16 April 2018 - What's new
16 April 2018
- ‘When times are stressful and it looks like the bad is winning out over the good, along comes the genre of crime novels to put the balance back in life. People inherently don't like folks who do bad to get away with it...' David Baldacci, author of Absolute Power, Memory Man and The Fallen, in The Times, provides this week's Comment.
- If you are submitting your work to an agent or directly to a publishing house, check through the our guidelines to give it its best chance. Making Submissions.
- There's good news in Bookbrunch about poetry sales coming from the UK, the market is up two-thirds since 2012. A 66% increase in poetry sales over the past five years has led to a million poetry books being sold with a total value of £1.1m. There has been a boom in poetry events and festivals, with increased interest in the work of living poets with strong online followings. News Review
- From our nineteen-part Inside Publishing series, you can read up on Advances and royalties: 'Publishers usually offer to pay authors advances against royalties. How do you work out how much money you might earn from your book? You need to understand for yourself how advances and royalties work and what they mean for you...'
- From the same series, Copy editing and proof-reading explains the difference between the two. Copy editing is the painstaking job of going through a manuscript line by line to correct the spelling, grammar and punctuation. Proof-reading at a later stage is a separate check through the book when it is set up in pages, before it goes to press or is finalised for ebook publishing.
- Our editor Kay GaleWritersServices editor who has worked for many years as a freelance editor for number of publishers. produces the delightful Travel Gourmet blog and she has just alerted us to a competition relating to her travel articles published on the travel app GPSmyCity - the biggest selling travel app on iTunes. They've now introduced a subscription for full access to all articles, maps and guides. They're offering free one-year subscriptions (worth $18.99) to 10 of her followers - so you can enter the competition (closing on 23 April) and see if you can get a free travel guide for your phone or tablet for a year. https://travel-gourmet.com/2018/04/07/win-a-years-subscription-to-gpsmycity/.
- Our links: the first of two recommended articles on crime-writing, The perfect crimes: why thrillers are leaving other books for dead | Books | The Guardian; Crime fiction - which I first became aware of as the Best Genre Ever when I read my first Enid Blyton mystery at six years old, No mystery crime is the biggest-selling genre in books | Sophie Hannah | Books | The Guardian; a new collection of short stories featuring works from 18 well-known authors is bypassing print and going straight to audiobook, Why more authors are going audio-only - BBC News; and in a tightening market for fiction and especially for debut authors looking for that big break, editors can be choosier, With Fewer Debut Novels Selling, What Do Editors Want To Tell Authors?
- As well as our highly-regarded Copy editing service, which will help you prepare your manuscript for submission or self-publishing, we have Manuscript Polishing, which provides a higher-level polishing service, Writer's edit, a new line-editing service, and Translation editing for writers who are not native English speakers. We also provide a Proof-reading service. Now with free samples for all, plus some free assessments. Our UK-based Editing services for writers have a solid professional reputation and we often have authors coming back to us for further assistance, see our Endorsements.
- More links: one author's story, After Dozens of Rejections, It Only Takes One Acceptance to Make a Writer | Literary Hub; Britain's looming departure from the European Union has set many people here on edge, British Book Publishers Fear Brexit Will Bring a U.S. Invasion - The New York Times; Same old story or a new chapter? The London Book Fair 2018 and what lies ahead for the UK's publishing industry as Brexit draws closer | City A.M. more poetry, Enitharmon was among the crop of independent poetry publishers that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s, The poets' home: how one small, heroic publisher shaped modern poetry.
- From two-time Booker Prize winning Hilary Mantel in our Writers' Quotes:'The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence - arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.'
- For quotes fans we have More Writers' Quotes and Even More Quotes.