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30 January 2012

	'There’s been an interesting discussion this week sparked off by an article in Publishing Perspectives about why an editor who has been working at a senior level in a publishing house would want to become a literary agent in order to spend more time working on authors’ manuscripts. The editor in question is Rebecca Carter of Harvill Secker and before that of Chatto & Windus, both highly-regarded imprints of Random House UK.' News Review investigates.
	Does your manuscript need Copy editing? Our new page on Getting your manuscript copy edited provides a useful overview and clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two versions of your copy edited manuscript, one showing the editor's changes in 'track changes' and one with the changes accepted. If you're not a native English speaker, you might be interested in our Manuscript Polishing service, which helps you make sure that your written English is correct.
	John Jenkins' January column 'Why is that even some successful authors find that writing a synopsis is a difficult task? Perhaps because they want to employ too much of their imagination and command of the English language. For beginners the problem seems to be one of confusion as they fail to appreciate the differences between a review, a biography and something to sell the book to a publisher or agent...'
	'To the Society of Authors, the arguments in favour of higher royalties on e-books seem as unanswerable as they have ever been. We feel that the starting rate for an unenhanced book, including academic texts, should be at least 30% - and that where enhanced e-books are being published, the royalty rate should be negotiated to reflect the degree of additional costs and work involved. Where the deal is exclusively for an e-book, and no advance is being paid, the royalties should start at a minimum of 50% and be valid either for a period of some three years, or else permit the author to terminate the agreement. Tom Holland, retiring chair of the UK Society of Authors in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.
	Rotten Rejections lists the famous writers who had their work rejected: The Diary of Anne Frank (‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity” level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies) was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about an artist.’
	'It is true that publishers try to stop me from writing anything but mysteries, but whenever they do, I go to another publisher. And they know I'm going to do that, so they have to make some kind of room for me.' Walter Mosley in our Writers' Quotes.

26 January 2012

'The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.' John Campbell in our Writers' Quotes.

	'The New Year has started with a mass of news from the ebook front, where things are really moving very fast. In the States ebook sales surged after Christmas. In the UK the figures show that more than one million ereaders and more than half a million tablet devices were received as gifts over Christmas, with Amazon and Apple the leading suppliers of e-readers and tablets respectively. One in 40 adults received a Kindle for Christmas.' News Review.
	Success story - with the publication of Inheritance, Christopher Paolini brought to a triumphant conclusion his epic sequence. In the UK this book had a first week sale of 76,000 copies and the series as a whole has sold 1.2 million books to date in the UK. It had a first printing of 2.5 million in the US. Not only have the books been translated in 49 countries but total sales for the first three books in the series have been 25 million copies worldwide.

	'I believe that the iron grip that large publishers and their marketing partners have had on readers’ attention since the 1990s has slipped quite a bit with the arrival of online retailers and opinion-makers.' Fred Ramey in Psychology Today, quoted in our Comment column.

	Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from procrastination. Chris Holifield shows you how to overcome the temptation to pause or stop writing in 'Don't procrastinate'.
	'The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.' John Campbell in our Writers' Quotes.

28 November 2011

	'A review of the UK children’s publishing scene by Caroline Horn in this week’s Bookseller provides an interesting picture of a part of the publishing business which is in pretty good shape. There is a strong feeling in the trade that the focus has shifted to bestsellers, bestselling authors and brand-name series. This makes it hard for new authors to get a sympathetic view taken of their work. The view is that nobody is interested in unknowns unless they are likely to be instant bestseller material.' News Review takes a look.
	Are you having a problem with Making Submissions? Here is our page on Your submission package and we can also help with our Submission Critique service. You could also think about having a report, our Editor's Report will help you with a professional editorial assessment of your work.
	This week's Writing Opportunity is the Commonwealth Prize short Story Competition, open to unpublished writers throughout the Commonwealth, but closing on 30 November, so hurry if you want to enter.
	Chas Jones looks at the tricky subject of Defamation , the defences against it, defamation and free speech, and how it works in different parts of the world. It's all too easy to defame someone, so authors should be wary about the risks.
	'We've arrived at this place where we just thoughtlessly plunge towards whatever the thing is that will allow us to make less of an effort. We know we're diminishing experience. We know that it was richer to walk to the store, talk to the bookseller, maybe meet your neighbour than it is to click online. But we can't stop ourselves...' Nicole Krauss, author of Great House, in the Observer, quoted in our Comment column.
	'The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.' T S Eliot in our Writers' Quotes.

21 November 2011

	John Jenkins' November column: What kind of a free Press do we writers want? A totally free Press left with its own self-governing body for standards of behaviour? Or a Press without any restrictions other than the existing laws of libel? Or a Press subject to government and legal censorship?
	‘The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them...' Dennis Lehane, author of Moonlight Mile in The Independent on Sunday, quoted in our Comment column.
	Are you looking for feedback on your work and constructive professional advice on how to improve it? Our services may be able to help. To produce an Editor's Report our editor will look at content, style and storyline, and give an assessment of your chances of getting your work published. Alternatively there are 17 other editorial services.
	'Many of us who have worked in the publishing business have long expected hardbacks to be superseded by paperbacks. But over the years hardbacks have been surprisingly durable in their grip on the book-buyer, with various come-backs affecting how much they are produced. Although it’s obviously going against normal pricing rules, the more expensive hardback edition survives partly because of the gift market and partly because readers don’t want to wait to read their favourite novelist. But why not publish that novel straight into paperback? News Review muses on the latest trend.
	Sell, don't tell: Some do’s and don’ts if you want to sell a script. If you want to turn your book, dream or idea into a performance script for film, stage or radio, it is going to be a very tough pitch. There are some pretty strict ‘rules’ which you need to follow if you are to maximise your chance of success. Read Chas Jones' two part article.
	'I am never indifferent, and never pretend to be, to what people say or think of my books. They are my children, and I like to have them liked.' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in our Writers' Quotes.

14 November 2011

	'Certain genre areas of fiction publishing seem to be coming into their own in a big way at the moment, which is good news if that’s the area you write in. Science fiction and fantasy are particularly popular. Last month major SFF author Terry Pratchett’s new novel became the fastest selling adult hardback novel by a British novelist since records began, selling no less than 31,094 copies in its first full week... News Review looks at the boom in genre publishing.
	Don't procrastinate! - 'Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from procrastination.' Chris Holifield looks at how to get yourself going.
	What does it take to market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today? Joanne Phillips provides the answer, which is that the internet is a fertile ground for writers. You just need to know how to make it work for you...
	Our Contract vetting service may be just what you need if you've got an agreement with a publisher but are now faced with dealing with the contract. Our contracts expert can advise and help you make sure you get a good deal.
	'Books have always been defined by their physical presence. Those under 50,000 words do not give customers value for money, books much over 200,000 words are cumbersome to read and prohibitively expensive to produce. Ebooks make those rules redundant. Piers Blofeld, agent at Sheil Land, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.
	Check out our review of How to Market Books if you're planning to publish your own.
	'There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.' George Orwell in our Writers' Quotes.

31 October 2011

	'Amazon has been much in the news this last week. After the announcement of it first big purchase for its new publishing arm at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which sent tremors through the publishing world, it is now consolidating its position on e-books. The deal in question may have garnered the book for Amazon because of the high ebook royalty offered. But the question is going to be whether the company can get the book into the book trade – or will Amazon sales be enough?' News Review reports.
	Success story - Darren Shan’s first book, Ayuamarca, was published in 1999 by Orion and didn’t have much impact. The sequel, Hell's Horizon, sold fewer copies than the first. But in January 2000, Shan released Cirque du Freak, the first book of The Saga of Darren Shan series in the UK and Ireland and this was the beginning of his tremendous success and as a YA (and, more recently, adult) horror writer.
	The latest addition to our fictionalised stories about our services - how Alison used our children's editorial services to get her magic unicorn story right. Plus how an Editor's Report helped Catherine, How Copy editing turned Tony's work into a publishable manuscript, how Makito benefited from Manuscript Polishing to get his PhD into shape, Self-publishing helped promote Annie's cake business and how Manuscript Typing helped John to get his father's wartime diary into good shape for publication.
	'There's just too much stress on authors. The business model seems to be that publishers want a book a year. I wanted to spend time on my novels, but that isn't economically viable...' Steph Swainston, fantasy author, who is abandoning writing to become a chemistry teacher, in the Independent on Sunday, quoted in our Comment column.
	For Creative writing tutors and their students there's a mass of useful information on the site, which we are very happy for you to print out, with due acknowledgement, please. You can find this in the listing under Advice for Writers, but we'd specially recommend our 7-part series Tips for Writers, Our Categories series, about Writing Crime, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Memoir and Autobiography and so on, our recently updated series Latest Changes in the Book Trade and the Inside Publishing series.
	'If booksellers wanted to be millionaires, they'd be in another line of business.' Godfrey Smith, in our Writers' Quotes.

24 October 2011

	'There is an increasing trend for older people to write their own memoir and then to self-publish it, sometimes in a nice gift edition. For many people looking back over their lives, the motivation for this is to set it all down for the family, particularly the grand-children, so that the story of their lives will not be lost but can be passed down through the generations. To have a handsome volume to give to your relatives is one thing, but for your own personal slice of family history to be preserved for the future is also a great motivator.' News Review looks at the trend.
	The very strong shortlist for the 2011 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry has just been announced this week, together with new three-year support from Aurum Funds.
	'Peter (Kravitz - her editor) said to me, I'll give you money for this. It had never occurred to me that anyone would give you money for writing: I thought writers were wealthy people who just wrote things out of the goodness of their heart and gave them as gifts. Janice Galloway, author of All Made Up, in the Guardian, quoted in our Comment column.
	Does your manuscript need Copy editing? Our new page on Getting your manuscript copy edited provides a useful overview and clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two versions of your copy edited manuscript, one showing the editor's changes in 'track changes' and one with the changes accepted.
	Author David Balderstone from Melbourne suggests how to use the two versions: "I studied the version with track change suggestions closely, learnt a lot, and fully realised how much editing work was involved. Then I read the version with track changes accepted very carefully."
	Our latest Writing Opportunity is National Novel Writing Month: Write Your Novel Online, an online support group for novelists. Here's your chance to join in , as 200,000 people worldwide did last November, completing the recommended 1,700 words a day (50,000 by the month's end). Starts 1 November.
	'In the same way that a woman becomes a prostitute. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and finally I did it for money.' Ferenc Molnair, on being asked how he became a writer, in our Writers' Quotes.

17 October 2011

	‘On the surface, there is little to distinguish this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair from any other but beneath the frantic meetings, crowded aisles and over-priced hotels the subtle shades of digital are stealing across the landscape… a new global market in English-language e-books is fast developing as the growing number of English-speaking readers worldwide opt to buy the cheaper English variant instead of the more expensive local-language product,’ says Publishing Perspectives Editor-in-Chief Ed Nawotka. News Review at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
	There's still time to enter the National Poetry Competition, with the closing date of 31 October, but you need to get your skates on.
	Our checklist on Entering competitions helps you to review how you approach competitions.
	'Here’s the flat truth of it, my friends: If you are a midlist writer and you sign a traditional publishing contract with most modern terms, and you do so with an agent—and not an IP attorney—negotiating for you, you will not make any more than your advance on that book. And the advance is not enough to live on. Kristine Kathryn Rusch in our Comment column.
	The Slush-pile - advice from an editor on how to get through it.
	Latest changes in the book trade 7: in the last part of this series, Chris Holifield looks at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses might transform authors' capacity to the license use of their books for all sorts of purposes.
	The rest of the series covers Bookselling, Publishing, Print on Demand and the Long Tail, Self-publishing - career suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences and Copyright.
	'It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly.' C J Cherryh in our Writers' Quotes.

10 October 2011

	'The Historical Writers’ Association, which we reported on last year, seems to have marked the coming of age of the genre of historical fiction... It is strange how genres come and go, with no obvious explanation, although sometimes the success of one or two books can have a knock-on effect, reviving the market for other similar books. News Review reports.
	John Jenkins' October column - did you know – as you sit at your state-of-the-art computer – that Qwerty has been going virtually unchanged for around 140 years? Not many such useful inventions last that long without some idiot trying to change them. It’s a classic case of -- it works don’t fix it. These letters are now fixed into the brains of millions of users and operate on millions of computers across the world.
	Our list of Picture Libraries continues to grow and is one of the best on the web, so have a look if you want to source some photos for your book.
	'Here’s the flat truth of it, my friends: If you are a midlist writer and you sign a traditional publishing contract with most modern terms, and you do so with an agent—and not an IP attorney—negotiating for you, you will not make any more than your advance on that book. And the advance is not enough to live on.' Kristine Kathryn Rusch quoted in our Comment column.
	Check out Advice for Writers for links to over 65 useful pages on the site. Some of the latest are are The Ins and Outs of Indexing, Sell, don't tell - a two-part article on how to pitch your script,How to market your writing services online, Writing for the web, Top Ten Tips for nonfiction writers, Choosing a Service, Getting your manuscript copy edited and Getting your poetry published.
	'The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.' J W Goethe in our fantastic Writers' Quotes.

26 September 2011

	'A new Harris poll has revealed that the number of Americans reading ebooks has doubled in the last year. One in six Americans who do not have an ebook reader are planning to buy one in the next year.' News Review reports on the latest developments in ebooks.
	This week's Writing Opportunity is Myriad Editions Graphic Novel Competition, open to all and with with an entry fee of £10. It closes on 1 October though, so better get your entry in quickly!
	Does your manuscript need Copy editing? Do you know the difference between copy editing and proof-reading? Divided by a common language? - are you wondering about the difference between American and British copy editing? Our new page on Getting your manuscript copy edited provides a useful overview and clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two versions of your copy edited manuscript, one showing the editor's changes in 'track changes' and one with the changes accepted.
	‘The next time you parachute a non-editor into a commissioning role, take your best real editor and promote them to - let’s call it - Structural Editor and pay them most of what you are going to pay the commissioning editor in lieu of the kudos (and the rest of the salary); let them work hand in hand with the commissioning editor and take care of the editorial work that the commissioning editor isn’t really qualified to do.' Advice to publishers from Stephen Guise, former editor at Mitchell Beazley, Cassell and at Little, Brown, quoted in our Comment column.
	So you want to write historical fiction? Your timing is good, because historical fiction is fashionable again after many years in the doldrums. In fact it’s so popular that it has virtually reinvented itself as a category...' The latest article in Chris Holifield's Categories series explores the market and approaches to Writing Historical Fiction.
	Other articles in the series cover Writing Romance, Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Writing Crime Fiction and Writing Non-fiction.
	'If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.' Edgar Rice Burroughs, in our Writers' Quotes.

19 September 2011

	'Last week saw the unusual spectacle of an author leaving her publisher because she thought the covers they put on her new book were inappropriate. Polly Courtney said the image was too racy – and she wanted her novel to be taken more seriously. 'News Review reports.
	This week's Writing Opportunity is the Mills & Boon New Voices competition, which has publication by the publisher as one prize. But you need to hurry as the open stage closes on 10 October. Also, visit the website to assess and score the submissions.
	Don't procrastinate! - 'Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from procrastination.' Chris Holifield looks at how to get yourself going.
	Screenplay assessment fictionalised story - 'Sarah had always been fascinated by the cinema. As a little girl going to see a film was her favourite treat and she was also interested in how movies got to be made. Her own favourites were the films with really good stories, like Titantic and Avatar, but she also liked the ones which were based on books, like Lord of the Rings and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...' Our fictionalised stories of how our services have helped writers give you some idea of what they can do.
	'One child in Edinburgh asked me who my main competitors were. If Julia Donaldson didn't exist and her books didn't exist, then I wouldn't have the readers. If I didn't exist then Anthony Horowitz and Jo Rowling wouldn't have their readers. Children need lots of different books. Adult writers are a lot more competitive, but with children you need this vast amount... Francesca Simon, author of the Horrid Henry books, in the Independent on Sunday, quoted in our Comment column.
	Is your progress as a writer stymied by the fact that you have old typewritten or even handwritten manuscripts that you can't face retyping onto a computer? Our Typing service can help with this.
	'The long-lived books of tomorrow are concealed somewhere amongst the so-far unpublished MSS of today.' Philip Unwin in our Writers' Quotes.

5 September 2011

	John Jenkins' September column: 'Every biography begins with a single sentence - 'Have you ever fancied writing your life story? There is always a market for biographies. Your story is equally exciting – a piece of social history, fascinating to your family and perhaps a wider audience if you go about it in the right way.'
	'The big debate for anyone at the moment is where does publishing provide value? What is our role? In my view what we do is we select, we nurture, we position, we promote, we leverage - but author care, editorial expertise, design excellence - those things are absolutely critical... Tom Weldon, CEO of Penguin UK in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.
	We're very sad to announce the death last week of Mike Legat, distinguished paperback publisher and author of our Factsheets, as well as twelve books on writing. Mike helped us in the early days of the site by producing this series of succinct and authoritative short articles. His factsheets range from Write about What You Know to The Qualities that Make a Writer, from What Do Publishers Want? to Useful Techniques for the Novelist and much else.
	'Following an appeal by two female customers from Tonbridge in the English county of Kent, the bookseller W H Smith has agreed to remove all references to ‘women’s fiction’ in its shops from October. The two women, Clare Leigh and Julia Gillick, complained that the women’s fiction section was ’very light, with lots of pink fluffiness’ and there were no classic authors.' What price women's fiction? News Review reports.
	Our Inside Publishing series consists gives you a clear picture of how publishing works. This extremely useful 19-part series has recently been revised to take account of changes in the publishing world. Advances and royalties, The Relationship between agents and publishers, Subsidiary rights, The English-speaking publishing world and The Marketing department have all just been brought up-to-date, and the series finishes with The Financial relationship between writers and publishers.
	'The crown of literature is poetry.. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy.' the writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.' Somerset Maugham in our Writers' Quotes.
	The September Magazine is ready!

29 August 2011

	'The advent of ebooks and consumers’ reluctance to accept the high price of hardbacks are having an impact on the traditional relationship between hardback and paperback publication. Traditionally, one year has been the norm and publishers have stuck to this for many years, in spite of the growth of sales of paperback editions.' News Review investigates.
	Our Writing Opportunity this week is the Trinity College London International Playwriting Competition, but it's closing on 1 September so you'll need to get your skates on if you want to enter.
	Publicising your book - gaining publicity is one of the biggest hurdles a new fiction or non-fiction writer faces. After all, without it, no-one will even know your book exists. In this article, media agent Alison Smith-Squire offers some top tips.
	We're proud of the good things writers have said about our site and have collected them together on an Endorsements page.
	'The biggest thrill of my life was selling my first novelette. It was a Western for Argosy magazine in 1951, called "Trail of the Apaches". I'd done a lot of research about the Apache Indians in the 1880s and they seemed like ruthless individuals out to raise hell, which fascinated me...' Elmore Leonard in the Independent on Sunday in our Comment column.
	If you want something to lighten your mood, try our Collection of Clangers to see that the experts don't always get it right.
	'F* this, I've had enough of writing. I don't like the book world. I don't like most books, even. I don't like sitting on my own in a room for hours on end.' Alex Garland on writing your second novel (which took him nearly ten years), in our Writers' Quotes.**

15 August 2011

	'By encouraging and effectively subsidising the creation and distribution of so many free apps by providing free distribution, Apple has given rise to a situation where anything that's not free has to work incredibly hard to prove its value, and in which consumers feel a tremendous sense of entitlement to be amused and pandered to for basically next to nothing... Simon Appleby, Digital Projects Manager for Octopus Publishing in the Bookseller's Futurebook, quoted in our Comment column.
	Our Writing Opportunity this week is the first MsLexia Women's Novel Competition, closing on 31 September. It's open to unpublished women novelists writing in any genre for adults and the entry fee is £25.
	Does your manuscript need Copy editing? Do you know the difference between copy editing and proof-reading? Divided by a common language? - are you wondering about the difference between American and British copy editing? Our new page on Getting your manuscript copy edited provides a useful overview and clarifies a new feature of our service, which enables you to get two versions of your copy edited manuscript, one showing the editor's changes in 'track changes' and one with the changes accepted.
	'Recently I was rejected utterly by over 500 literary agents and publishers for the 12th year in a row in an attempt to find representation or a publisher for 5 novels I have created. In my last attempt, one agent wrote to say...' Read the latest entry in our Rotten Rejections.
	Joanne Phillips' article about The Business of Writing is essential reading for any writer. It really is a business, with invoices to raise, accounts to be submitted and records to be kept. Writers, like artists, can find themselves floundering when it comes to the ‘business end’ of the job. Read this article for our easy-to-follow guide to the business of writing.
	'Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer - and if so, why?' Bennett Cerf, Co-founder of Random House, in our Writers' Quotes.

8 August 2011

	John Jenkins' August column provides a lively and rather cynical view of this year's Booker shortlist, which has a large number of surprise inclusions.
	'Now it’s beginning to look as if World Book Night may shortly become just that, rather than an aspirational name for the adult version of the UK’s World Book Day. The United States is to partner the UK, launching World Book Night in 2012... and 8 more Quick Reads are to come from bestselling authors.' News Review reports.
	Do you want to find out how to publish your work as an ebook? The final article in Chas Jones' series on ebooks is entitled Selling and Marketing Your Ebook and covers marketing through Amazon, Google and Ingrams, being your own supplier, print and payment, and other marketing.
	The first article in the series provides a practical introduction to Ebook publishing. The second article looks at metadata and explains the importance of getting the metadata right.
	The third article about ebook publishing deals with Ebook conversion and what you should think about before starting your own ebook conversion, with an overview of the software. The fourth article deals with Preparing files for e-book conversion.
	'I write full-time, it's my job, I have nothing else to do. I've got no excuse for not writing a book a year... I have no truck at all with this supposed link between quality and quantity, tell that to Mozart... I understand that it's not everybody's cup of tea, but because I come from a performance background, I'm not shy when in comes to standing up at festivals or in bookshops. Mark Billingham, author of Good as Dead, interviewed by Alice O'Keeffe in the Bookseller, and quoted in our Comment column..
	WritersServices editor Kay Gale offers her tips on Getting through the Slush-pile, drawing on her own experience as an editorial assistant reading her way through it.
	'When you give someone a book you're giving them the most imaginative of gifts, because you're taking a personal interest in what interests them.' W H Smith ad in the Observer, in our Writers' Quotes.

1 August 2011

	Our new Blurb-writing service is for anyone who is having difficulty producing their cover of jacket copy and may be especially helpful for self-publishers. Let our skilled editor/writers do the job for you, so that you end up with a professional blurb.
	'American author Bob Mayer had published over 40 books with traditional publishers before he decided to take things into his own hands and convert his backlist into ebooks. By January of this year the author of 40 books had reached a turning-point. After 20 years of writing, he had written himself out of his last contract. Mayer said: ‘It was a good news, bad news situation. The good news was for the first time in two decades I could really sit down and think about what I wanted to write. The bad news is, that in traditional publishing, an author without a contract is unemployed...’ News Review on the cutting edge of the ebook revolution.
	The winner of the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Sue Fondrie, an associate professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Given annually since 1982, the competition, sponsored by the English department at the University, is inspired by the melodramatic first line of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford.
	Self-publish your way through the recession - Our article by Chris Holifield, first published in The Self-Publishing Magazine, looks at what's going on in the publishing world and why it might make sense to consider self-publishing.
	Rotten Rejections lists the famous writers who had their work rejected: The Diary of Anne Frank (‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity” level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies) was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about an artist.’
	'It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.' Penelope Lively in our Writers' Quotes.

25 July 2011

'There have been a series of events on the bookselling front which may mark a seismic shift. In the States, Borders have gone into liquidation after what seems like months - or even years - of teetering on the brink. And in the UK Amazon has swooped on its successful competitor, The Book Depository, buying out the competition. News Review reports.

The fourth article in Chas Jones's series showing how to set up your books as ebooks deals with Preparing files for e-book conversion. The first article, A Practical Guide to Ebook Publishing gives an overview of the whole process.

If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look at our Services, especially our Editor's Report, Submission Critique and Children's Services. Also available is Synopsis writing, Contract Vetting, Copy editing, Manuscript Typing and our latest addition, Indexing.

The novelists' task, says Jonathan Franzen in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven, is: 'To find an adequate narrative vehicle for the most difficult stuff at the core of me, in the hope that that might resonate with the reader who otherwise has been feeling alone with those deep, difficult feelings...' Quoted in our Comment column.

This week's Writing Opportunity is the 4th Luke BitmeadWriter's Bursary, in memory of the young writer who died prematurely, which closes on 31 August.

Real Time Web for Old Time Books: the Benefit of Social Media for Publishers and Authors - Fauzia Burke explores the online activities you can do in real time -- from status updates on Facebook, to microblogging on Twitter to uploading photos and videos on other social media sites. If you want to explore how social networking can help you market your book, her article provides a starting-point.

'I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.' Edgar Rice Burroughs in our Writers' Quotes.

18 July 2011

John Jenkins' July column introduces Dr Bernard Lamb's Guarding the Queen's English, which he can 'recommend to all writers and would be writers, particularly those bewildered by me and I, who and whom, it’s and its, that and which, who’s and whose.'

'Do you want to find out how to publish your work as an ebook? This is something you may be thinking about, in view of the rapid growth in ebook sales. Many authors are suffering from a big contraction in their earnings. Midlist authors have found it increasingly difficult to get their books published by mainstream publishers and may be looking for the the chance to go it alone with ebook versions of their books.' News Review investigates.

NoViolet Bulawayo from Zimbabwe has won the £10,000 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing with her short story "Hitting Budapest", published.

The third article in Chas Jones's series about ebook publishing deals with Ebook conversion and what you should think about before starting your own ebook conversion, with an overview of the software.

'Actually, there's hardly a mainstream genre (fiction, history, children's books, poetry) that's not undergoing significant change, attributable to the liberation of the new technology, from ebook to Kindle: poets developing apps, J K Rowling linking Harry Potter to cyberspace, would-be novelists launching their work as ebooks.' Robert McCrum in the Observer, quoted in our Comment column.

Writing Historical Fiction our revised article on Writing Historical Fiction brings this subject up to date. Other articles cover Writing Crime Fiction, Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy , Writing Romance, Writing Non-fiction and Writing Memoir and Autobiography.

'The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.'
Dylan Thomas in our Writers' Quotes.

11 July 2011

'It looks as if the campaign against closing libraries in the UK has just scored a significant victory. Since the Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, has failed to intervene to assert the statutory right to a library service, campaigners all over the country have rallied to challenge the closures being put in place by local authorities. Up to 500 libraries in the UK are at risk as a result of the UK government’s current austerity drive.' News Review reports on the campaign.

This week's Writing Opportunity is Wasafiri New Writing in Poetry, Fiction or Life Writing, but hurry because the closing date is 29 July.
Are you writing poetry but finding it difficult to get it published? Look at our page on Getting your poetry published.

'When I'm writing a picture book, I automatically think "I don't need to say that" because the pictures will say it. Or better still, "I'll say this and the pictures will say that, which contradicts it.' Allan Ahlberg in the Guardian, quoted in our Comment column.

Michael Legat's Factsheets are a series of specially commissioned information-packed Factsheets for WritersServices, which cover the essentials for writers from a former publisher, novelist and author of 12 books on writing. For a quick update on Write about What You Know, Literary Agents or Shall I be Famous? Shall I be Rich?, and much more, this is the place to look.

'In an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.' Harper Lee in our Writers' Quotes.

4 July 2011

'Rather to the amazement of the publishing world, J K Rowling, long a bye-word for her loyalty to her agent and publishers, has cut out her publisher Bloomsbury and set up a new site to sell ebook versions of her books direct to her readers... Even more surprisingly, Rowling has announced that she has left her agent of 16 years, Christopher Little, and moving to a new agency, The Blair Partnership, set up by Neil Blair, the lawyer who worked with her at the Christopher Little Agency.' News Review reports on the latest surprising news.

Ebook publishing - do you want to find out how to publish your work as an ebook? Chas Jones's new series guides you through the process. The first article provides a practical introduction to ebook publishing.

The second article looks at metadata and explains the importance of getting the metadata right.

Our fictionalised stories about our services help to show how they might help. Find out how an Editor's Report helped Catherine, How Copy editing turned Tony's work into a publishable manuscript, how Makito benefited from Manuscript Polishing to get his PhD into shape, how Self-publishing helped promote Annie's cake business and how Manuscript Typing helped John to get his father's wartime diary ready for publication.

'I always say "Please edit me", because I don't want to write those big, flabby books where the writer's making loads of money and nobody wants to tell them that it's crap. You know who I'm talking about. You have to take your ego out of it and say, do I want people to be obsequious to me or do I want to write good books?' Denise Mina, author of The End of the Wasp Season, in the Independent on Sunday, quoted in our Comment column.

Have you looked at our Problem Page? You can send in your own problem to us, but this one is pretty interesting because it's about problems with finding an agent.

'Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.' Virginia Woolf in our Writers' Quotes.

27 June 2011

Update to our links - our 23 lists of recommended links have just been updated with many new links to sites of special interest to writers. these range from Writers Online Services to Picture libraries and from Software for writers to Writers Magazines & Sites.

'The British Library and Google have just announced a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s collections. Opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in the world, this demonstrates the Library’s commitment to increase access to anyone who wants to do research.' News Review reports.

Have you followed Eastenders with interest and always thought about being a TV scriptwriter? Bob's Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer covers the period when he wrote for EastEnders and very revealing it is too. Try Wednesday 9 February 2005: '86-page planning document arrives from Elstree. Undoubtedly happy to be writing another episode; only hope I have more control over it than I had over last one...'

And here's a recommendation from Bob's fellow EastEnders script-writer Pippa McCarthy:   'Just discovered your web page... I've just spent the last hour crying with laughter with periodic yelps of 'been there!'... I'm going to make my entire family read your diary. Then perhaps will understand own bizarre behaviour every time I start a script... Anyway, will shut up now but just wanted to say you have cheered me up no end. It's brilliant.'

We're proud of the good things writers have said about our site and have collected them together on an Endorsements page.

'Although it is hard for many of us to emotionally detach ourselves from the book as an incredible medium, what with all its historical contributions to humanity, we must admit that the concept of the book as the best delivery system for knowledge and information is, in fact, dead.' Julius Wiedemann of Taschen, in the Huffington Post, quoted in our Comment column.

'If you have other things in your life - family, friends, good productive day work - then these can interact with your writing and the sum will be all the richer.' David Brin in our Writers' Quotes.　

20 June 2011

Set up your own blog - in order to be in the best position to promote yourself and your writing, it’s well worth setting up a blog. In case you find this idea a bit alien, here’s why you should take the trouble to do this. A blog offers you the opportunity to start building an audience for your work and the chance to experiment with writing about yourself and with different kinds of writing. Many successful writers’ blogs start with a small readership of family and friends, but build a good audience over the years.

Writing for the web is a particular skill. Jakob Nielsen’s study has been extracted from to give you a digest of how to go about this.

'Australia breaks into the international publishing news less often than it should, but last week government minister Nick Sherry hit the headlines when he said: ‘I think in five years, other than a few specialist booksellers in capital cities we will not see a bookstore, they will cease to exist.’ He believes it is ‘inevitable’ that online shopping would wipe out general bookstores within five years, leaving only specialist shops in capital cities.' News Review reports on events down under.

Do you want to get your work copy edited? Our Copy editing service may be able to help. There are articles on the site about the difference between UK and US copy editing, and about the difference between Copy editing and Proof-reading.

This week's Writing opportunity is from the Alan Titmarsh Show and is The People's Novelist Competition, closing on 1 July, so hurry if you want to enter.

'Writing for television is such a strange world, you have to write up to 25 episodes of a programme　each year and you need to create a lot of drama. You end up thinking: "Have we done this before and if we have, will anyone notice?"' John Stephens, author of The Emerald Atlas in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

'I can't start writing until I have a closing line.' Joseph Heller in our Writers Quotes.

13 June 2011

John Jenkins' June column is entitled 'A new chapter for publishers' and deals with the vast changes sweeping through the publishing world as the ebook rapidly gains a large audience - to his regret.

'An article in last week’s Bookseller looks at the long-heralded death of the mid-list. Discussions about this have been going on as long as anyone in the business can remember, but this time it really does look as if we’re on to the last rites. The economics of contemporary publishing dictate that it’s more efficient for publishers to publish fiction at a higher level and to focus on new authors, rather than going for the long slow build, as they used to do. This means a bigger up-front investment in a new author, in terms of both advance and promotion, to build them into an instant bestseller. The reason for this seemingly risky strategy on the part of publishers is the way the book trade will support or not support the author in question.' News Review investigates.

Our latest Writing Opportunity is the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, run by the Poetry Society, the top UK award for young poets aged 11-17. Each year 100 winners are selected by a team of high profile judges, and receive their awards at an annual prize-giving event on National Poetry Day. Closing date 31 July 2011.

Sell, don't tell: Some do’s and don’ts if you want to sell a script. If you want to turn your book, dream or idea into a performance script for film, stage or radio, it is going to be a very tough pitch. There are some pretty strict ‘rules’ which you need to follow if you are to maximise your chance of success. Read Chas Jones' two part article.

