Publishers need to communicate better with authors, pay them more and utilise writers' skills to market books, but most writers would still choose to be published traditionally, a survey has found. Read more
The median advance for traditionally published authors is "well under £6,600", according to early findings of a survey into authors' attitudes towards their publisher. The survey also found that bigger publishers pay more. Read more
If 2013 was the year that trade publishers finally learned to stop worrying and love the ebook, 2014 could go down as the year when the publishing industry started doing interesting things with digital reading. Read more
Mike Shatzkin of the Idealogical compamy has been writing a well-known blog for many years. His predictions are oftern controversial and also opinionated but he has won wide respect for his forthright views, which often turn out to be correct in the long run. We'll just have to see about his predictions for 2014.
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers