers and agencies should encompass what they say about submissions. Even if you think it makes no sense for them to bar you in this way, there's no point in sending your manuscript to a publisher which does not read its slush-pile or an agent who specifies that no unsolicited material should be submitted...'
- If you're looking for a report on your manuscript, how do you work out which one of our four would suit you best? Which Report? includes our top-of-the range service, the Editor's Report Plus, introduced by popular demand to provide even more detail. This very substantial report takes the form of a chapter-by-chapter breakdown and many writers have found this detail helps them to get their book right. Through our specialist children's editors we can offer reports on children's books.
- Our links: my entire childhood I hoped to write books, and entered the publishing industry after college on the now humorous assumption... that being an editor would help me realize that dream, What Writing a Book Taught Me About Being an Editor | CrimeReads; fascinatingly, the perception many have of book clubs - as primarily social groups with minimal serious discussion - isn't accurate, The Inner Lives of Book Clubs; behind all the talk, what's really been happening with literary translation? Translated Fiction Has Been Growing, or Has It? My self-improvement project for the year was to read a fresh poem every morning, Mary Oliver's Poetry Captures Our Relationship With Technology - The Atlantic; and an entertaining look at writers' pics, Author Photos: A Taxonomy | Literary Hub.
- Our page of Picture library links provides a good starting-point for finding an image for your book, whether it's for the cover or inside. Gograph was the last one we added with its 18 million stock links.
- More links: he has published 28 collections and is on the national curriculum, Simon Armitage: 'Witty and profound' writer to be next Poet Laureate - BBC News; is the low rate of diversity a by-product of the low author earnings exposed by the survey? U.K. Writing Scene Is 'Overwhelmingly White,' Study Finds; a bestseling author with a prodigious work ethic, How the Hell Has Danielle Steel Managed to Write 179 Books? | Glamour; in 1999, the main obstacle in getting children interested in reading was their own attention spans, How the Children's Laureate championed young literature - BBC News.
- Poets are naturally keen to see their work in print but it's actually quite hard to get a first collection taken on by a publisher and self-publishing may make a lot of sense. Getting your poetry published.
- From James Baldwin in our Writers' Quotes: 'Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.'
- ‘Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other atheist that I know ever threatens violence. We never threaten to fly planes into skyscrapers. We never threaten suicide bombs. We are very gentle people... It's just an opinion.' Richard Dawkins, ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Enemies of Reason, River out of Eden, The God Delusion and 9 other books. Our Comment.
- If you are trying to get your work into shape for publication, or for self-publishing, there's plenty of advice on the WritersServices website which you may find useful. Advice for Writers gives a rundown of what's on the site.
- The Curtis Brown First Novel Prize is open to unpublished writers of 18 or over, writing a novel in English and resident in the UK or Ireland. There's no entry fee. First Prize is representation by Curtis Brown plus a prize of £3,000, and there are five generous runners-up prizes. It's closing on 1 August.
- Other live competitions and prizes.
- If you are looking for copy editing online, it can be difficult to ensure that you are getting a professional copy editor who will do a good job on your manuscript. Let WritersServices help you. Hardly any authors can copy edit their own writing and it is in any case notoriously difficult to spot the errors in your own work. So professional copy editing does make sense, either if you are trying to give your work its best chance when submitting it or, even more crucially, if you are planning to self-publish. Getting your manuscript copy edited.
- Our links: new figures show that many authors are being subsidised by their partners or a second job in order to stay afloat, Writing at risk of becoming an 'elitist' profession, report warns | Books | The Guardian; a desperate industry increasingly addicted to quick takes for fast profit, Book Publishers Have a Trump Problem | The New Republic; "I realized if I did not trust myself enough to write it, it would never be written." From Trauma to Triumph: An Indie Success Story; and - more on memoir - The New Toolkit For Opening Up Your Memoir Writing | Literary Hub.
- Health Hazards is our special series about the various health risks for writers, including the dreaded Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. If you know you're spending too much time at a keyboard, it's worth making sure you're being careful about how you're sitting, your eyes and your wrists.
- More links: Do disturbing novels reflect an extreme reality or are they just titillation? Would American Psycho be published today? How shocking books have changed with their readers | Books | The Guardian; the author hasn't made a single mention of HBO's Game of Thrones on his Twitter or blog since the April 14 premiere of the show's final season, George R.R. Martin can still fix this shit | The Outline; this year, the Mellon Foundation provided $2.2 million in funding for poets, Funding the Poets: PW Talks with Elizabeth Alexander; a new publisher planning to put a robust rights strategy at the heart of its business model by seeking - and exploiting - world English language rights, Interview: Amanda Ridout on Her Boldwood Books' Rights Strategy.
- A new page which gives an editor's take on using pdfs, So what's wrong with PDFs? 'If you need your file to be edited, PDF is not the ideal format; in fact, it is practically the worst format you can choose. Why? Precisely because PDFs are designed not to be tampered with or changed. When you stop to think about it, editing is no more or less than a process of changing - and correcting - your file...'
- 'Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?"' A less serious note from Connie Willis in our Writers' Quotes.