‘A few weeks ago, I was talking to a group of writers online.　The subject was what an author can do for herself if her book isn’t chosen to get the "big love" from her publisher.　We all knew what she meant: each season, it seems like some books are selected for star treatment — often, but not always, debut novels — and all the rest are left to take off, or more likely, fade into obscurity, without much support... ' Lisa Tucker, author of The Promised World in Publishing Perspectives, quoted in our Comment column.

We're proud of the good things writers have said about our site and have collected them together on an Endorsements page.

'One of my great surprises when I was in American was about twenty-five years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack.' Stephen Spender, writing in 1984, in our Writers' Quotes.

The June Magazine is ready!

30 May 2011

'Never has there been a time when so much is changing so fast in the world of books. Seminars and discussion from Book Expo America last week underlined the way things are going, and it’s a scary prospect for people who have spent their lives in publishing or bookselling.' News Review reports on the scrum.

If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look at our Services, especially our Editor's Report, Submission Critique and Children's Services. Also available is Synopsis writing, Contract Vetting, Copy editing, Manuscript Typing and our latest addition, Indexing.

Writing biographies: ‘If you get to hate them you should give up the book! But it is a bit like being married. You have days when you feel fed up and days when you feel passionately in love. Dickens did terrible things in his life. But a good thing about being old is that you’ve seen it, you’ve done it. You know we all do terrible things… Claire Tomalin, author of nine biographies, with Charles Dickens : A Life coming later this year, quoted in our Comment column.

Is a creative writing degree really worth it? Having completed a creative writing degree, Josh Spears thought he would become a bestselling writer or at least be able to get a job. Neither of these has happened, so was it worth it and would he advise other writers to put themselves through the course?

Are you writing poetry but finding it difficult to get it published? Look at our page on Getting your poetry published.

'In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your reader to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.' Ben Bova in our Writers' Quotes.

23 May 2011

'Other news stories had to be shelved with the news on Friday that Waterstone’s has been bought by Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut’s A&NN Group. Although this negotiation has been a bit long drawn-out, the news has been well-received and is in contrast to the situation in the United States, where Borders continues to teeter on the brink. The troubled HMV group has only raised £53m in the sale, considerably less than they had originally hoped for.' News Review on the latest news.

Our Writing Opportunity this week is the Tony Lothian Biographers Club Prize, closing on 11 August and with an entry fee of £10. This presents a good chance for unpublished biographers.

Tips for Writers is our latest 8-part series for writers: Improving your writing, Learning on the job, New technology and the Internet, Self-publishing - is it for you?,   Promoting your writing (and yourself), Other kinds of writing, Keep up to date and Submission to publishers and agents

‘The inevitable disappearance of the vast majority of bookshops will remove a main marketing channel and will seriously undermine the power of publishers. It will also increase the scary dominance of Amazon. Book printers will, sadly, mostly go out of business, and physical books will become more expensive as a consequence of reduced economies of scale. Public libraries, as repositories of physical volumes, will disappear...' UK investor Luke Johnson, former Chairman of Borders UK, in Publishers’ Lunch, quoted in our Comment column.

If this all sounds a bit gloomy, have a look at our Classic Quotes to cheer yourself up.

Joanne Phillips has written a useful article on The Business of Writing: 'Writing is undoubtedly a creative art. Whether we are working on the next Booker Prize winner or ghostwriting blog posts, writers need to be original, imaginative and inspired. But writing is also a business, with invoices to raise, accounts to be submitted and records to be kept. Writers, like artists, can find themselves floundering when it comes to the ‘business end’ of the job. Read on for our easy-to-follow guide to the business of writing...'

'I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote simply for money. What makes a writer is that he likes writing. Naturally, when he has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money.' P G Wodehouse in our Writers' Quotes.

16 May 2011

"The shortlist for the £10,000 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing – the twelfth “African Booker” - has just been announced. Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, Chair of the judges, said that "choosing a shortlist out of nearly 130 entries was not an easy task – one made more difficult and yet more enjoyable by the varied tastes of the judges – but we have arrived at a list of five stories that excel in quality and ambition. Together they represent a portrait of today’s African short story: its wit and intelligence, its concerns and preoccupations.” News Review reports.

Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from procrastination. Chris Holifield shows you how to overcome the temptation to pause or stop writing in 'Don't procrastinate'.

'I've always had uneasy loyalties about the relevance of the term 'work' to the activities I perform every day, and which occupy the hours when most other people are in fact "working". I write novels and stories and essays for a living.　And while I fairly mindlessly refer to what I do as "work"... it's hard for me to think that work is what I really do.' Richard Ford in the Guardian, quoted in our Comment column.

Our Writing Opportunity this week is the wonderful 2012 Times/Chicken House Children's Fiction Prize,closing on 28 October with a prize of a £10,000 advance plus publication by Chicken House worldwide.

Use our UK, US, Children's and International agents' listings to find the right agent for your work and then our pages on Finding an Agent, Making submissions and Your submission package will help with your submissions.

'Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.' Virginia Woolf in our Writers' Quotes.

9 May 2011

'Readers of this column may be tiring of all the talk about ebooks, but it should be said in our defence that the news has been full of nothing else for many weeks now. Take comfort however, because in the midst of this obsessive concentration on digital developments, publishing – and writing – is still going on as normal... A major trend at present is the increase in the number of books published.' News Review looks at the figures.

The revision of our Inside Publishing series is complete. This extremely useful 19-part series has been revised to take account of changes in the publishing world. Advances and royalties, The Relationship between agents and publishers, Subsidiary rights, The English-speaking publishing world and The Marketing department have all just been brought up-to-date, and this week we've finished with The Financial relationship between writers and publishers.

'How do you choose your subject matter? Indeed, do you choose it or does it choose you? Should you follow the adage "write what you know", or should a writer engage with the world beyond their back-yard? How important is research? Are you "allowed" to write a story that doesn't "belong" to you, for reasons of race, class, gender and so on?　Is it possible to "own" any story, even the story of your life, given that others who intersect with it (your parents, your lover) will have a different "truth" to tell?...' Monica Ali on writing Untold Story, her novel about Princess Diana, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

This week's Writing Opportunity is the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition, with a first prize of £5,000, closing on 10 June.

Our 23 lists of recommended links give access to many sites of interest to writers, including Writers Online Services and Online resources. Many new links have been added and please send us any suggestions.

'No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.' W H Auden, in our Writers' Quotes.

2 May 2011

Help get your book ready for publication with an editorial service - Marti Norberg, who has worked as a reporter and managing editor for several Colorado newspapers, advises on how to use an editorial service (such as WritersServices) to get your book book ready to be published.

'A recent article in Teleread questioned the way publishers bring out the premium edition, the hardback, and then make readers wait for the mass market paperback, which is available at a lower price which most people can afford... But if books are valued down to nothing, or almost nothing, as they are being right now in the Amazon Kindle store, doesn’t the consumer get used to the idea that books, like many other things, should be free or nearly so? And how do writers make an income from their writing if that is the prevailing view? News Review reports.

Rotten Rejections lists the famous writers who had their work rejected: The Diary of Anne Frank (‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity” level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies) was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about an artist.’

Our checklist on Entering competitions helps you to review how you approach competitions and to make sure you give yourself the best possible chance of winning.

'It's a unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. There is an invisible line that the murderer steps over, and which divides him from or her forever from the rest of us. Murder is an extraordinary act. PD James on murder in the Sunday Telegraph, in our Comment column.

Our list of picture libraries is a good place to start if you're looking to source pictures for your book.

'There is no such thing as moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.' Oscar Wilde in our Writers' Quotes.

Our May Magazine is ready!

18 April 2011

Getting your manuscript copy edited - if you are looking for copy editing online, it is difficult to ensure that you are getting a professional copy editor who will do a good job on your manuscript. WritersServices has now made its copy editing service unique, as it will offer as standard TWO versions of your script, one prepared using 'track changes' and one with all the changes accepted.

Our Copy editing service can help if you are interested in getting your book copy edited. If you're not sure what this entails, this article may clarify it - Copy editing and Proof-reading. If you are concerned about getting English English or American English, our article on American copy editing is worth a look.

'The two big spring book fairs in Europe, Bologna and London, have both gone rather well, with packed aisles and a lot of solid business being done. This is all the more surprising because the book business internationally is in something of a crisis. The two big English language markets are both down on book sales, the UK by 3% and the US by a worrying 9%. Although sales of ebooks are growing, especially in the States, this is not yet compensating for the lost print sales.' News Review reports.

The Historical Writers' Association has been set up by novelist Manda Scott as a forum for writers and to promote the genre. The internet-based group already boasts around 100 members including authors, agents and editors, and is open to writers of historical fiction and non-fiction.

'We're in the early stages of a whole new era. The last time something this important happened was when Gutenberg introduced modern book printing to the world. That revolution helped books spread to more corners of the planet than ever before. This revolution will take them even further, faster, and I'm absolutely thrilled to climb on board and be a part of it. Viva e-books! Viva The Word!!' Darren Shan, in Futurebook, quoted in our Comment column.

'And as to experience--well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.' Elizabeth Bishop in our Writers' Quotes.

11 April 2011

'Self-publishing has been much in the news recently, with bestselling self-publisher Amanda Hocking deciding to sign up with a publisher, whilst author Barry Eisler has decided to continue self-publishing in spite of receiving a big offer.' News Review looks at the pros and cons of going it alone or signing up with a publisher.

John Jenkins' April column - Ideas for stories begin in many different places: a snatch of dialogue, a character, a title, sometimes from a news fragment from TV or newspapers. Whatever the start point, the crucial question – whether from Aristotle to Shakespeare or Sam Goldwyn to Stephen Spielberg is: What’s the big idea?

Thinking about subscribing to a writers' magazine? Our Magazine Reviews offer a unique service, guiding you through what's available for writers: Writers' News, Mslexia, Writers' Forum, Writer's Digest, Scriptwriter and Self-Publishing Magazine.

'Pay a fair price, e-whingers: Talent and experience should cost a just amount of money in a commercial marketplace. Professionals deserve a fair reward. This whingeing, petty, adolescent sense of entitlement to culture and entertainment for free has almost proved the death of recorded music. It must not happen with books.’ Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor, in the Independent, in our Comment column.

Online advertising for writers - Chas Jones looks at how writers can benefit from using the web as an advertising medium, including using Google ads and display ads to promote your book online.

'It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.' Robert Benchley in our Writers' Quotes.

4 April 2011

Poetry Book Society fights Arts Council England funding withdrawal - the tiny Poetry Book Society is fighting back against the Art's Council's shocking decision to remove its funding completely in one year's time. Carol Ann Duffy, the UK Poet Laureate, was widely quoted in the press last week: "This news goes beyond shocking and touches the realms of the disgusting. The PBS was established by T S Eliot in 1953 and is one of poetry's most sacred churches with an influence and reach far beyond its membership. This fatal cut is a national shame and a scandal and I urge everyone who cares about poetry to join the PBS as a matter of urgency."

Have you looked at our very useful Printing and Publishing Glossary?

'The recent Books and Consumers conference showed some surprising trends in British book-buying, which is catching up on the US as regards e-books. Ebook sales, whilst much talked-about, were still only 1% of the total in 2011. But Kelly Gallagher, Vice President Publishing Services of PubTrack Bowker, observed that in the US ebook sales had enjoyed a "hockey stick" moment, with a steep rise in sales once devices had become prevalent. News Review at the Books and Consumers conference.

Become a biographer - Chas Jones looks at why you might decide to become a biographer, covering searching out the right subject, dealing with celebrity and whether you should make your book fact or fiction, footnote of history or a piece of literature.

Also on the site are Writing a biography or autobiography and Writing Memoir or Autobiography.

Our latest Writing Opportunity is for young writers aged 16-18 and living in the UK. Could you be the next John le Carre? Write a short story and find out but hurry as you need to get it in by 14 April.

'"Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book... in private, unsupervised, unspied-on, alone. It isn’t like a lecture; it’s like a conversation. There’s a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our own limitations too, our own experience of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter."' Anthony Horowitz quoting Philip Pullman in our Comment column.

'Sleep on your writing: take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.' Amos Bronson Alcott in our Writers' Quotes.

28 March 2011

'In a stunning final judgement, Judge Denny Chin has this week rejected the Google Book Settlement, some 13 months after its final fairness hearing, saying: "In the end, I conclude that the [Settlement Agreement] is not fair, adequate, and reasonable." Chin suggested his concerns with the agreement could be overcome with one simple change. "As the United States and other objectors have noted, many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA were converted from an opt-out settlement to an opt-in settlement. I urge the parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly." News Review on the Google Settlement.

The National Poetry Competition winner is announced and you can read his stunning poem here.

An Editor's Advice is a useful series is based on the advice Maureen Kincaid Speller, a long-serving WritersServices freelance editor, has given writers over the years. The series covers Dialogue, doing further drafts, genre writing, planning, points of view, autobiography and travel and manuscript presentation.

‘Very often I'm brought to a halt by some ridiculous mistake that hasn't been picked up by an editor, which makes me think there can't be much line-by-line editing going on in publishing houses these days. I don't know that it matters all that much. It makes a lot of people absolutely furious so they can hardly enjoy reading. But for me if what is being said comes clearly across that's what matters. It is a bit pedantic to fuss too much about the editing of detail. On the other hand, it does offend my personal instincts, having been trained in the old-fashioned ways, which meant our texts should be perfect.' Diana Athill, author of Somewhere Towards the End in the Guardian, quoted in our Comment column.

The winner of the second Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry has also been announced this week. The £5,000 prize is donated by Carol Ann Duffy, funded from the annual honorarium the Poet Laureate traditionally receives from HM The Queen. The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry seeks to recognise excellence in poetry, highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life.

Do you want to make a Table of Contents for your non-fiction book? It looks good to provide one, especially when you prepare a large document. It is remarkably easy to get a professional-looking table which is generated for you by the software. Chas Jones shows you how.

'The more a man writes, the more he can write.' William Hazlitt in our Writers' Quotes.

7 March 2011

'World Book Night was brilliant and World Book Day its usual effective self. But what about the literacy campaign which lies behind the whole operation? It is a shocking statistic that one in six people in the UK struggle with literacy. The figure is better in many European countries and worse in the US and many others. What is clear is what a terrible loss this is for them, how it reduces their life chances in every way, barring them from decent jobs and sapping their self-confidence.' News Review reports.

Our Writing Opportunity this week is the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, eligible to all writers over 16 living in the UK or Ireland and worth a fantastic £16,000.

Have you looked at our Problem Page? You can send in your own problem to us, but this one is pretty interesting because it's about problems with finding an agent.

Real Time Web for Old Time Books: the Benefit of Social Media for Publishers and Authors - Fauzia Burke explores the online activities you can do in real time -- from status updates on Facebook, to microblogging on Twitter to uploading photos and videos on other social media sites. If you want to explore how social networking can help you market your book, her article provides a starting-point.

'Sometimes writing is easy and sometimes not. You have to be sitting at your desk; if you wait to want to do it you might wait for ever. But you generally find that once you're doing it, you want to. Early morning is best. I write in my dressing gown, because when you're writing fiction the nearer you are to your subconscious, your sleeping state, the better. My theory is that once you dress, that's the end of work for the day. The real world surges in and takes over. Fay Weldon in The Times, quoted in our Comment column.

Is your progress as a writer stymied by the fact that you have old typewritten or even handwritten manuscripts that you can't face retyping onto a computer? Our Typing service can help with this.

'If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.' Edgar Rice Burroughs in our Writers' Quotes.

28 February 2011

'World Book Night is practically upon us, and thousands in the UK will help celebrate it this coming Saturday, 5 March. This year the organisers have broken away from the traditional Quick Reads and book tokens for children - although the traditional programmes are still there - to go for a much larger promotion.' News Review reports.

The Creative Process - Chas Jones writes: we came close to inventing a quantum theory of creativity during a poetry reading by Professor Philip Gross of Glamorgan University at Kellogg College, Oxford. Rather like Schrodinger’s cat, the debate that followed suggested how the creative process was changed, if not actually killed off, when it is examined. Does the keeping of notebooks, for example, change the quality of the creative impulse that the words try to capture?

Are you thinking about self-publishing? Our site, WritersPrintShop, has over 90 pages - the most informative resource on this on the web - so it's the perfect place to find out what's involved and what it costs.

'The balance of power has permanently, irreversibly shifted from the media companies to the tech firms. Let's imagine some bolder moves from the publishing industry. Perhaps multiple publishers could band together in opposition, starving the App Store of content until better terms can be negotiated. Or maybe they could seek to challenge Apple on antitrust grounds. Either might prove effective in leading to slightly better terms for publishers. Pete Cashmore founder and CEO of Mashable in our Comment column.

