30 March 2015 - What's new
30 March 2015
- 'It's not the first time an author has ‘written' from beyond the grave (Virginia Andrews and Robert Ludlum come to mind) but the just-announced news that, 11 years on, a fourth book in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy will be published still strikes a cynical note...' This week's News Review looks at the announcement of the fourth book in Stieg Larsson's 'trilogy'.
- If you want to browse across the WritersServices site, Advice for Writers shows the vast amount of information we have for writers and helps you find what you're looking for.
- 'My belief is that it's all about story and that's not shared by other writers necessarily. Story is the best vehicle to understand anything and that's what makes human beings unique. We make sense of the world by telling stories. I've become firmly of the belief that plotting and the narrative is primary and then anything else - style, tone, dialogue - comes second...' James Graham, playwright and scriptwriter, whose This House was a smash success at the National Theatre in London and whose Coalition was on TV last week, in the Observer, quoted in our Comment column.
- Are you interested in Getting Your Manuscript Copy Edited? As well as this article we have one from our 19-part Inside Publishing series about Copy editing and proof-reading and we offer a Copy editing service, as well as a Proof-reading service and our special Manuscript Polishing service, which involves more intensive work, 'polishing' and improving the text, and correcting the English if you are writing in English as a second language.
- Our links this week: why has the depiction of friendship gone out of fashion? Why modern fiction has turned its back on friendship | Books | The Guardian; the well-known French writer of books for young children offers his advice on writing for children, Grégoire Solotareff on Writing Books for Very Young Readers; and a fascinating look at how rights departments in publishing houses work, To Automate or Not to Automate the Rights Business? - Publishing Perspectives.
- More links: a distinguished translator offers a personal perspectie on the difference between translating children's and adult books, Sarah Ardizzone on Translating Two Worlds: Children's and Adult's; even bestselling authors can have difficulties getting started or writing under another name, JK Rowling reveals frustrations over manuscript rejections | Herald Scotland; and shocking initial findings about how low author advances really are, Median author advance under £6,600 | The Bookseller.
- Michael Legat's Factsheets provide a mine of pithy information on subjects such as Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar, Copyright 'Anything you write is your copyright as soon as you have put it in writing or on disc or recorded it in some other way, provided, of course that it is your own work rather than something which you have copied. However, if the material is written as part of your employment, as is the case with journalists employed by a newspaper or magazine, the copyright belongs to the employer...' and Revising manuscripts.
- 'The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.' Ezra Pound in our Writers' Quotes.
