24 April 2017 - What's new
24 April 2017
- Some sensational figures have just been released showing the trend towards book sales in print form as opposed to ebook is continuing, as sales of consumer ebooks in the UK dropped by a whopping 17%. These figures exclude self-published titles, which have contributed a large proportion of the ebook sales. But more than 50% of genre sales are now reckoned to be in ebook form. News Review
- ‘I refuse to be bullied by the idea that you have to have mental peace to write. I have no mental peace but I have written despite that. It's been from about the mid-Seventies that we've had this phenomenon of women with children writing. There's 2,000 years of that not being true, like literally never true...' Zadie Smith, author of Swing Time, NW and White Teeth, in the Evening Standard provides this week's Comment, ‘Women with children writing'.
- Our Success Stories series includes Darren Shan and Tina Seskis, of whom we said: 'an irresistible subject for a Success Story because she lives just up the road from WritersServices in north London and because her success as a writer is like a textbook illustration of how to do it'. We have other Success Stories on a wide range of authors.
- A new entry to our Endorsements page: 'I cannot thank you enough!! Your editor has worked her magic and I am delighted with the results!! Please thank her for me, I really appreciate what she has done!' Wendy White, whose Blue Rat rhyming children's stories we edited.
- Our March Magazine is now ready!
- Our links: too often, an independent author writing a memoir doesn't deliver the sort of book readers at large can appreciate, Writing A Memoir? Avoid These Mistakes | BookBaby Blog; the online retailer's rapid rise to prominence in the translation of foreign prose to English, Amazon expands its literary horizons, making big imprint in translation niche | The Seattle Times; the thing that can get a perfectly good story rejected by an editor on the first page, The Most Common Entry-Level Mistake in the Writing Game | Jane Friedman; and from today's paper, here are some things that you can't do with a Kindle, How eBooks lost their shine: 'Kindles now look clunky and unhip' | Books | The Guardian.
- A recent new page on the site is Our Services for Writers, listing all 20 editorial services offered by WritersServices, the widest range available on the web.
- More links: what is the one piece of advice you can give me before my book is published? Ask the Publicists: What's the One Thing I Can Do For My Book? | Literary Hub; forty years ago this month, a small group of campaigning writers founded an organisation which now pays out around £30 million a year to its writer members, Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society ALCS at 40 Small beginnings, big ambitions; there are different types of book editing - including proofreading, copy-editing, and developmental editing - for different stages of the publication process, What Type of Book Editing Do You Need - And When? BookBaby Blog; and Sarah Dalton writes young adult novels. She's earned a following among fans of YA genre fiction, but has now turned to crime fiction, The Secrets of Writing in Multiple Genres.
- The Web as a Research tool - there are some sensational research resources for writers on the web. The search engines and other directories have made these accessible. But it helps to understand a little about how they work.
- And from our Writers' Quotes, from W H Auden: 'But if a stranger in a train asks me my occupation I never answer 'writer' for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer 'poetry' would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.'