Our Writing Opportunity this week is the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, worth £5,000 to the winner and closing on 25 March.

Thinking about subscribing to a writers' magazine? Our Magazine Reviews offer a unique service, guiding you through what's available for writers: Writers' News, Mslexia, Writers' Forum, Writer's Digest, Scriptwriter and Self-Publishing Magazine.

'The Americans may have need of the telephone but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.' Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the General Post Office in Britain in our colllection of clangers.

'The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.' G K Chesterton in our Writers' Quotes.

21 February 2011

In this useful article on Applying text style, Chas Jones shows you how to apply text style to your manuscript. All word processors offer you the chance to apply a layout style to sections of the text. When preparing your manuscript for submission or for the printer, this is how to go about it.

'Borders’ filing for bankruptcy this week was the expected outcome of the long slow decline of the second-biggest US bookstore chain, as it gradually ran out of impetus and money. The book retailer has been struggling for months, with Ingram as the chain's main supplier of books, and most publishers putting them on stop. Borders had proposed that publishers receive interest-bearing notes instead of payment but publishers, not surprisingly, were cool on that proposal.' News Review on this week's bad news.

Our 17 editorial services, some of which we've been delivering for ten years, cover the range from the Editorial Report to Synopsis writing, from Copy editing to Submission Critique. there are also special Children's Editorial Services and Contract vetting.

'With a biographical novel you've got the basic structure of the life, you've got a mass of facts.　The problem is to find a novel-shaped story to tell, there's no point telling the biographical story, it's been done…' David Lodge, author of A Man of Parts on H G Wells, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

2010 Diagram Prize shortlist - here's the shortlist for the 2010 Diagram Prize. It looks like it's going to be another strong year. This is run by columnist Horace Bent in the Bookseller (the UK book trade weekly) with input from dedicated odd title hunters from all over the world. The prize, set up in association with the Diagram Group, has been running since 1978 and is a joyous celebration of the barmy side of publishing.

What does it take to market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today? Joanne Phillips provides the answer, which is that the internet is a fertile ground for writers. You just need to know how to make it work for you...

'Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.' Truman Capote in our Writers' Quotes.

14 February 2011

The revision of our Inside Publishing series is complete. This extremely useful 19-part series has been revised to take account of changes in the publishing world. Advances and royalties, The Relationship between agents and publishers, Subsidiary rights, The English-speaking publishing world and The Marketing department have all just been brought up-to-date, and this week we've finished with The Financial relationship between writers and publishers.

'The big questions about creative writing courses still remain, although there’s no doubt about their popularity, nor that the universities and colleges see them as real money-spinners. There are now a huge number of writing courses in America - no less that 1,000 - and, after a slower start, about 100 postgraduate courses in the UK catering for the creative writing student.' News Review asks whether creative writing courses are worth it.

Back in 2007, Colin Murray wrote an article for WritersServices on getting published entitled 'The long and winding road'. It was all about the difficulties of getting your second novel published. It's great therefore to report that last week Colin had a launch party in Goldsboro Books in London for his second book, No Hearts, No Roses, the first Tony Gerard thriller.

'When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book. It's important to see the film as a film. Of course, it's easier with an old book.　 If it's Wuthering Heights or something, it's like going to the theatre and seeing another version; it might as well be Chekhov.　This book (Never Let Me Go) came out in 2006, so it's harder to do that.　But it's a movie. Every discussion shouldn't be dominated by comparison with the novel...' Kazuo Ishiguro, the film of whose book Never Let Me Go has just been released, in the Evening Standard.

The latest addition to our fictionalised stories about our services - how Alison used our children's editorial services to get her magic unicorn story right before submitting it to children's publishers. These stories are just a bit of fun, but they do show how our services can help you.

'An author ought to consider himself not as a gentleman who gives a private treat, but rather as one who keeps a pub, at which all persons are welcome for their money.' Henry Fielding in our Writers' Quotes.

7 February 2011

'In the light of everything else going on in Egypt, it’s perhaps a small thing that the Cairo International Book Fair was cancelled a few days ago. China was to be the guest of honour and its large delegation of it 248 publishers and 10,000 books was withdrawn at the last minute. President Mubarak, now with other things on his mind, was to have opened the Fair.' News Review on events in Cairo.

John Jenkins' February column - in this month's column John deals with the all-important subject of creating characters. How good are you are creating characters? John shows you how to go about it.

Writing Historical Fiction our revised article on Writing Historical Fiction brings this subject up to date. This series about writing in different genres is really useful for anyone trying to tackle one of them, as it looks at the writing and the market too.
Other articles cover Writing Crime Fiction, Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy , Writing Romance, Writing Non-fiction and Writing Memoir and Autobiography.

'The fact of the matter is that author events will take over your life if you let them. Being invited to Edinburgh these days is like entering the royal enclosure at Ascot.　 If you haven't sat sipping whisky in that yurt, you haven't arrived - and it's not just other pen-pushers that you'll meet. Politicians, sportsmen, celebrities... they don't need to have written or even ghost-written a book. Talking about books seems to be a bigger business than reading them...' Anthony Horowitz in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

Chas Jones looks at the tricky subject of Defamation , the defences against it, defamation and free speech, and how it works in different parts of the world. It's all too easy to defame someone, so authors should be wary about the risks.

'I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.' Edgar Rice Burroughs in our Writers' Quotes.

31 January 2011

Publicising your book - gaining publicity is one of the biggest hurdles a new fiction or non-fiction writer faces. After all, without it, no-one will even know your book exists. In this article, media agent Alison Smith-Squire offers some top tips.

'Amazon has just announced that ebooks for its Kindle are now outselling paperbacks... For bricks and mortar booksellers, the news from Amazon was almost totally bad. The rapid increase in ebook sales as the Kindle gains market share is due to the ease with which people can download ebooks on to their devices. In the US a large proportion of paperback buyers are opting for ebooks instead. But it also shows that Amazon are getting a much bigger proportion of the e-book market than they have of the paperback market.' News Review reports.

You'll have to be quick to take advantage of this week's Writing Opportunity, which is the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, with two grand prizes of publication by the Penguin Group, closing on 6 February.

‘Publishers are relevant. We have practical expertise and, of course, money. We give our authors advances which enable them to concentrate on their work in hand… My idea of hell is a website with 80,000 self-published works on it – some of which might be jewels, but, frankly, who's got the time? What people want is selection and frankly that's what we do.' Gail Rebuck, CEO of Random House UK, in the Guardian, quoted in our Comment column.

Latest changes in the book trade 7: in the last part of this series, Chris Holifield looks at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses might transform authors' capacity to the license use of their books for all sorts of purposes.

The rest of the series covers Bookselling, Publishing, Print on Demand and the Long Tail, Self-publishing - career suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences and Copyright.

'Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing profession carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be creative; that one must be cantankerous and objectionable in order to be bright; that ego is paramount over skill; that one can rise to a level from which one can tell the reader to go to hell. These myths, if believed, can ruin you. If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.' David Brin in our Writers' Quotes.

24 January 2011

'An interesting study published recently in the US suggests that writers are at greater risk of depression than most other occupations. The study puts artists and writers among the most vulnerable of professionals, alongside other "at risk" jobs including care workers, teachers, social workers, maintenance staff and salespeople. Irregular pay and isolation contribute to the tendency for writers to succumb to depression, says the site, with nearly 7% of male artists and writers likely to suffer a major episode of the illness.' News Review looks at the evidence.

The winner of this year's T S Eliot Prize has just been announced at an award ceremony in the Wallace Collection in London. It's been a fantastic shortlist and the Readings in the Royal Festival Hall were a glittering success, attracting an audience twice as big as last year's event.

Read Michael Legat's 19 incredibly useful Factsheets to get some quick guidance on everything from plotting your novel to publishers' contracts.

'I was lucky. Susan Watt (his editor) said: "It will take four or five books to establish you." HarperCollins sat out those first books and the fifth Sharpe took off.　I really don't know if publishers would have the patience to do that in the current climate.' Bernard Cornwall, author of The Fort and many other novels, in the Observer, quoted in our Comment column.

This week's Writing Opportunity is the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Book Prize, closing on 24 February and offering a prize of £1,500 plus the option for Janetta Otter-Barry at Frances Lincoln Children’s Books to publish to the best manuscript for 8 to 12-year-olds that celebrates diversity in the widest possible sense.

From our archive, five excerpts from Inspired Creative Writing by Alexander Gordon Smith from the brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series.

'In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.' Ben Bova in our Writers' Quotes.

17 January 2011

'Bestselling author J K Rowling is in the clear as regards a case brought against her by the estate of the late Adrian Jacobs in relation to his book Willy the Wizard, which she was accused of using as the basis of the Harry Potter books. The judge said: "The contrast between the total concept and feel of the work is so stark that any serious comparison of the two strains credulity." ' News Review looks at accusations of plagiarism and attempts to defend work against passing-off.

Don't procrastinate! - 'Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from procrastination.' Chris Holifield looks at how to get yourself going.

The Writer’s Compass is the new name for all the UK's National Association of Writers’ professional development services for writers. It brings together NAWE’s professional development programme with the free information and advice services for all writers formerly offered by literaturetraining. Aiming to help writers in all genres, and at all stages in their development, to steer a course through the complexities of the writing life and build and sustain their careers. The Writer’s Compass offers training and events, One-to-One support, information services and resources.

'I was lucky. Susan Watt (his editor) said: "It will take four or five books to establish you." HarperCollins sat out those first books and the fifth Sharpe took off.　I really don't know if publishers would have the patience to do that in the current climate.' Bernard Cornwall, author of The Fort and many other novels, in the Observer, quoted in our Comment column.

Our Writing Opportunity comes from BBC writersroom, which is launching a new partnership programme for writers and theatres, with 10 commissions for UK writers, closing 24 January, so you need to get a move on.

Are you looking for an agent? Our agents' listings have been compiled from agents' own websites and other information they publish about what they're looking for. You can use them to research which agents to submit to. The listings cover UK and US agents, with separate listings for children's agents in the UK, and international agents from all over the world.

'The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.' Somerset Maugham in our Writers' Quotes.

10 January 2011

John Jenkins' January column looks at the eternally fascinating question of rejection and how some successful writers have overcome it. He also quotes from our Rotten Rejections page.

'The old idea of sentimental and formula-driven romances of the sort produced by Mr Mills and Mr Boon has been replaced by a highly efficient publishing machine which has an exact idea of what readers want and long ago set about delivering it. Many of the books they publish now would have scandalised the ‘spinsters’ of the past. New series deliver a much more raunchy read and their books are avidly consumed by a wide-ranging, almost totally female, readership of all ages and from all backgrounds – and across the world, with new markets like India developing fast.' News Review on why romance is perfect for e-readers.

Are you thinking about self-publishing? Our site, WritersPrintShop, has over 90 pages - the most informative resource on this on the web - so it's the perfect place to find out what's involved and what it costs.

Have you been following the Eastenders saga with interest and thinking sympathetically about the dilemma of the scriptwriters? Bob's Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer covers the period when he wrote for EastEnders and very revealing it is too. Try Wednesday 9 February 2005: '86-page planning document arrives from Elstree. Undoubtedly happy to be writing another episode; only hope I have more control over it than I had over last one...'

And here's a recommendation from from fellow EastEnders script-writer Pippa McCarthy:   'Just discovered your web page... I've just spent the last hour crying with laughter with periodic yelps of 'been there!'... I'm going to make my entire family read your diary. Then perhaps will understand own bizarre behaviour every time I start a script... Anyway, will shut up now but just wanted to say you have cheered me up no end. It's brilliant.'

'Through all these "wither the industry" debates, I feel I'm looking on from the outside.　 It's frustrating not to understand the implications and, truthfully, I realise I resent having to think about it all. Like many writers, I just want to concentrate on the book that I'm working on...' Kate Mosse, author of Sepulchre, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

MsLexia's tips on How to win a short story competition might come in handy if you want to enter theirs, but hurry, it closes on 24 January.

'Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.' Ray Bradbury in our Writers' Quotes.

3 January 2011

International Book Fairs 2011 - bang up to date, our list of the key international books fairs for 2011. Some are growing in this competitive sector, some have vanished, and others are still a bit vague about their dates, but here's the list as it stands at present.

Making all sorts of New Year's resolutions about your writing? Well, you could start by reading systematically through the mass of free pages on our website. The best way to find them is through this listing Help for Writers.

'A fantastic new tool has become available for anyone interested in using the power of the web to trace word use. Google’s Ngram is a digital storehouse which comprises words and short phrases – 500 billion of them from 5.2 million books – contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian... ' News Review is wowed by a great new development.

Why do non-fiction books need an index? In The Ins and Outs of Indexing Joanne Phillips provides an answer, explains why it's a specialist job and why computers can't achieve the same result as a skilled indexer.

'Since 2000, the Anglo-American book business has been rocked by seismic convulsions. Google has digitised some 10 million titles, Barnes and Noble is for sale.　Borders, bankrupt in the UK, clings on in the US.　Here, Waterstones's parent company, HMV, wants to sell.　Amazon's market share continues to soar...' Robert McCrum in the Observer, quoted in our Comment column.

We have a whole section of writers' magazine reviews, so if part of your New Year's resolution is to take out a subscription to one of them to help with your writing, it's worth taking a look at how we rated them.

'War and Peace maddens me because I didn't write it myself, and worse, I couldn't.' Jeffrey Archer in our Writers' Quotes.

20 December 2010

'In the internet age the English language has become especially dominant and over half of all web pages are currently written in English. This gives authors writing in English an immense advantage, a market potentially of both the 400 million and the 1.4 billion mentioned above. Without your work needing to go through the expensive and difficult process of translation, it can in theory be made available to all the readers in these huge groups.' News Review looks at the remarkable spread of English.

This week's Writing Opportunity is the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest 20111. With a closing date of 14 January, it offers four prizes of $500, publication in Boston Review and a reading at the Boston Poetry Center. This USA competition, now in its fifth decade, attracts large audiences of poets who have not yet published a collection.

Interested in writers' software? There's a number of packages which can help you with your writing reviewed in our Writers' Software section.

'Male writers write books with themselves as characters in them, because we never cease to feel that there's something less than manly about the way that we earn our living. Literary creation is an isolated business involving nothing in the way of physical aptitude, courage, leadership or business acumen. Writers are cut off from all of the male-bonding rituals that gestate in the world of work...' Will Self in The Times, quoted in our Comment column.

Inside Publishing - this extremely useful 19-part series is in the midst of being revised to take account of changes in the publishing world. Advances and royalties, The Relationship between agents and publishers, Subsidiary rights, The English-speaking publishing world and The Marketing department have all just been brought up-to-date, and this week we're on to Creative Commons.

'The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe' who 'brings the whole soul of man into activity'. Samuel Taylor Coleridge in our Writers' Quotes.

13 December 2010

‘The idea that publishers 'now appear frozen in the headlights of the onrushing digital revolution' is simply untrue. Long before the digital revolution had become a reality for readers, most major publishing houses have been planning and investing in their digital divisions in addition to 'doing the day job', publishing and selling their authors in all formats and in all markets... 'Ursula Mackenzie, CEO of Little Brown UK, on the Guardian website, quoted in our Comment column.

John Jenkins' December column - 'Show the reader, don't tell him: Sooner or later most good tutors will advise you to stop "telling" the reader what has happened and instead "show them." The point is to involve the reader. There are many times when tell is more important but nine times out of ten go for show.'

The Digital Rights Management debate - Chas Jones looks at the way the views on digital rights management are changing. Is generosity a good sales strategy and what about piracy?

More submission tips from Andrew Lownie is a useful feature on the agent's website, with plenty of examples of what to avoid.

Rotten Rejections lists the famous writers who had their work rejected: The Diary of Anne Frank (‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity” level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies) was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about an artist.’

'It's a kind of zen question: if you write a book and no one reads it, is it really a book?' Lee Child in our Writers' Quotes.

6 December 2010

My e-book reader - Chas Jones relates his own experience with a new e-book reader and looks at what's going on in the e-reader world.

'Libraries are under threat as governments carry out major cuts to public services in both the US and the UK... It’s a bad lookout for libraries, which are all too easy to cut, especially as regards their book budgets and staff, but this time local authorities are going for large-scale closure of branch libraries... News Review reports.

The 18th Bad Sex in Fiction Award for 2010, run by the Literary Review, is just as entertaining as usual and has been won by Rowan Somerville.

