Writing a book with your dad is hard. It's harder if your dad is Thomas Keneally
theguardian.com – Monday May 23, 2016
There’s a thick and slightly battered volume on my bookshelf, with a line drawing of a man in a deerstalker hat. The book, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, has an inscription on the cover page. It reads: “To Meg, who has made and will make great fantasies of her own. Love, your father.” The date he has written is that of my 12th birthday.
The new digital model that treats books like magazines
thebookseller.com – Saturday May 21, 2016
The digital revolution has been something of an asteroid for the whole publishing industry, but it has presented particularly gnarly challenges to libraries, colleges and schools.
How to transfer collections from the stacks to the screen? How does digital lending work, both practically and financially? Which texts would publishers be willing to digitise, and which would languish in analogue ignominy on the shelves?
What's Next for Hybrid Publishing
publishersweekly.com – Saturday May 21, 2016
In 2012, I cofounded She Writes Press with a clear vision for what our press would be, but without a clear definition. We were creating something that combined self-publishing and traditional publishing, curating the books, and placing a strong value on editing and design, but without author platforms or a particular sales threshold driving our publishing decisions. Because our model is author subsidized, we were decidedly not traditional publishing, but we were not self-publishing either.
The Five Stages of Writing a Novel
huffingtonpost.co.uk – Thursday May 12, 2016
Few things in life are more daunting than attempting to write a novel. Leaving aside the amount of words you have to write (novels are usually around 80,000 - 100,000 words), there's the enormity of having to create an entire world, peopled by characters that have come straight out of your imagination. Most difficult of all, you have to keep that world spinning; keep it interesting, keep the twists and turns coming, right up to the very end.
The 15 Stages of Sitting Down to Write
bustle.com – Wednesday May 11, 2016
We all know that the life of a professional writer is exciting, glamorous, and filled with unqualified success. The only downside to a career in writing is the actual writing. Writing, as most people already know, is impossible. If you've ever tried to write something, be it a novel or a term paper, you're probably well acquainted with the struggle of actually sitting down to write.
Know a budding writer? Roddy Doyle has ten tips to get them writing
irishtimes.com – Wednesday May 11, 2016
It’s there in front of you - the blank space with the blinking cursor or the empty page in a notebook. Your fingers grasp the pencil or the pen; your hands hover over the keyboard. There’s so much to say but how to start and, once started, how to keep going? That’s the challenge. You and only you can do it, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.
Here's Roddy Doyle with some tips.
Five famous novels turned down by publishers
telegraph.co.uk – Wednesday May 11, 2016
Stephen King received so many rejection letters for Carrie that he kept them all on a spike in his bedroom. When it was finally published in 1974 it was a runaway success, and the paperback sold more than a million copies in its first year.
How To Write A Book When You Have A Full-Time Job
elitedaily.com – Tuesday May 10, 2016
It took me five minutes to write this sentence.
Five minutes of staring into space until the idea of writing an opening line about how long it took me to think of an opening line popped into my head.
In the grand scheme of things, five minutes isn’t all that long. But for a writer, five minutes for nine words can add up.
The Future of Writing Looks Like the Past
theatlantic.com – Monday May 9, 2016
These days, I write with my fingertips. We all do. And so, anything that changes that sensation stands out. Today, instead of chiclet keys on an Apple laptop, I am clacking at the white, mechanical keys of the Freewrite, a “smart typewriter” made by Astrohaus. It’s the latest and most extreme entry in the distraction-free writing wars. The idea: by stripping down a computer to its basics, writing can be simplified and improved.
Writing crime with Donna Leon, Duncan Campbell and Barry Forshaw – books podcast
theguardian.com – Friday May 6, 2016
In this week’s podcast, we investigate the enduring appeal of crime in literature. Duncan Campbell, for decades one of the UK’s most distinguished crime correspondents, looks back through a murky history that began with reports of hangings in the 17th century, assisted in the birth of the novel with Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and has been conflating fact and fiction ever since.
He’s joined by Barry Forshaw, a walking encyclopedia of noir, who explains why the British tradition of crime writing walks to a different beat than the rest of the world.
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