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19 October 2015 - What's new

19 October 2015
  • 'We had intended to report on the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. this week, but all we have been able to glean so far is that it was a busy fair, with a great many successful rights deals, and the new layout of the Fair was generally liked. Salman Rushdie spoke at the opening ceremony, saying freedom of speech is not just a human right but a "universal of the human race" which must be defended...' News Review
  • The Times / Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition 2016 is open to all writers of 18 and over internationally. The wonderful prize is a worldwide publishing deal with Chicken House with an advance of £10,000, a great start for a new children's writer. Our Writing Opportunity.
  • ‘Twenty years as a teacher, ten years in educational research and five years of directing an educational charity, and in all that time, I hadn't published any fiction or poetry at all. I'd always had a feeling that if life ever did allow me a clear run at creative writing, I might just be able to do something with it...' Bruce Harris's Writing Short Fiction: A Personal Journey is about how he worked his way towards setting up the fantastic website Writing Short Fiction. In spite of problems with the site, it still has some wonderful material but do visit it now.
  • Authors often find it difficult to write their own synopsis for submission to publishers, which is where our Synopsis-writing service can help. If you're preparing to self-publish and having difficulty with your blurb, our Blurb-writing service might be what you need. There are eighteen other services if this isn't what you're looking for.
  • Our links: today's writers have never had a more global reach; ebooks and digital distribution have made it easier for authors to find readers in other countries as well as their own, How Authors Can Find Their Ideal Reading Audience | Jane Friedman; this Manifesto is about letting writers be writers and bridging the gap betwenn traditionally published and self-published, A manifesto for all writers | The Bookseller; the first bit of the investigation which turned into the fake reviews scandal, Amazon fake reviews bought for £3 | The Bookseller; and as self-publishing shrugs off its "vanity press" stigma and becomes recognized as a bona fide and lucrative option, more and more authors are finding that going indie just makes more sense, Why Traditionally Published Authors Are Choosing to Go Indie.
  • From our Archive, in the first excerpt from the excellent Writing Biography & Autobiography by Brian D Osborn, he makes a valuable point: 'The novelist L P Hartley wrote in The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' This is a great and important truth, awareness of which should always be with us when writing biographies; and making proper allowance for that truth is one of the core skills that the biographer has to learn...'
  • More links: after polling 1,674 Guild members, Mary Rasenberger, executive editor at the Authors Guild, created a splash a few weeks ago by claiming that most of its members' annual earnings were below the federal poverty level of $11,670 but Publishers, Amazon Not to Blame for Author Poverty Wages; the phenomenal success of vloggers, Video killed the book star? The rise of the YouTuber author | Children's books | The Guardian; and Emma Barnes says "I want to work in a flourishing industry known for its competence, kindness, innovation and creativity", A manifesto for skills | The Bookseller.
  • 'If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.' Somerset Maugham in our Writers' Quotes.