'I always look back to that and tell people if I had given up then, if I had said well I tried it and I'm not good enough, it didn't work out, I would still be practising law right now... I think so much of whatever we do in life is about hard work and it's about luck... Emma Giffin, author of Heart of the Matter in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

Our reviewer, Maureen Kincaid Speller, said of the The Arvon Book of Life Writing by Sally Cline and Carole Angier: 'Many people want to write about someone’s life, perhaps their own, and there are courses to suit every level of interest, from university masters degrees to local college qualifications' and concluded that it was: 'a brisk and helpful guide on how to set about writing a life story... It is a sensible account of life writing from experienced practitioners of what is both art and craft, and I recommend it!'

Our Contract vetting service may be just what you need if you've got an agreement with a publisher but are now faced with dealing with the contract. Our contracts expert can advise and help you make sure you get a good deal.

'Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.' Franklin P Adams in our Writers' Quotes.

29 November 2010

'So, what has changed in the world of short stories? Well, the biggest change is that the internet has made short stories more viable by creating the possibility of publishing them online and using the internet to find an audience for them. Because of the brief form, short stories can be read online or even printed out, which, just like poetry, gives them a head-start over novels. The short form also suits a time-pressured audience with an increasingly short attention span.' News Review looks at what's happening.

Still on the subject of short stories, this week's Writing Opportunity is the Mslexia Women's Short Story Competition, open to all women, closing on 24 January and with a £2,000 first prize.

Tips for Writers is our latest 8-part series for writers: Improving your writing, Learning on the job, New technology and the Internet, Self-publishing - is it for you?,   Promoting your writing (and yourself), Other kinds of writing, Keep up to date and Submission to publishers and agents

'I always look back to that and tell people if I had given up then, if I had said well I tried it and I'm not good enough, it didn't work out, I would still be practising law right now... I think so much of whatever we do in life is about hard work and it's about luck...' Emma Giffin, author of Heart of the Matter in the Bookseller, quoted in or Comment column.

The National Academy of Writing has just launched its series of Conservatoire-style Masterclasses which will start in April. This is a specialist course for committed writers seeking to publish a book-length work in either fiction or non-fiction. Up to eighteen writers will be selected each year as members of The National Academy of Writing.

Our Glossary of Technical Terms, Glossary of Printing and Publishing and List of Acronyms have just been updated and provide a useful reference source.

‘I will never stop writing. People often ask when I will retire, but I say it’s none of their business. Writing defines who I am. I love the feeling of holding a finished book in my hands, and then I can’t wait to start the great adventure of writing the next one.’ Barbara Taylor Bradford in our Writers' Quotes.

22 November 2010

'A recent posting on Publishing Perspectives took the reader to their article on Pitchapalooza, written by authors David Henry Sterry and his wife Arielle Eckstut, the duo known as The Book Doctors. The Book Doctors invented ‘Putting Your Passion Into Print’, now known as Pitchapalooza. This is an American Idol for books, where writers get one minute to pitch their books to a panel of book professionals... ' News Review reports.

What is bandwidth? Chas Jones investigates: 'High bandwidth has been likened to a multi-lane highway. This is a poor physical analogy because the carrying capacity is increased by packing the digits nose to tail rather than side by side but it will do.'

Our Writing Opportunity this week is the UK Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger, open to unpublished writers, with a £25 entry fee and a closing date of 5 February 2011.

From the winner of the 2010 Debut Dagger, Belinda Bauer, author of Blacklands, previously quoted on the site: 'As a screenwriter you have to be succinct and cut out any extraneous words or descriptions so when I started writing prose for the first time it was really difficult to make it last. I'd write Chapter One (and it would take up) three-quarters of the page!'

'Fundamentally, though, the need for publishers endures, even if not in their current form. Readers will be best served by publishers who can marry the best of what is sometimes labelled "legacy" publishing to the new means of developing and delivering what readers want and writers need. And if that marriage is achieved, then the persistent reporting of the death of old publishing will continue to be mere exaggeration.’ Stephen Page, MD of Faber and Faber, in the Guardian blog, quoted in our Comment column.

There's a well-informed article on the London Book Fair website, written by Bookbrunch's Liz Thomson, for anyone who's interested in developments in publishing in the Arab world,

'Beware of self-indulgence. The romance surrounding the writing profession carries several myths: that one must suffer in order to be creative; that one must be cantankerous and objectionable in order to be bright; that ego is paramount over skill; that one can rise to a level from which one can tell the reader to go to hell. These myths, if believed, can ruin you. If you believe you can make a living as a writer, you already have enough ego.' David Brin in our Writers' Quotes.

15 November 2010

John Jenkins' November column - this month John has put together a hilarious collection of howlers, ranging from 'Man kills self before shooting wife and daughter' to 'College dropouts cut in half'.

'The idea of turning a blog into a story is not original but the idea of bloggers getting together to co-operate on the story did seem to be original, combining the contributions, whether they are art work, a soundscape, or a few words, which are brought together by an editor: or is the editor really the author...?' Chas Jones on Crowd-sourcing, 'one of the most exciting ideas as the Frankfurt Book Fair.

'E-book sales are astonishing'. So, given publishers' latest focus, are readers switching to e-books at a staggering speed and is the whole market for books set to change radically within a short space of time? The evidence for this is actually a bit contradictory. News Review takes a look at the latest studies.

Epub: Version 3. The business of international standards is not normally the most exciting story in the world. But there was an infectious buzz at the meeting where the latest version of Epub was being discussed at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2010... Chas Jones' latest report from the Frankfurt Book Fair looks at this important new standard and what it means.

'Of course, it didn't hurt that we had begun to write fiction that's hugely enjoyable to read. And maybe that's the key part of the answer. Maybe our present success has something to do with escaping from the weight of misery that was at the heart of The Well of Loneliness: the tradition Radclyffe Hall established of writing about crippled and damaged lives...' Val McDermid in the Independent on Sunday on making lesbianism mainstream, quoted in our Comment column.

'The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.' Russell Baker in our Writers' Quotes.

There are pages more of writers' quotes to be found on this page and this one and there are classic quotes too.

1 November 2010

'So what’s the situation with the UK’s small funded literature sector in the light of the enormous cuts which were announced last week by the new coalition government? Literature is very much the poor relation when it comes to Arts Council funding, with theatre, music and art all taking very much larger slices of the pie. Arguing, quite reasonably, that literary fiction is quite well provided for by commercial publishing houses, most of the literature money is spent on poetry, with a small amount going to pay for the publication of literary translations and some to programmes to support and develop writers.' News Review investigates.

What is a widget? Chas Jones looks at how writers can use widgets to promote their work and how viral marketing works.

Poet to crime writer: 'Both have a massive preoccupation with structure. In a poem, every word has to be in the right relation to every other word.　 In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11.' Sophie Hannah in the Independent on Sunday, quoted in our Comment column.

The updating of the Inside Publishing series continues with Vanity Publishing, which, even with the advent of self-publishing, still can deceive writers.

What is metadata? In this second article Chas Jones shows how metadata is data about other pieces of data, how you can add your metadata and how image metadata works.

If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look at our 17 Services, especially our Editor's Report, Submission Critique and Children's Services. Also available is Copy editing, Manuscript Typing and Indexing.

'The only reward to be expected from the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and and hatred if one succeeds.' Voltaire in our Writers' Quotes.

25 October 2010

Matera Women's Fiction Festival: Writing Historical Fiction. In Elizabeth Edmonson's masterclass her opening point was that 'you must know yourself... creating a historical fiction requires an extra dose of confidence, plus a real feel for the period and subject. The challenge for the writer is to generate the complete, imaginative environment for the reader which often means that they have to distance them from their familiar frame of reference.'

'The recent Children’s Bookseller Conference in London focused on a part of the publishing industry in relatively good health. Children’s book sales have suffered less than adult books as a result of the recession and they are only down 2% in the UK against an overall figure of 4%... there is still a greater sense of confidence in the children’s sector...' News Review reports.

Two more articles in the Inside Publishing series have now been revised and brought up to date: Children's publishing and Copy editing and proof-reading. There are 19 articles in all.

The shortlist for 'the world's top poetry prize, the T S Eliot Prize, has been announced this week and there's a new reading group scheme on the Poetry Book Society website with free downloads.

Our list of Picture Libraries continues to grow and is one of the best on the web, so have a look if you want to source some photos for your book.

It's fascinating to see how Print Machines and Auto-scanners work, as these photos show.

'Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.' James Baldwin in our Writers' Quotes.

18 October 2010

Matera Women's Fiction Festival: making a pitch - 'It is a brave person who stands up in front of an audience of writers and creative people to tell them how to communicate. Writers tend to believe it is one thing that they are good at! But that that is exactly what Jesse Ponce did at the Matera Women's Fiction Festival 2010 when he talked about making a pitch. Like all good communicators he had one message that he wanted to convey in the time allotted for this presentation. His message was ‘make sure you define your objective’.' Chas Jones reports.

'The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize has been a compete surprise to everyone, including the author. Howard Jacobson had never even been shortlisted before, and his book The Finkler Question was the bookies’ least favourite title on the shortlist. It’s very nice to see this important prize going to an author who has paid his dues, with 16 titles which are reckoned only to have sold 90,000 copies in all. News Review investigates.

Our photo-essay of Frankfurt 2010 by Chas Jones shows there was plenty going on in between the serious publishing meetings.

'I believed right from the start it would work powerfully on stage because it's the story of one man, with a very strong central narrative drive, questioning what it means to be human, I don't know a more dramatic question than that.　Also, for me, it says that no matter what happens, there is always the possibility　of redemption. I hope the play will make you cry, but make you come out wanting to live...' Unknown playwright Rachel Wagstaff on dramatising Sebastian Faulks' First World War novel Birdsong, quoted in our Comment column.

Our latest Writing Opportunity is the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, with a closing date of 1pm on 30 October and a first prize of £30,000 for a single story. It's the world’s most valuable short story prize, but please note that unfortunately eligibility is restricted to fiction authors who have had work published in Britain or Ireland.

This week the two articles in Inside Publishing which have been revised and updated cover Print on Demand and Copyright.

'I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.' Norman Mailer in our Writers' Quotes.

11 October 2010

'The Frankfurt Book Fair seems to have engendered a mood of optimism, in spite of the uneasy world economy and the particular preoccupations which are making book publishers feel as if the ground is shifting under their feet. The numbers were up, with 7,533 exhibitors, an increase of 3%, and 522 agents registered in the Literary Agents Centre, 4% up on last year. This shouldn’t be exaggerated as a factor, but some publishers who didn’t make it to London because of the volcanic ash seem to have felt that a trip to Frankfurt was a necessity, although most of them would have been going to the German book fair anyway.' News Review on the big book fair.
John Johnson's October column - John's column recounts how he won the heart of his prospective mother-in-law through a volume of Bryon's poems and provides a glowing review of a travel book which takes you in the footsteps of the poet.
The third week it's Books clubs and Direct selling, as we continue our revision of the 19-part Inside Publishing series, which is being revised to take account of changes in the publishing world.

'The ideas I will tend to choose for novels are ones that least resemble books I have already written. My curiosity leads me to choose different types of books to write. I rather encourage this trait because it's the best way I can see of avoiding the condition of writing endless versions of the same novel, which can lead to premature artistic death.’ David Mitchell, author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet in the Independent, in our Comment column.

For Creative writing tutors and their students there's a mass of useful information on the site, which we are very happy for you to print out, with due acknowledgement, please. You can find this in the listing under Advice for Writers, but we'd specially recommend our 7-part series Tips for Writers, Our Categories series, about Writing Crime, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Memoir and Autobiography and so on, our recently updated series Latest Changes in the Book Trade and Inside Publishing (see above).

There's also some very practical pages on Making submissions and Finding an agent.

'My books aren't trying to fathom the mysteries of human existence. I'm an entertainer.' Bernard Cornwall in our Writers' Quotes.

4 October 2010

'It’s been a gift for the media. ’A comedy of errors for author of The Corrections.’ (The Times) ‘Jonathan Franzen's 'book of the century' pulped over error.’ (the Guardian) ‘ Franzen’s new novel recalled to be pulped.’ (Evening Standard). So what really happened to Jonathan Franzen’s highly-anticipated new novel, Freedom, and why did the UK edition have scores of errors, which were so serious that the publisher has reprinted the corrected version and asked buyers to return their copies to be pulped?' News Review has the story.
Inside Publishing - this extremely useful 19-part series is in the midst of being revised to take account of changes in the publishing world. This second week we're on to The Frankfurt Book Fair, the Sales Department, the Production Department, Pricing and Distribution.

Screenplay assessment fictionalised story - 'Sarah had always been fascinated by the cinema. As a little girl going to see a film was her favourite treat and she was also interested in how movies got to be made. Her own favourites were the films with really good stories, like Titantic and Avatar, but she also liked the ones which were based on books, like Lord of the Rings and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo...' Our fictionalised stories of how our services have helped writers give you some idea of what they can do.

‘Recently, Newsweek ran an article about the brave new world of self-publishing. Its title asked the question "Who Needs a Publisher?" Well, the short answer is, I do. The bigger answer is: we all do. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad that self-publishing has evolved from stigma to respectability. I love that worthy authors who might be overlooked by the major houses can now be read. It's great that writers with a special niche, an established following or an entrepreneurial bent can make more money self-publishing than they would in royalties. But I'm also concerned about the future of books and the larger issue of assuring the flow of reliable information.' Philip Goldberg in the Huffington Post, quoted in our Comment column.

Googleworld - digitilization/Google and all that - Nick Webb, publisher turned author, comments on what GoogleWorld might mean for authors.

'Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.' Charles Caleb Colton in our Writers' Quotes.

And the new Magazine is ready!

27 September 2010

'Can creative writing courses really open up the world of writing to the students who pay heavily for the privilege of taking them? As students begin the return to college or university across the northern hemisphere, this seems a good time to examine whether or not creative writing courses earn their keep...' News Review investigates.
Inside Publishing series - this extremely useful 19-part series is in the midst of being revised to take account of changes in the publishing world. The introduction, How the publishing business works, Advances and royalties, The Relationship between agents and publishers, Subsidiary rights, The English-speaking publishing world and The Marketing department have all just been brought up-to-date.

'When I was a child, we lived in a two-up, two down. We had no bath - it was a tin tub in the back yard. The toilet was at the end of the yard. The first six years of my life, we used to go over the road twice a day and fetch water from the well. We were too poor to own books. However, every night we were read a story, and those stories came from books, and those books came from the library... Pie Corbett, in an interview on the National Literacy Trust website and in our Comment column..

You're probably familiar with our Agents' listings, but have you checked out the list of Bursaries, Fellowships and Grants for writers we have on the site, which offers all sorts of opportunities for writers.

This week's Writing Opportunity is the The First Chapter Literary Prize, a
new prize from just-launched publisher Lighthouse Publishing.

'Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.' Charles Caleb Colton in our Writers' Quotes.

20 September 2010

News Review reports on recent studies of bestsellerdom: So, what does it mean for authors? Well, the strongest message from all this is that people buy books by author brand. They’re affected by bestsellerdom, which tends to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as bestsellers get more display space and marketing spend, in the attempt to turn them into ever greater bestsellers. This means they sell more.

Our latest Writing opportunity is the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, with a closing date of 15 October 2010 and an entry fee of £5/$8. It's open to all poets over 18 writing in English.

In Latest changes in the book trade 7 Chris Holifield looked at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses might transform authors' capacity to the license use of their books for all sorts of purposes. The rest of the series covers Bookselling, Publishing, Print on Demand and the Long Tail, Self-publishing - career suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences and Copyright.

'A writer's passion, his belief in his work, is what keeps him going through those long, dark stretches when it seems as if no one is ever going to get it. But if a writer has got himself out there - just a toe in the water - then readers' passions come into play too, and in the age of Amazon and e-readers independent booksellers still have a huge role to play.' Erica Wagner in The Times, quoted in our Comment column.

We are very proud that the British Library has chosen to add WritersServices.com to its web archive. You can find out more about this UK Web Archive here and our site is archived here.

'How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.'
Henry David Thoreau in our Writers' Quotes.

13 September 2010

'Keith Ogoreck, Senior VP for Marketing for Author Solutions, has made a rather astounding prediction in book editor Alan Rinzler's blog on Forbes. He suggests that big publishers like Random House could one day ‘cede the midlist to a vast army of self-published authors’. His theory is that the 80% of publishers’ lists which make up what is known as the midlist – literary fiction, cookbooks, self-help books and presumably a lot of genre fiction publishing - they’d just cherry pick from self-published authors who had already tested the market by publishing their book and shown a track-record of success.' News Review looks at some predictions of the future.

We've done a thorough update of our Links, with many new links to interesting and useful sites in our 23 lists of links, which range from writers' online services to pictures libraries, from writers' magazines and sites to software for writers.

‘Some people think they know what my books are about when they haven’t read them. They feel I’m in favour of bad behaviour or swearing. Some even think I write about drugs. There’s nothing of that kind. Mostly, my books are about outsiders, kids who don’t fit in. I feel they’re quite moral tales, although they do show that there are things even loving parents can’t always protect children from. Children recognize the truth of that… Jacqueline Wilson in our Comment column.

Our Health Hazards series is a unique 7-part series warning about the dangers to writers of Carpal Tunnel syndrome, eye problems and your working environment.
Reaching new poetry audiences - the Poetry Book Society has just announced the launch of two major new websites, www.poetrybookshoponline.com and www.poetrybooks.co.uk, which will provide a substantial way for poetry readers to find out about poetry and to buy poetry books and CDs. It’s becoming ever harder to find a decent selection of poetry in bookshops, so these new sites offer a good way of finding out about the latest new poetry - and much more - and buying it.

New content on these sites includes Seamus Heaney’s ‘Encounters with poetry’, Roddy Lumsden on Identity Parade, Katy Evans-Bush on the difficult relationship between Henry James and Oscar Wilde, and Philip Gross on how winning the T S Eliot Prize started a year of prizes and what it has meant to him.

'The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.' Ned Rorem in our Writers' Quotes.

6 September 2010

John Jenkins' September column is about the inspiring story of Joe Delaney, whose agent suggested he should switch to writing for children, which he did with the Wardstone Chronicles series. The first book, The Spook’s Apprentice, spent seven weeks in the bestseller’s charts, was translated into 12 languages and landed a film deal with Warner Brothers.

'Television Book Clubs are back in the news again with much talk about Oprah’s new choice and the relaunch of the Richard and Judy Book club in the UK. Richard and Judy presided over a real phenomenon... Over the last six years the titles in their club have sold in excess of 10 million copies and generated over £60m (nearly $93m) million in book sales, turning at least eight authors into multi-millionaires and throwing a welcome spotlight onto new writers.' News Review reports.

If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look at our 17 Services, especially our Editor's Report, Submission Critique and Children's Services. Also available is Copy editing, Manuscript Typing and our new service, Indexing.

This week's Writing Opportunity is Mills & Boons' New Voices competition. It's open to all but you'd better be ready to submit your chapter when it opens on 6 September, as it closes on the 22nd!

‘A lot of people love to get their history through historical fiction, so it’s very important that what they read is as close to the truth as possible. Where the novelist uses her imagination is to fill in the gaps. But even then you can’t let rip. What you write has to be credible within the context of what is known about that person. You can’t indulge flights of fancy because that sells short both those who know a lot and those who know a little about the subject…' Alison Weir in the Toronto Star, quoted in our Comment column.

Our list of picture libraries is a good place to start if you're looking to source pictures for your book.

'Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. the very best and the very worst.' Ford Madox Ford in our Writers' Quotes.

The September Magazine is ready!

30 August 2010

'Last week saw a flurry of articles about libraries in the UK press, starting with Culture Minister Ed Vaizey’s views on libraries and the future, which included proposals to cut costs by giving libraries to communities to run and to run them from pubs and shops. Public libraries have long been at risk, but in the current economic climate they seem absolutely endangered. If the Department for Culture, Media and Sport withdraws their support, many local authorities will find libraries a soft target when they start to make cuts. News Review reports.

Our Writing Opportunity this week is the The 7th International Women's Fiction Festival from 23-26 September 2010. It is a literary festival dedicated to women’s fiction from all over Europe. It attracts best-selling writers, agents, translators and editors from international publishing houses to the beautiful city of the Sassi, Matera in southern Italy. Our very own Chas Jones will be giving a talk on New Opportunities, Epublishing and Self-publishing.

'What's different about digital publishing? The answer should be: nothing. It's a fact that we talk about digital and traditional publishing and we need to stop that now. One of my frustrations is that many publishers seem to keep editors away from digital discussions, leaving contracts and "digital" departments to take things on.' David Miller, agent at Rogers, Coleridge　& White in the Bookseller, in our Comment column.

Joanne Phillips has written a useful article on The Business of Writing: 'Writing is undoubtedly a creative art. Whether we are working on the next Booker Prize winner or ghostwriting blog posts, writers need to be original, imaginative and inspired. But writing is also a business, with invoices to raise, accounts to be submitted and records to be kept. Writers, like artists, can find themselves floundering when it comes to the ‘business end’ of the job. Read on for our easy-to-follow guide to the business of writing...'

And from our Writers' Quotes: 'A writer ought to be the best possible source about their work but the writing instinct doesn't come out of self-examination. That part of yourself in your work is expressed willy-nilly, without your cooperation, motivation or collusion. You can't help being what you write and writing what you are.' Tom Stoppard.

If you're looking for some diversion, Writers' Quotes presents a wonderful selection and there's also More Writers' Quotes and Even More Writers' Quotes.

23 August 2010

'Åsne Seierstad, the author of The Bookseller of Kabul, has been ordered to pay more than £26,000 in punitive damages. As Conor Foley in the Guardian put it, this news will be greeted 'as either a blow to artistic freedom of expression or a victory for the world's misrepresented and powerless poor... But should any writer be free to use any material, however private, in any way they like? News Review looks at this fascinating case.

We're complimented by Stuart Aken's review of our site in his blog for 27 July:
'It is the Resources pages that really make this site stand out from the crowd. Here you’ll find reviews of books and software, listings of agents, self-publishing facts, educational matters, health and safety advice, and there’s a new feature, reviewing writing magazines. You’ll see there is a great deal of information on this site. It’s well presented and easily navigated, which is as well, considering the number of pages. It’s a site I browse often and I think you’ll benefit from a good look at this one.' Read more.

'Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down... I only read on paper. I don't have an e-reader or an i-Phone. I have the best time reading newspapers. I don't believe books are dead. I've seen the figures. Sales of adult fiction are up in the worst economy since the Depression.' Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in the Observer, quoted in our Comment column.

Interested in writers' software? There's a number of packages which can help you with your writing reviewed in our Writers' Software section.

The Publisher's View is a four-part series by Tom Chalmers, MD of Legend press. the first article deals with What a publisher wants from submissions and what a writer can do about it. Then there's Judging a book by its cover and synopsis, The Writer's X Factor and The changing face of publishing.

'Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.' Peter Porter in our Writers' Quotes.

9 August 2010

John Jenkins' August column - ever fancied a bet on the Booker? John reviews the field and offers his own caustic comments on the whole process.

'The British independent publisher Quercus has just announced stellar results: revenue has almost tripled to £15m ($24m) for the first six months of the year, making a profit of £3.4m ($5.41m) compared with a loss of £100,000 ($159,120) in the same period in 2009. And what is it down to? Well, the answer is Stieg Larsson. News Review reports.

Here's our latest Writing Opportunity - there's just time to enter the Arvon International Poetry Competition, if you're quick off the mark. It's closing on 6 August, has a first prize of £7,500, and an entry fee of £7 per poem.

Read Michael Legat’s 19 Factsheets on everything from plotting your novel to publishers’ contracts.

'Books are not going anywhere. Neither is publishing. Since Gutenberg made his epic contribution to the human race, publishing has secured a place as one of the largest and most profitable industries in history. In that time, publishing has adapted to major technological changes, survived economic meltdowns, persisted through political censorship, and made it to the other side of catastrophic price wars...' Jennifer Havenner, independent publisher, in the Huffington Post, quoted in our Comment column.

Great summer reading - follow the triumphs and disasters of an unpublished writer’s life in Bob G Ritchie’s Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer.

'What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.' P D James, who has just celebrated her 90th birthday, in our Writers Quotes, along with a sparkling and thought-provoking collection of thoughts from a huge range of writers from across the centuries.

2 August 2010

'It will surprise no-one who read the STOP PRESS at the end of last week’s News Review to know that Andre Wylie’s Odyssey Editions and what’s happening to e-books have dominated the publishing news agenda this week. Using the aggressive approach which has earned him the soubriquet ‘The Jackal’, Andrew Wylie decided to push ahead with launching his new imprint, designed specifically to seize his authors’ e-book rights and offer them a better deal than they were getting from publishers...' News Review looks at an extraordinary week in publishing.

Our self-publishing site, WritersPrintshop, provides a first-rate service and, if you're still just thinking about it, there's over 90 pages about self-publishing, providing the fullest information on self-publishing available on the web.

Our latest My Say is from Dominae Primus and says some pleasantly complimentary things about WritersServices now, and then!

Our Writing Opportunity this week is The Writing Forge Short Story Competition, with a first prize of £700 ($1,098), a closing date of 30 August and an entry fee of £6 for the first entry.

'The fundamental relationship between authors and publishers is changing... We now have to say we are actually in the copyright business, not the book business. It is a whole new dimension of understanding various media, in the larger context of being the author's business partner. Anthony Cheetham, Director and Associate Publisher of Atlantic UK, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

WritersServices editor Kay Gale offers her tips on Getting through the Slush-pile, drawing on her own experience as an editorial assistant reading through it.

'You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.' This advice from Stephen King is in our Writers' Quotes.

26 July 2010

John Jenkins' July column - John's view is that 'you can do everything with dialogue: let your characters tell the story'. He illustrates what he means by this and how you should go about it in his July column.

Inspired by Colin Robinson's recent article in The Nation, News Review takes another look at Amazon, still growing fast and now the largest bookseller in the world, with all that entails. Are they using their power wisely? What effect do they have on publishers? There's a stop press too, relating to the latest big story on e-books.
The English language publishing world - in the face of a changing situation as English becomes ever more established as the international language, Chris Holifield has revised this article in the Inside Publishing series, which consists of 19 articles which take you inside the publishing world.

‘Any bookseller who might be considering whether to order more copies of Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel, which (in May) took the Independent Foreign Fiction prize, should look at this week's charts. Astonishingly, translations currently account for 40 per cent of Britain's top-ten bestsellers.' Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor of the Independent in our Comment column..

Latest changes in the book trade 7: in the latest part of this series, Chris Holifield looked at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses might transform authors' capacity to the license use of their books for all sorts of purposes.

The rest of the series covers Bookselling, Publishing, Print on Demand and the Long Tail, Self-publishing - career suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences and Copyright.

'Poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written, he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.' T S Eliot in our Writers' Quotes.

19 July 2010

News Review looks at the big international publishing companies and what a recent study shows about how they have fared in the rankings in the last year. Trade publishing is not top of the charts and it is the companies which have a global approach which have grown the most. But waht difference does this make to writers?

'I think there was what people sometimes call 'a gap in the market' because I wanted to get away from the fantasy and sensationalism of James Bond and the Ludlum-esque stuff... after a while too much fantasy has a bludgeoning effect: you accept that the guy can fly, or defuse a bomb with bare hands, or whatever.' Jason Elliot, author of The Network, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

Tips for Writers is our latest 8-part series for writers: Improving your writing, Learning on the job, New technology and the Internet, Self-publishing - is it for you?,   Promoting your writing (and yourself), Other kinds of writing, Keep up to date and Submission to publishers and agents

Our Writing Opportunity this week is the Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition, open to women only and closing soon, on the 26 July. First prize is £5 for up to three poems.

Our checklist on Entering competitions helps you to review how you approach competitions and to make sure you give yourself the best possible chance of winning.

'The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that at times strangely wills and works for itself.' Charlotte Bronte in our Writers' Quotes.

12 July 2010

Do you want to make a Table of Contents for your book? It looks good to provide one, especially when you prepare a large document. It does not take long and the benefits make it well worth doing. If you are using Microsoft Word, or most other word-processing packages, it is remarkably easy to get a professional-looking table which is generated for you by the software. Not only will the table look good but the headings are ‘active’; so people reading the document on a computer can click on the TOC and jump to the place in the text. Chas Jones shows you how.

'Following on from our look at prizes and what effect they have last week, this week’s column will be devoted to new prizes. There has been a proliferation of new ones launched over the last few years, so there’s quite a lot to evaluate. Some of them focus on new work but only a proportion of them are open for entries from unpublished writers.' News Review looks at new prizes.

Our latest Writing Opportunity is the Luke Bitmead Writer's Bursary, in memory of the young author Luke Bitmead. The top prize is a publishing contract with Legend Press, as well as a cheque for £2500.

'Only now that the book is out have I fully realized what the most frightening part of the is process is. The questions: How will the reading public respond? Do ads work? Do people even read much anymore, beyond vampire books? Is the sophomore slump real? Is the sales rank on Amazon.com a true indicator?... I want people to buy and read my book, but the reasons for this want lie not in sales rank or blog hits. The reasons lie where they always have for the artist. If we do our job right, writers can, in the words of Muhammad Ali, shake up the world.' Glenn Taylor, author of The Marrowbone Marble Company on Publishing Perspectives in our Comment column.

Does your book need copy editing, either to prepare it for submission or so that you can self-publish with confidence? Our team of skilled copy editors is ready to help. Here's an article about UK and American copy editing and another about the difference between proof-reading and copy editing.
'And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.'
Sylvia Plath in our Writers' Quotes.

5 July 2010

New review of The Writing Workshop Notebook by Alan Ziegler - our reviewer Maureen Kincaid Speller concluded that: 'This is an unconventional book about writing, inspirational as much as it is practical, and focusing on an aspect of the writing process that isn’t much discussed. It would, I think, prove a valuable addition to the writing bookshelf if you are at all interested in the workshopping process and what it involves.'

'The literary world is awash with literary prizes, with new ones being set up every year. But what effect do these prizes have and do they actually sell more books?... The answer is mixed. Some of the biggest prizes do have a major effect on sales but others have surprisingly little impact. The €100,000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, which bills itself as the world’s largest prize for a single novel, was won recently by a novel in translation which will probably not sell in really significant numbers...' News Review investigates.

Bob's Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer offers entertaining insights into the life of an aspiring writer. It's a WritersServices exclusive and you can go back to the start in 2001 and right through to its end in December 2007, when he reflected: 'Still haven’t broken through my writer’s block. No longer even sure I want to. Why write? What’s writing for? Have absolutely no idea. How can one add anything worthwhile to the work of writers like Oscar Wilde? Yet the internet grows more vast by the minute with the words of the millions who are certain their opinions are worth airing.'
This year’s Bulwer-Lytton Prize, the annual award for the worst opening sentence, has gone to Molly Ringle's comparison of a lovers' kiss with the sucking of a thirsty rodent. Given annually since 1982, the competition, sponsored by the English department at San Jose State University, is inspired by the melodramatic first sentence of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel Paul Clifford.

'A multi-media strategy pays richer dividends to busy, versatile authors for whom film adaptations, TV slots, press columns and the like come easily. For focused literary types who simply want the best deal for their words, other agents still keep faith with books alone.' Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor, in the Independent, on literary agents, quoted in our Comment column.

Thinking about subscribing to a writers' magazine? Our Magazine Reviews offer a unique service, guiding you through what's available for writers: Writers' News, Mslexia, Writers' Forum, Writer's Digest, Scriptwriter and Self-Publishing Magazine.

'Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.' A A Milne in our Writers' Quotes.

21 June 2010

'An article in a recent edition of the Bookseller has highlighted the ongoing pressure on acquisitions in publishing houses, which has now become acute. Helen Garnons-Williams, Bloomsbury fiction editorial director said: "Our entire business is based on confidence, whether among the publishers or the agents, and pretty much everyone is wobbling because no one knows what will sell." Auctions have often faltered because the recession is causing a massive loss of confidence and publishers are becoming increasingly risk-averse.' News Review has the story.

Our Writing Opportunity this week is the wonderful new prize for unpublished novels set up by Terry Pratchett and Transworld Publishers. Called The Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhen But Now Prize it is for a publishing contract with Trnasworld with a £20,000 advance.

Why do non-fiction books need an index? In The Ins and Outs of Indexing Joanne Phillips provides an answer, explains why it's a specialist job and why computers can't achieve the same result as a skilled indexer.

Our skilled Indexing service. Are you an author planning to compile your own index? Have you been asked by your publisher to provide an index for your book? Or are you self-publishing your work? If so, don’t let your readers down by offering them a sub-standard index. A professional index will set your work apart from other self-published books.
'I've always loved short stories. The process is probably less anxious than writing a novel. There's something about the intensity of a short story that I love... You can reinvent them all the time (whereas) with the novel there's the huge weight of tradition. There's something about modern life that suits the short story. It's a bit snipped up and jagged and raw and I think stories are like that...' Michele Roberts, author of Mud, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

The winners of the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets have just been announced. Selima Hill won the Michael Marks Poetry Award for her pamphlet Advice on Wearing Animal Prints and HappenStance won the Michael Marks Publishers’ Award on the basis of their publishing programme in 2009. More on Poetry Bookshop Online, including the Chair of the Judges' fantastic speech, and from the British Library.

