‘From my perspective, in general producers and studios find content from the world of books highly attractive for development due to established storytelling, inspiration, quality recognition, and a built-in audience. While there may be instances of preferring original content, book adaptations hold significant appeal... In the best properties we grow to know the characters, and the story pays due respect to their complexities and needs. There's always the sense that they exist in the now and not at some point along a predetermined continuum....' Kamran Sardar Khan of Stuttgart's East End Film has produced some 150 feature films and - being a great reader - has included literary adaptations in that body of work, in Publishing Perspectives.
If you're looking for a report on your manuscript, how do you work out which one of our three reports would suit you best? Which Report? includes our latest 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 that this detail helps them to get their book right. Through our specialist children's editors we can offer reports on children's books.
This week we have a new article in our Ask the Editor series. The submission letter: practice and pitfalls. 'Your submission letter (also known as the query letter) is the first thing a publisher will read; that makes it an important document. Get it right, and you have captured their attention; get it wrong, and your book may be rejected without being read. In this article, I will look at the ground rules for the letter, and the pitfalls you should try to avoid...' The first article in the series was entitled What genre is my book?
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... Hardly any authors can copy edit their own writing or know much about what is involved. 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. Copy editing services
Links for writers: guidance for authors on how they can protect themselves and their work from "the impact of new technologies", The Bookseller - News - SoA urges vigilance in new AI guidance for authors; L. Ron Hubbard's Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contests, Top voices in science fiction and fantasy hail from the UK; everyone always says to "write what you know", So, when drafting my debut thriller The Dive, that's what I did, A deadly island and a quarter life crisis; 'I try not to worry too much about what other authors are writing, and just focus on what's in my control.' Q&A: bestselling novelist Clare Mackintosh; should this author have stopped publication? Pundits Weigh in on Gilbert's Decision to Pull Russian-Set Novel Over Ukrainian Backlash; and "Put that on your website." "I don't have one," she replied. "Sometimes I post stuff on Facebook. Do you think anyone reads it?" When Do You Need an Author Website? | Jane Friedman.
An essential read for children's authors is Suzy Jenvey's special series for WritersServices, the four-part Essential Guide to Writing for Children. The first article looks at the all-important question of age groups and what you should be aware of in writing for each one. The second part is Before You Write: What is My Story Going to be? The third part deals with Starting to Write and the fourth part is about Submitting Your Work to Agents and Editors. This series by a hugely experienced children's editorial director and agent helps you get started on your own story or develop what you're already working on.
Advice for Writers is a really useful page which takes you into our archive and helps you explore our more than 9,000 pages of information for writers.
The Writer's Edit is an enhanced editing package that offers you all the benefits of our expert copy editing service, plus an extra level of advice and support to help you take your writing to a new level. We will copy edit your manuscript to our usual professional standard, but in addition we will offer you a line-by-line edit specifically designed to improve your style, structure and form, and a set of guidance notes, giving commentary and advice.
Links from publishing: this week the Guardian suggested that books could continue to outperform other entertainment goods as the wider economy faces financial uncertainty, The Bookseller - Editor's Letter - Editor's letter: Brought to book; they are designed to mislead the casual onlooker into thinking that they are books, Cooking the books: the rise of fake libraries | The Spectator; problems in the world of literary festivals, The Bookseller - Features - Festivals boom post-Covid but struggle with big names amid theatre tours; talking to Emily Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America, about the 'huge surge' in book banning today, ALA 2023: Behind the Book Bans; we were hauled up into the light and sent abroad to appear before live audiences and pretend to be a more or less plausible and if possible entertaining version of ourselves, The Casual Ignominy of the Book Tours of Yore; and an alarming 26.6% year-on-year increase in visits to Pirate websites, Pandemic drives piracy.
The Ledbury Poetry Competition 2023 is open to all poets writing in English, no matter where they live. The entry fee is £6 per poem and the First prize is £1,000 cash and a week's poetry course at Arvon, the Second Prize is £500 and Third prize £250. The Competition closes on 10 July.
Two other competitions close at the end of June.
From our Endorsements page: 'The copy-editor perfectly captured the spirit of my story, making not only pertinent corrections, but also a string of brilliant suggestions and comments that inspired me to improve the text on my own. So happy I chose Writers Services. Rasmus, Chile.'
More on writers: bestselling authors are still getting major multi-book deals, Baldacci Re-Ups at Grand Central with Eight-Book Deal; Stephen King called him "maybe the greatest American novelist of my time", Cormac McCarthy: Tributes to 'unique' author of The Road and No Country for Old Men - BBC News; links to intriguing articles on McCarthy they've published over the years, Remembering Cormac McCarthy ‹ Literary Hub; and finally a tribute to one of the most eminent literary editors in publishing history, Legendary Knopf Editor Robert Gottlieb Dies at 92.
The eighth and final set of our new pages of Tips for Writers deals with submitting to publishers and agents: 'Look for agents who are trying to build up their lists, rather than those with established client lists. It may be wonderful to think of being represented by the agents who act for Stephen King or Ian Rankin, but you're much more likely to get taken on by someone who's just set up, or a hungry young agent in a bigger agency...'
A typically minimalist comment from the late Cormac McCarthy in our Writers' Quotes: 'I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.'
