26 January 2015 - What's new
26 January 2015
- 'So what are fiction editors looking for in 2015? A handful of British editors have contributed to a recent article in the Bookseller, speaking up for home-grown talent, strong debut novels and - perhaps surprisingly - books in translation... News Review
- Are you interested in Getting Your Manuscript Copy Edited? As well as this article we have one from our 19-part Inside Publishing series about Copy editing and proof-reading and we offer a Copy editing service, as well as a Proof-reading service and our special Manuscript Polishing service, which involves more intensive work, 'polishing' and improving the text, and correcting the English if you are writing in English as a second language.
- 'As I write, it is 5.30pm on a wet Wednesday afternoon, and so far today I have talked once, to my wife, about which of us is going to take our youngest son to football training. I appreciate how lucky I am in my work. I am able to support myself and my family through my writing. I can watch as many YouTube clips as I want. My lunch hour is when my stomach tells me it should be. But on a normal working day, things are very, very quiet around here... Nick Hornby, author of About a Boy and Funny Girl, in the Sunday Times magazine, quoted in our Comment column, in a piece entitled Screenwriting - a collaborative endeavour.
- From our Archive, a two-part serialisation of Linda Strachan's Writing for Children: 'One of the most exciting things about writing for children is the sheer diversity. You have different ages to choose from; you can write picture books, easy readers, short books for more confident readers, or novels - each quite different in length and often in content... Do you want to write for the educational market - books written for use in schools - or would you rather write poetry or plays, a series or a ‘stand alone', or perhaps a picture book for the very young?...'
- Links of the week: Judith Curr's positive view, How Publishers Can Work with Entrepreneur Authors - Publishing Perspectives; a writer's cri-de-coeur, These days, writing isn't a career. It's a rich man's hobby - Telegraph; four people from the centre of the book world debate - Is Amazon a Hero or Monster? - The Daily Beast; the sad story of a languishing genre, Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society RIP Children's Non-Fiction?; a warning about the subscription business, Publishing: Spotify for books | The Economist; and a sardonic comment, Oui, French Readers are Just as E-Trashy as Everyone Else.
- 'Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.' H P Lovecraft in our Writers' Quotes.