An Editor's Advice is a useful series is based on the advice Maureen Kincaid Speller, a long-serving WritersServices freelance editor, has given writers over the years. The series covers Dialogue, doing further drafts, genre writing, planning, points of view, autobiography and travel and manuscript presentation.

'Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.' Mark Twain in our Writers' Quotes.

14 June 2010

Our reviewer, Maureen Kincaid Speller, said of the The Arvon Book of Life Writing by Sally Cline and Carole Angier: 'Many people want to write about someone’s life, perhaps their own, and there are courses to suit every level of interest, from university masters degrees to local college qualifications' and concluded that it was: 'a brisk and helpful guide on how to set about writing a life story... It is a sensible account of life writing from experienced practitioners of what is both art and craft, and I recommend it!'

'A major recent study led by Nevada University has showed that regular access to books in the home had a direct effect on children’s long-term educational achievement. Involving 70,000 people in 27 countries, it showed that the effect of having 500 books in the home was to increase by three years the length of time that these children subsequently spent in education.' News Review reports.

Zoe Jenny has just published her first novel written in English, The Sky is Changing. She is the author of The Pollen Room, written at the age of 23, which was translated into 27 languages and is the best-selling debut Swiss novel of all time. Zoe wrote a My Say article for us on writing in a new language, Cutting the Cord.

'Books are not dead. They may appear besieged, ever more so as fragile retailers hunker down to re-examine their own business models. There may be fewer new titles published over the next several years... but I am confident that the book business will evolve, as it has done for hundreds of years, and will occupy a considerable position as a ongoing and valued medium.' Laurence Orbach, CEO of Quarto, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

Tips for Writers is our new series for writers and covers: Improving your writing, Learning on the job, New technology and the Internet, Self-publishing - is it for you?, Promoting your writing (and yourself), Other kinds of writing, Keep up to date and Submission to publishers and agents

'The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.' George Orwell in our Writers' Quotes.

7 June 2010

John Jenkins' June column looks at the recent decision by Rupert Murdoch to take the Times Online private. But will this work, or are we all just too used to getting things for free online?

'The excitement surrounding the arrival of the i-Pad in countries outside the US has caught the attention of the media, reinforcing the idea that a mass audience is waiting to buy one and start using it to read e-books. The arrival of the Kindle aroused similar expectations and many articles presaging the end of the printed book... ‘Reading the Future’, the Bookseller’s third annual survey into what readers and book-buyers are thinking, contradicts this view and shows that the publishing world is much more focused on e-books than book-buyers are.' News Review investigates.

Our Contract vetting service may be just what you need if you've got an agreement with a publisher but are now faced with dealing with the contract. Our contracts expert can advise and help you make sure you get a good deal.

Our Writing Opportunity this week is the Writer's Bureau Poetry and Short Story Competition, with prizes of £1,000, a £5 entry fee and closing on 30 June.

'I do try and remember what it was like writing books in the void, back when I had to worry about whether they were even going to see print. That was not a good place. I am very grateful not to be there. I feel I not only narrowly escaped obscurity but also having to give up writing novels altogether, which would have broken my heart. It is easy to be blase about having a bigger audience. I don't take it for granted.' Lionel Shriver, whose new book is So Much For That, in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven.

Our surveys, which are responses from people coming to the site, have some fascinating information which has been garnered over the years. We look at your reading and writing habits, and what you think about the future of publishing.

'All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?' Philip Pullman in our Writers' Quotes.

31 May 2010

London Book Fair 2010: Masterclass - Organising author events -Amanda Pollard, illustrator of An Illustrated History of 1066, attends a London Book Fair Masterclass to find out what part authors can play in organising their own bookshop events.

'Stieg Larsson notwithstanding, what are the chances of a translated author selling well in the big English-speaking markets of the US and the UK? The received wisdom has always been that translations into English are tough going financially, with it proving virtually impossible to make the figures work without an English-language publisher on both sides of the Atlantic to pay for the costs of translation.' News Review looks at writers in translation in the headlines.

Our Writing Opportunity this week is The Tony Lothian Biographers' Club Prize, for an uncommissioned first-time writer working on a biography. The First Prize is £2,000, there's an entrance fee of £10 and the closing date 1 August 2010.

'I know it's somewhat of an unpopular opinion, but I think it's unrealistic to expect that you can support yourself solely as a writer in this economy... In the end, the better you make the book, the better the chances that you'll get a healthy advance, and the harder you work with your publisher to promote the book by publishing stories or nonfiction essays to raise your profile, by blogging and keeping your website active, by thinking outside of the box in terms of marketing and publicity, the better your book will do. But at the end of the day it's the quality of the work that matters the most.' US agent Julie Barer on mediabistro, quoted in our Comment column.

We're proud of the good things writers have said about our site and have collected them together on an Endorsements page.

'All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?' Philip Pullman on writers' block in our Writers' Quotes.

24 May 2010

'The Penguin Group and the Pearson Foundation have launched an interesting new charitable venture, designed both to get children reading and to encourage them to become charitable givers. When a child reads a book online, they are able to donate another book to be sent to a reading charity and can choose from four options as to where their this book is sent. The site is free, so the child can read a book, as well as giving one. News Review reports.
WiFi - Chas Jones looks at technical issues relating to WiFi, explains how it works and investigates the security issues which are involved.

'My job is to entertain. There is a contract between the reader and the writer.　The readers give me their hard-earned cash and I have to entertain them... It's my role to come up with the goods. I work in an entertainment industry. I tell stories, people read them and enjoy the stories, so I get paid, and get to write more stories...' Jasper Fforde, author of Shades of Gray, in the Independent on Sunday, quoted in our Comment column.

Our listing of International Book Fairs gives you the basic information about book fairs across the world and links to their sites.

This week's Writing Opportunity is the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook events for emerging writers in London: The Insider Guide to Hot to Get Published Saturday 19th June, 10am-4.30pm and Submitting Your Manuscript Wednesday 7 & 14 July 2010, 6-9pm.

Our self-publishing site, WritersPrintshop, provides a first-rate service and, if you're still just thinking about it, there's over 90 pages about self-publishing, providing the fullest information available on the web.

'Writing is not a job description. A great deal of it is luck. Don't do it if you are not a gambler because a lot of people devote many years of their life to it. I think people become writers because they are compulsive wordsmiths.' Margaret Atwood in our Writers' Quotes.

17 May 2010

Dark Web - Charles Jones looks at the fascinating subject of the dark web and asks why you might want to make your website invisible.

'The case of Robin Price, a Devon-based literary agent who has just appeared in court charged with stealing over half a million pounds from a number of clients, is a salutary one for unpublished authors. Over a period of several years, Price had bamboozled sums as large as £293,603 out of hopeful authors... ' News Review looks at fraudulent agents and why you should beware of vanity publishers.

The BBC National Short Story Award 2010 is this week's Writing Opportunity. It's the fifth year of this award for a single short story and the first prize is £15,000. The closing date is 18th June 2010.

Our 19-part Inside Publishing series offers a unique insider's look at the publishing industry and explains how it works, with articles on Advances and Royalties, the English language publishing world, Children's publishing and much more.

'This analogy between music and books is something that keeps popping up. Many people are saying that digital file sharing "killed" the music industry and that if the book industry isn’t careful, the same thing will happen to publishing. But the book industry is not the music industry... Books... are already their own device with no need for any sort of player.' Mark Leslie in The Mark, quoted in our Comment column.

Interested in writers' software? There's a number of packages which can help you with your writing reviewed in our Writers' Software section.

‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?' Emily Dickinson in our Writers' Quotes.

10 May 2010

John Jenkins' May column looks at how to kickstart writing a biography or family history, now a very popular thing to write and something you can easily set out to do. His May column shows how to get yourself started with websites, books and magazines.

'Every so often a completely unknown writer hits the headlines after years of trying to break through and the dream come true provides fresh hope for many others. Recently it was the turn of Australian Rebecca James, whose new book Beautiful Malice was sold to Allen & Unwin, making her literally cry with joy. The timing couldn’t have been more propitious, as she and her partner had just closed down their struggling kitchen design business. This was just the beginning though. A week later Faber acquired the UK rights, then the German auction went through the roof. News Review reports.

USB: Chas Jones guides us through this useful gadget: 'Released in April of the millennium year, this connection has been a part of a revolution in the way we connect items to our computers. Before USB connecting was an unreliable process but coupled with the arrival of USB we had versions of Window that could support 'plug and play' which made the business of attaching things to your computer at least an order of magnitude simpler.... '

Rotten Rejections lists the famous writers who had their work rejected: The Diary of Anne Frank (‘The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the “curiosity” level.’) and Lust for Life by Irving Stone (which was rejected 16 times, but found a publisher and went on to sell about 25 million copies) was pronounced: ‘ A long, dull novel about an artist.’

'The sudden rush of Kindles, tablets and readers strikes me as strangely illogical.　 Reading is supposed to be in danger, in decline.　 And yet somehow these devices are going to make it more attractive... Call me old-fashioned or just call me old. But you can keep your e-book ancillaries. Stories are enough for me.' Anthony Horowitz, author of The Power of the Necropolis in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

Does your book need copy editing, either to prepare it for submission or so that you can self-publish with confidence? Our team of skilled copy editors is ready to help. Here's an article about UK and American copy editing and another about the difference between proof-reading and copy editing.

'I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all, they are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.' Somerset Maugham in our Writers' Quotes.

3 May 2010

'Unable to make it across the Atlantic to deliver a speech in London because of the ash, Mike Shatzkin asked someone else to deliver his speech and it can be found on his blog. And uncomfortable it certainly is this time. In a sobering analysis of the next 20 years, he says there is one inexorable truth: ‘The price consumers will be willing to pay for content is going to go down because of the laws of supply and demand.’ News Review investigates.
The Digital Rights Management debate - Chas Jones looks at the way the views on digital rights management are changing. Is generosity a good sales strategy and what about piracy?

Ready to submit? Our page on Making submissions helps guide you through the process and Your Submission Package shows you what to send.

'Writing fiction is inevitably much more personal.　 Not necessarily autobiographical, but much closer to your way of seeing the world, and much more demanding.　 I find it much harder... It’s a personal form of expression as opposed to a screenplay where I think you’re second-guessing the director or the producer or the audience.’ David Nicholls, author of One Day and many TV scripts, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

Are you a poet who is trying to get your work published? Have a look at Getting your poetry published and there's also a review of Chris Hamilton-Emery of Salt Publshing's 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell, the best book on the subject.

There's just time to enter this week's Writing Opportunity if you hurry. The Templar Poetry Pamphlet and Collection Prizes close on 8 May and have an entry fee of £18 and you can enter online.

'The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.' Allan Sillitoe, author of Saturday Night and Saturday Morning, who died last week, in our Writers' Quotes.

26 April 2010

'It’s been a rather surreal week in the publishing world, as the suspension of flights destroyed what was to have been the best London Book Fair ever... The second half of the week has been enlivened by the extraordinary story of Orlando Figes, distinguished historian known for his books on Russia. Poisonous reviews of his rivals’ books had been posted anonymously on Amazon, but using the pen-name ‘Historian’ aka Orlando-Birkbeck’.' News Review reports.

Our latest Success story is that of Rosie Alison, who has just been shortlisted for the all-female 2010 Orange Prize for fiction with her first novel, a great vindication for this author whose first book was eight years in the writing.

If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look at our Services, especially our Editor's Report, Submission Critique and Children's Services. Also available is Copy editing, Manuscript Typing and our new service, Indexing.

'We're back to who can tell the best story. Will it be you, about your own life? Or will you let others tell your story for you?　Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.' Jeanette Winterson on her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in The Times, quoted in our Comment column.

Are you writing poetry but finding it difficult to get it published? Look at our page on Getting your poetry published.

'Once a book has been declared a bestseller, its sales accelerate - like the freshwater polyp the best seller breeds from itself - and the book-buyer can happily accept the judgement of the great majority.' Frank Muir, in our Writers' Quotes.

19 April 2010

New agents' listings - our brand-new, up-to-date agents' listings have been compiled from agents' own websites and other information they publish about what they're looking for. You can use them to research which agents to submit to. The listings cover UK and US agents, with separate listings for children's agents in the UK, and international agents from all over the world.

Use these listings to find the right agent for your work and then our pages on Finding an Agent, Making submissions and Your submission package will help with your submissions.
Become a biographer - Chas Jones looks at why you might decide to become a biographer, covering searching out the right subject, dealing with celebrity and whether you should make your book fact or fiction, footnote of history or a piece of literature.
Also on the site are Writing a biography or autobiography and Writing Memoir or Autobiography.

'The subject of this week’s News Review was to have been the London Book Fair (LBF) how it has grown in importance and numbers and what its role is in relation to other international book fairs. But nature, with supreme indifference to the problems of human beings, has decreed that the volcanic eruption in Iceland should make it impossible for anyone to fly in and out of the UK... ' News Review reports on how this disaster is affecting the Fair.

Read Michael Legat's 19 incredibly useful 19 Factsheets on everything from plotting your novel to publishers' contracts.

'The electronic book offers me a convenient extra way to read while on the move. Given a good enough screen I am sure that I will use it, and I certainly like the idea of being able to buy and download difficult-to-locate texts at any time of the day or night. This may also be the device that will allow newspapers and magazines to survive as revenue-earning businesses. But I do not expect to stop using physical books.' Lisa Jardine in 'A Point of View' on BBC Radio Four, quoted in our Comment column.

Our checklist on Entering competitions helps you to review how you approach competitions and to make sure you give yourself the best possible chance of winning.

‘If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.’ Isaac Asimov in our Writers' Quotes, the best listing on the web.

12 April 2010

Online advertising for writers - Chas Jones looks at how writers can benefit from using the web as an advertising medium, including using Google ads and display ads to promote your book online.

‘It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world -- it's going to be a game changer’, said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. ‘iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad’. But is it really game over for Amazon's Kindle, and how are e-books faring anyway? News Review reports.
In John Jenkins' April column he ruminates on what writers can learn from the great Anthony Trollope and concludes: His success is an inspiration to those who feel they have failed early in life and fear failure more than failure itself... he would set himself a target of 5,000 words a day – or 28,000 words a week – and keep to it.

Self-publish your way through the recession - Our article by Chris Holifield, first published in The Self-Publishing Magazine, looks at what's going on in the publishing world and why it might make sense to consider self-publishing.

'You could argue that all novels stand or fall on how convincing and engaging their plot and characters are, but with crime fiction and thrillers these ingredients don't just underpin the story: they are the story.' Stephanie Merritt, aka S J Parris, the author of Heresy, in the Observer, quoted in our Comment column.

What does it take to market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today? Joanne Phillips provides the answer, which is that the internet is a fertile ground for writers. You just need to know how to make it work for you...

'I think readers who aren’t used to reading contemporary poetry are surprised to find it’s about our world now, our experience; it talks about movies and pop music and stuff. It’s not some fuddy-duddy thing, and most of it contains a good deal of imaginative brilliance. My experience is that when people read contemporary poetry they are engaged and interested in a way they did not expect to be.' John Stammers in our Writers' Quotes.

5 April 2010

This year’s National Poetry Competition (which actually has an international entry although it is run by the UK Poetry Society) has been won by Helen Dunmore for her poem ‘The Malarkey’. Better known as a novelist, Dunmore has produced nine poetry collections and a number of novels. This poem was submitted on impulse just before the closing date, so it was a great surprise for the poet when she won the £5,000 prize. News Review reports.

If you're thinking about making sound recordings of your work, either podcasts or an audiobook, take a look at our Audio Publishing section.
The 2009 Diagram Prize winner, of the wonderfully barmy Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of the Year for 2009 has just been announced. And here's where you can find the shortlist.

Have you looked at our Problem Page? You can send in your own problem to us, but this one is pretty interesting because it's about problems with finding an agent.

'What keeps you writing is that you don't ever enter a place that feels like home at last. You're still going uphill. There's still a little glowing light in the distance that you're trying to get to.' Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time in the Daily Telegraph, quoted in our Comment column.

We've just updated our very useful Printing and Publishing Glossary.

'The "greatness" of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.' T S Eliot in our Writers' Quotes.

22 March 2010

Chas Jones looks at the tricky subject of Defamation , the defences against it, defamation and free speech, and how it works in different parts of the world. It's all too easy to defame someone, so authors should be wary about the risks.

At the report back from the annual UK Books and Consumers report this week, Book Marketing Limited’s Research Director Steve Bohme pointed out some interesting changes in consumer behaviour relating to books. Nearly half of all book purchases were gift purchases, an increase from one-third in 2005, a stunning proportion which shows that books have not lost their attraction as gifts... Purchases were down 4% in 2009, compared with 2005. News Review reports.

