9 February 2015 - What's new
9 February 2015
- So which country has the highest number of titles published per head of population? We also have S J Watson on the second novel problem, Blake Morrison on poetry.
- 'When I wrote Before I go to Sleep, I was in a blissful state of being disconnected from anybody else - I wrote it with the hope I could finish it, first of all, and then with the hope that somebody else might like it. But I was writing Second Life knowing that I had editors all over the world that were eager for it. There was a sense of pressure in getting it right. But ultimately I realised I had to just write a book that I loved...' S J Watson, author of Before I go to Sleep and Second Life, in the Observer, quoted in out Comment column.'
- How to market your writing services online is a useful article from Joanne PhillipsUK-based freelance writer and ghostwriter. She has had articles published in national writing magazines, and has ghostwritten books on subjects as diverse as hairdressing and keeping chickens. Visit her at www.joannephillips.co.uk about selling yourself as a writer. 'Recently someone commented to me that I seem to be doing a pretty good job of promoting my writing services on the internet. I was touched by the observation - we writers get so many rejections that a little praise is especially gratifying. And I began to wonder - what does it take to market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today?...'
- 'Figures just released by the International Publishers Association show that Britain produces more books per capita than any other country in the world. Last year 184,000 titles were produced - the equivalent of 2,870 titles per million inhabitants when population is taken into account. These figures only cover books published by publishers and exclude self-published work, which might well change them substantially...' What about other countries? News Review
- Our Picture Libraries page is a good resource for finding picture libraries across the world.
- Our links of the week: Grove Atlantic President and Publisher Morgan Entrekin,with a broad group of publishers, literary magazines and booksellers, is developing a website styled as a Huffington Post for the literary world-a one-stop shop of bookish aggregation, Literary Hub Is a New Home for Book Lovers - WSJ; what Indie publishers, who need it most, don't get from Amazon, Amazon, the greedy giant with small publishers in its grip | Books | The Guardian; whoever thought reading could be so very good for you, Reading for pleasure boosts self-esteem | The Bookseller; Spanish digital marketing company develops new tool, Mylibreto: Spanish Start-up Offers Social Analytics Tool - Publishing Perspectives; and, for some very amusing suggestions in the Comments, The Australian Insults Colleen McCullough in Obit, Inciting Ire.
- Do you have an old typescript or even hand-written manuscript which you can't work on? Or even audio recordings which need typing up? Our Manuscript Typing service can do the job for you cheaply and efficiently.
- ‘At times of crisis or distress, it's poems that people turn to. (Poetry) still has a power to speak to people's feelings, maybe in a way that fiction, because it works in a longer way, can't. There's a little bit of your brain that mourns and grieves that you're not writing poetry, but actually as long as I'm writing something, I'm happy.' Blake Morrison, whose Shingle Street is just published, in our Writers' Quotes.