24 October 2016 - What's new
24 October 2016
- 'This year's Booker result raises so many interesting issues that a longer report on Frankfurt, the Book Fair and other issues relating to international publishing will come next week. The links this week give a clue to the many themes that Paul Beatty's win with The Sellout has raised...' News Review covers 'A novel that is recklessly, scabrously funny, politically of-the-moment and hugely erudite'.
- Have you got something you'd like to say to our community of writers? My Say gives writers a chance to air their views about writing and the writer's life. So we have Natasha Mostert, 'There are few things as satisfying as typing THE END to a manuscript.' And there's British author Eliza Graham, author of Playing with the Moon and The One I Was, on her route to publication and Richard Hall "Write about what you know" - does this adage always make sense? Contributions should ideally be 200 to 400 words in length and of general interest. Please email them to us.
- Last call for the National Poetry Competition 2016, which is open to anyone from anywhere in the world aged 17 or over and has a First prize of £5000. It closes on Monday 31 October.
- ‘Crowd funding can be quite arduous and you have to be persistent - to the point of being very concerned that you are nauseating and repetitive! But if you stop, then the funding dries up pretty quickly. You have to keep going and you need to be of a mindset that you're happy to do that. If you're an author who's so involved in the creative process that you're not interested in getting involved with your readers, then it's probably not the route for you...' David Roche, author of a collection of his own humorous family and children's poetry, Just Where You Left it and Other Poems (How To Survive School, Parents and Everything Else That's Unfair In Life) in an interview in Bookbrunch has this week's Comment.
- Our links this week do feature the Guardian a lot and the Man Booker, but are all worth reading: Paul Beatty's book is one-of-a-kind, The Sellout rips up rulebook for what award-winning fiction looks like | Books | The Guardian; Beatty very nearly wasn't published in Britain at all, Turned down 18 times. Then Paul Beatty won the Booker ... | Books | The Guardian; when The Sellout was first published in America in 2015, it was a small release, How Paul Beatty's win shakes the Jonathan Franzen-loving US literati | Books | The Guardian; 'novelists had better conclude that the only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo', Inside the World of Judging the Man Booker Prize | Literary Hub; and the amazing story of two-time Booker Prize-winning Oneworld, The Rise of the Small Press on the Man Booker Shortlist | Literary Hub.
- Do you want some help with your writing but don't quite know what you want? Are you a bit puzzled by the various services on offer, and not sure what to go for? Choosing a service can help you work out which service is right for you.
- Some more links: serialized novels delivered through your mobile, The Hottest Trend In Digital Publishing are Serialized eBooks; how some genre writers are approaching publishing, Horror Authors Take a Stab at Self-Publishing; how the book and the film can diverge, Jack Reacher's Creator Knows the Movie Isn't Like the Book-and He Likes It That Way | Vanity Fair; and a literary flowering, with the critical validation of novels that also quite blatantly ignore Chinese literary stereotypes, Chinese Literature and New Authenticity on the International Stage.
- The web as a research tool is a useful page showing you what a great research tool the web is for writers.
- From our Writers Quotes, 'I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit.' Robert Rankin.
