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'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.
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'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 reports.
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'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.
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'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business have long expected hardbacks to be superseded by paperbacks.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.
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'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.
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'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
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'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
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'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
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‘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.
- '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.
- '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.
'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
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With the publication of Inheritance, Christopher
Paolini brings 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.
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.
Help for Writers
Use this page as a springboard to over 2,000
pages on the site.
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. Relax and just write what
comes naturally, it makes sense for your blog to be more informal, more personal
than a standard piece of non-fiction writing and more lively than a slice of
autobiography, as there are no conventions that go with it.
Previous magazines:
November
October
September
Magazine index
Writing Memoir and
Autobiography
Writing
Historical Fiction
Writing Romance
Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writing Crime Fiction
Writing non-fiction
WritersPrintShop
If you're thinking
about self-publishing, this is the place to find out what's
involved. If you're ready to go ahead, our high quality service is second
to none and there's an economy version for those who want to
tackle some of the work themselves. You can
estimate
the cost for yourself.
Our book review section
Our huge section on technology and the web, and how writers can make use of
them, takes you from beginner-level articles to advanced technology.
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 ready.
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'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...'
Our new service is for anyone who is having
difficulty producing their cover or 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.
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?
Our latest new contribution: 'One agent wrote
to say my titles were so uncommercial that reading my synopsis made him laugh
and that he couldn't sell any of my titles to a publisher even if he had a
million years to try.'
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.
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.
The fourth article deals with
Preparing files for e-book conversion.
The final article 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.
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.
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.
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.
Our Editorial
Services for writers
Check out the 18 different editorial services we offer, from Reports to
Copy editing, Typing to Rewriting. Check out this page to find links to the huge number of useful articles on this site,
including Finding an Agent
and Making Submissions.
Are you having difficulty deciding which service might be right for you?
This useful article by Chris Holifield offers advice on what to go for,
depending on what stage you are at with your writing.
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