Hilary Mantel is the subject of our latest Success Story. After 25 years of writing and eleven books published it's good to that winning the Booker has transformed the career of this excellent writer. Wolf Hall has now sold 196,463 copies in the UK alone and it is being widely translated.
Tips for Writers is our latest 8-part series for writers: Improving your writing, Learning on the job, New technology and the Internet, Self-publishing - is it for you?,   Promoting your writing (and yourself), Other kinds of writing, Keep up to date and Submission to publishers and agents

'(Historical novels) are just novels that have a past location and are therefore not swept away by the tide of present day life so fast.　 This is the great agony of trying to capture the present in a novel - it's a very slow thing to write and present life moves on in a hideously unexpected and overtaking kind of way.' Rose Tremain, whose new novel is Trespass, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

'Writing is a dog's life, but the only one worth living.' Gustave Flaubert in our Writers' Quotes.

15 March 2010

Our latest review covers the 4th Edition of Giles Clark and Angus Phillips' Inside Book Publishing. Reviewer Chris Holifield commented that it had been substantially revised and that it 'provides an excellent introduction to anyone with a professional interest in publishing... No writer equipped with this book need ever feel like an ignorant outsider again.'

'This year’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair runs from 23 to 26 March and provides a good opportunity to have a look at the children’s publishing industry. Not everything in the garden is lovely but children’s trade (general) publishing is undoubtedly doing a lot better than its adult counterpart.' News Review on the biggest children's book fair.

If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look at our Services, especially our Editor's Report, Submission Critique and Children's Services. Also available is Copy editing, Manuscript Typing and our new service, Indexing.

'Whatever the future, a new generation of agents and publishers sees the old publishing model as broken. There must, they say, be a marriage between virtual and old text worlds. This generation speaks the jargon of "disintermediation" (roughly, commercial streamlining). The boom days are over. Writers will have to adapt.' Robert McCrum in the Guardian, quoted in our Comment column.

Our latest Writing Opportunity is the Bridport Prize, with prizes for poetry, short stories and flash fiction. Entry is open to everyone over 16, there are entry fees and the closing date is 30 June 2010.

What does it take to market yourself successfully as a jobbing writer today? Joanne Phillips provides the answer, which is that the internet is a fertile ground for writers. You just need to know how to make it work for you...

‘It really is most extraordinary, having lived all these years as a cheerful but inconspicuous blue-stockinged, gray-haired, backseat publishing lady, to become a sort of show- stopper.’ Diana Athill, 92-year-old author of Somewhere Towards the End in our Writers' Quotes.

8 March 2010

Latest changes in the book trade 7: in the latest part of this series, Chris Holifield looks at the subject of Creative Commons and how these special licenses might transform authors' capacity to the license use of their books for all sorts of purposes.

The rest of the series covers Bookselling, Publishing, Print on Demand and the Long Tail, Self-publishing - career suicide or 'really great', Writers' Routes to their audiences and Copyright.
John Jenkins' March column covers the writing of memoirs and shows how his students have approached writing in this genre. He then provides an elegant essay on the semi-colon.

'The staggering number of 285,000 new titles and editions were self-published and published by community presses in the US last year, balanced against a slightly lower figure of 275,000 coming from traditional publishing houses... The Nielsen figures for the UK are 133,224, quite modest by comparison... So, what do these huge figures mean for authors? At a time when it’s increasingly hard to get published, why are there so many titles coming out? The main answer of course is self-publishing and print on demand in general. News Review reports.

An Editor's Advice is a useful series is based on the advice Maureen Kincaid Speller, a long-serving WritersServices freelance editor, has given writers over the years. The series covers Dialogue, doing further drafts, genre writing, planning, points of view, autobiography and travel and manuscript presentation.

'If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer’s share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent’s fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer.' Henry Porter in the Guardian, quoted in our Comment column.

'The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out.' Lillian Hellman in our Writers' Quotes.

1 March 2010

Writing Memoir and Autobiography - if you want to write a memoir you’re in good company – lots of writers want to try their hand at this category. In the latest in our new Categories series Chris Holifield looks at how to set about writing your memoir and how to publish it.

Other articles in the series are Writing Historical Fiction, Writing Romance, Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Writing Crime Fiction and Writing non-fiction.

'Quick Reads recently surveyed over 30,000 of their readers and found that 100% said Quick Reads had made a positive impact on their lives. 88% were more confident and 41% felt their job prospects had improved since reading a Quick Read. Significantly, in terms of encouraging book reading, 82% said they were more likely to read another book after reading a Quick Read.' News Review investigates Quick Reads with World Book Day coming up on 4 March.
Real Time Web for Old Time Books: the Benefit of Social Media for Publishers and Authors - Fauzia Burke explores the online activities you can do in real time -- from status updates on Facebook, to microblogging on Twitter to uploading photos and videos on other social media sites. If you want to explore how social networking can help you market your book, her article provides a starting-point.

Does your manuscript need Copy editing? Do you know the difference between copy editing and proof-reading? Divided by a common language - are you wondering about the difference between American and British copy editing?

‘Books are not a threatened species. They are ordinary features of the ordinary world... Should we, who read books and believe that books and the stories within them contain such power, be surprised that kids read, that books survive? Of course not.　 We should be celebrating these facts.’ David Almond, author of Skellig, in The Times, quoted in our Comment column.

From our archive, five excerpts from Inspired Creative Writing by Alexander Gordon Smith from the brisk and entertaining 52 Brilliant Ideas series.

'If you steal from one author, it's research; if you steal from many, it's research.' Wilson Mizner in our Writers' Quotes.

The March Magazine is here!

22 February 2010

‘I am saddened that yet another claim has been made that I have taken material from another source to write Harry. The fact is I had never heard of the author or the book before the first accusation by those connected to the author's estate in 2004; I have certainly never read the book.' J K Rowling. News Review looks at the latest plagiarism claim.
The 2009 Diagram Prize shortlist - Click through to find the shortlist for the oddest title of the year. Will it be Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter or Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich? Your chance to place your vote on the Bookseller website.

'I think John Irving said in an interview something which nobody says about writing, which is that writing is sitting down and typing that sentence, and that sentence creates the next sentence and the character grows and the story grows from the physical act of typing what is going on in your head.' Deborah Moggach in Scriptwriter, quoted in our Comment column.

My Say 9 is from Zoe Jenny, who was born in Switzerland but is shortly publishing her first book written in English: 'Now that I am writing in English I have to start all over again, earning my credentials in a new market. I am essentially back to square one. But maybe that is the most exciting place to be.'
The latest addition to our fictionalised stories about our services - how Alison used our children's editorial services to get her magic unicorn story right.

Plus how an Editor's Report helped Catherine, How Copy editing turned Tony's work into a publishable manuscript, how Makito benefited from Manuscript Polishing to get his PhD into shape, Self-publishing helped promote Annie's cake business and how Manuscript Typing helped John to get his father's wartime diary into good shape for publication.

Thinking about subscribing to a writers' magazine? Our Magazine Reviews offer a unique service, guiding you through what's available for writers: Writers' News, Mslexia, Writers' Forum, Writer's Digest, Scriptwriter and Self-Publishing Magazine.

'Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.' Mark Twain in our Writers' Quotes.

15 February 2010

Latest changes in the book trade 6: in the sixth part of this revised overview of what's going on in the book world, Chris Holifield tackles the thorny and currently highly contentious subject of copyright.

As e-books move into the mainstream and the parties involved in the Google Settlement continue to slug it out, copyright is at the centre of publishers' and authors' anxieties. Is this the end of the slush-pile? News Review looks at the problems facing unpublished authors who are trying to get their work into print.
Is a creative writing degree really worth it? Having completed a creative writing degree, Josh Spears thought he would become a bestselling writer or at least be able to get a job. Neither of these has happened, so was it worth it and would he advise other writers to put themselves through the course?

The great writers and the canon... The idea of what constitutes literary value has changed or become less consensual.　 It’s harder to establish what is good and what is not, and that is one of the things that forms the canon.　 Barnes, Amis, McEwan were the last people through the door, and then the door closed, and then the building fell down.’ Giles Foden, author of Turbulence, in the Bookseller, quoted in our Comment column.

Why do non-fiction books need an index? In The Ins and Outs of Indexing Joanne Phillips provides an answer, explains why it's a specialist job and why computers can't achieve the same result as a skilled indexer.

Our new Indexing service. Are you an author planning to compile your own index? Have you been asked by your publisher to provide an index for your book? Or are you self-publishing your work? If so, don’t let your readers down by offering them a sub-standard index. A professional index will set your work apart from other self-published books.

'This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.' Martin Amis, in our Writers' Quotes.

8 February 2010

Don't procrastinate! - 'Do you find it difficult to get started on your writing? Is it always easier to put off finishing that research/ starting that novel/embarking on the second draft? You are not alone, for many writers suffer from procrastination.' Chris Holifield looks at how to get yourself going.

Figures for 2009 just released by the big UK publishers show just how tough a time they had and what a difficult book market we’ve had in the past year. Seven of the top UK publishers had negative sales growth last year... The only one of the top four to do well was the market leader Hachette and that was because of Stephenie Meyer, whose £29.4m ($46m) of sales accounted for an extraordinary 10.2% of the group’s total UK sales. News Review reflects on what all this means for authors.
Poem for Haiti - from Gillian Clarke, National Poet for Wales, a beautiful poem which is a lament for Haiti.

‘Every agent has their own style.　 Ed Victor goes to a party and signs up someone.　 Luigi Bonomi goes and talks to a film company or football agent.　 But I like doing it this way (through his website) because it brings in interesting books, often ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I love the range and serendipity…' Andrew Lownie on finding agency clients through the web, quoted in our Comment column.
Our review of FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions from ambitious writers and the answers by John Jenkins, our columnist and the former editor of Writers’ Forum, is packed with answers to all the questions you have ever thought of asking. Chris Holifield's review concludes that: 'All in all, this is a valuable resource, especially for the new writer, but also for anyone who has tried to work their way through the writing jungle.'

If you want editorial input from our professional editors, have a look at our Services, especially our Editor's Report, Submission Critique and Children's Services. Also available is Copy editing, Manuscript Typing and our new service, Indexing.

'The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.' W H Auden in our Writers' Quotes.

1 February 2010

News Review looks at the battle of the titans which has just commenced: 'This has been one of those weeks when there’s been so much happening that it’s difficult to cover it in a single column. Apple has broken the news of its iPad and, amidst the buzz about that, Amazon has already started to fight back. This could be a turning-point and how publishing, books and authors come out of all this is hard to predict...'
In his latest column John Jenkins deals with the famous piece of advice to writers: 'Show, don't tell'. If you've ever wondered exactly what this means in practice, John's examples provide a quick tutorial and will help you to make your own writing work much better.

Bob's Journal of a Virtually Unpublished Writer offers entertaining insights into the life of an aspiring writer. It's a WritersServices exclusive and you can go back to the start in 2001 and right through to its end in December 2007, when he reflected: 'Still haven’t broken through my writer’s block. No longer even sure I want to. Why write? What’s writing for? Have absolutely no idea. How can one add anything worthwhile to the work of writers like Oscar Wilde? Yet the internet grows more vast by the minute with the words of the millions who are certain their opinions are worth airing.'

‘According to Amazon Kindle's vice-president, Ian Freed, the success of the Kindle signals the end of physical books: 'The only question is does it take three years, five years or 20 years?' I remain to be persuaded that e-readers are capable of matching the varied activities we engage in when reading. More is required to satisfy the dedicated reader than replicating the content and appearance of a printed book, or emulating the action of "turning pages" using a tap on a touch-sensitive screen.' Lisa Jardine in A Point of View on BBC Radio Four, quoted in our Comment column.

Is your progress as a writer stymied by the fact that you have old typewritten or even handwritten manuscripts that you can't face retyping onto a computer? Our Typing service can help with this.

This week's Writing Opportunity is the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, offering £5,000 for a poetry pamphlet published in the UK in 2009. Self-published work is eligible.

'The very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it.' John Ruskin in our Writers' Quotes.

The new February Magazine is ready!

25 January 2010

International Book Fairs 2010 - our updated line-up of the year's book fairs across the world, a unique feature of the site which is much in demand. Is there a book fair near you? It might be worth planning to attend it if so.

'So are agents really feeling the pinch now? Long regarded as the fats cats of the industry, there are signs that the London agency constituency is really beginning to join in the pain. You cannot escape the conclusion that there will be redundancies, closures and mergers of agencies... some of the larger agencies have become quite big businesses and they will find it difficult to sustain their cost bases. News Review examines the latest news from the agency world.

There's just time still to enter the Cardiff International Poetry Competition 2010 if you do it online. It closes on 29 January, so hurry! This week's Writing Opportunity has a prize of £5,000 and is open to all.

'We all know the adage of 'everyone has a book in them' - but how many truly have the commitment, courage, tenacity - and skills - to write a series of novels? Writing a novel is not about ‘burning ambition’ - where ambition is solely about publication or money or fame. For a novel to be a good novel - and worthy of the generous readers who part with their cash to buy it - it can only arise from the author’s absolute desire to write that story out of their　 system - and being blessed with the necessary talent to do so...' Freya North, in a Bookseller blog, quoted in our Comment column.

Sell, don't tell: Some do’s and don’ts if you want to sell a script. If you want to turn your book, dream or idea into a performance script for film, stage or radio, it is going to be a very tough pitch. There are some pretty strict ‘rules’ which you need to follow if you are to maximise your chance of success. Read Chas Jones' two part article.

'Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.' Cyril Connolly in our Writers' Quotes.

18 January 2010

There's better news from the UK book trade. 2009 was down just 1.2% down in value and only 0.5% down in volume in a year which has seen a contraction in the overall economy of 5%, so the book trade can justifiably claim that book sales have held up reasonably well. News Review reports.

This week's Writing Opportunity is the Biscuit International Short Story Prize 2010 for stories of 1000-5000 words. The deadline is 14th April 2010, it's open to all and there's a £10/£11 entry fee, so get writing!

The winner of the 2009 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry is announced!

‘Self-publishing has taken a huge leap forward in recent years. It’s always existed, but with all the technological changes from desk-top publishing systems to POD to blogging and so forth it’s now more acceptable than ever before... The trend is hardly surprising: mainstream publishers have cut back and cut back, so that even authors who had niche titles published and might have been in print for some years now find it harder and harder to keep their books available.' Eileen Campbell, Mind, Body and Spirit expert and author of 6 books, in Bookbrunch, quoted in our Comment column.

Thinking about publishing your own book? Is self-publishing for you? helps you think this through and our WritersPrintShop provides the best writers' resource on self-publishing on the web, 90 pages of information, as well as a first-rate service.

Here are answers to the essential questions: How much will it cost?   How long will it take? & How much might you earn?

'One man is as good as another until he has written a book.' Benjamin Jowett in our Writers' Quotes.

11 January 2010

'Americans are buying fewer books because of the economic downturn, and purchase cheaper books when they do buy... Knocking on the head a favourite publishing theory that books do well in recession, only 2% of consumers said that they were choosing to buy books as an alternative to more expensive kinds of entertainment. So, green shoots of recovery notwithstanding, the American book trade is still experiencing tough times.' News Review looks at the American book business.
John Jenkins' January column looks at a Robert Altman film, The Gingerbread Man, based on a discarded story by John Grisham: 'Although it wasn’t Grisham’s best story, I enjoyed it. But the moral of this story is: never throw anything away. I realise that Grisham could probably sell his laundry list to a publisher but for your new year resolution, dip down into that drawer and see what you can salvage. You may find a gem. And after you have done that go through stories and features you have sold in the UK and see if you can sell them on for the American and other rights.'
'So you want to write historical fiction? Your timing is good, because historical fiction is fashionable again after many years in the doldrums. In fact it’s so popular that it has virtually reinvented itself as a category...' The latest article in Chris Holifield's Categories series explores the market and approaches to Writing Historical Fiction.

Other articles in the series cover Writing Romance, Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Writing Crime Fiction and Writing Non-fiction.

'My life changed when I took control of my time.　 Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, I sit down to write for three hours every day.　 It's much more effective - it's about giving yourself the space for creativity to come. Esther Freud, author of Love Falls in the Sunday Times' Style magazine, quoted in our Comment column.

We were very honoured recently that the British Library asked to archive www.writersservices.com in its web archive, where you can find it at British Library web archive. The UK Web Archive is a corpus of websites selected by leading UK institutions for their historical, social and cultural significance in the UK. Also listed in this article on their archive are other international web archives.

'I have never know any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.'
Baron de Montesquieu in our Writers' Quotes.

The January Magazine is here!

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