Woke Twitter is ruining literature
spectatorworld.com – Thursday November 11, 2021
When Democratic strategists look back on how woke theology cost them key races in 2021 — never mind the coming flood of the midterms — they will discover the #MSWL. Hidden away on Twitter, it’s one of the actual headwaters of all things blindly woke, the way the mighty Mississippi begins as a shallow stream. It’s part of the reason we have drag queens reading to our kids in public libraries and Virginia doesn’t have Terry McAuliffe as governor.
#MSWL is a hashtag meaning “manuscript wish list.” For anyone interested in publishing fiction, the road to a book deal is complex. Publishers aren’t interested in reading manuscripts sent directly to them because most are truly horrible. They will only consider reading those submitted by literary agents on behalf of authors. These gatekeepers are forced to root through mountains of garbage to find something they can sell to a publisher and thus claim a commission. They are scavengers of a kind.
Author Bernardine Evaristo on her award wins, activism, and what inspires her writing
womanandhome.com – Sunday November 7, 2021
Bernardine Evaristo is a British author and academic. In 2019, she became the first black woman to win the Booker Prize for her eighth book, Girl, Woman, Other. She is a professor of creative writing at Brunel University London and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her new book, Manifesto on Never Giving Up, is an intimate and inspirational memoir about her journey as a writer. She was Chair of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction. Bernardine lives in London with her husband.
Authors share the writing habits that got them on the Giller short list
rmotoday.com – Friday November 5, 2021
Some authors get to work right after their morning coffee; others write late at night by the glow of their smartphones. Some struggle to stave off distractions; others embrace them as part of the creative process.
The Canadian Press asked the finalists for the Scotiabank Giller Prize to share the habits that help them put words on the page. Their emailed responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.
PEOPLE TO PEOPLE, Elizabeth Ann Atkins on coaching new writers through their first book
youtube.com – Sunday October 31, 2021
Elizabeth Ann Atkins of Two Sisters Writing and Publishing is known as "America's Book Coach." With dozens of titles to her own credit, she says she can help you do the same.
Want to Improve Your Writing? Get 100 Years Of Writing Experience In 20 Minutes
youtube.com – Tuesday October 26, 2021
Want to improve your writing? Get ready to take notes because in this MarieTV, seven famous authors share their best writing advice.
How the subscription newsletter service Substack is changing the writing game
theglobeandmail.com – Sunday October 24, 2021
One of the great surprises of the COVID-19 era is that some of the most talked-about journalism on the internet is being done through a subscription newsletter service. And, more surprising still, this business model is actually proving to be profitable. I’m speaking, of course, about Substack, a platform that’s gained prominence during the pandemic as a haven for heterodox journalists exiting the mainstream media.
The platform is now home to investigative reporters such as Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, and Glenn Greenwald, a founder of The Intercept; digital media heavyweights such as Vox’s Matt Yglesias; and former magazine columnists such as New York’s Andrew Sullivan. All have concerns about the direction the media is headed, and all now regularly publish pieces that it would be hard to imagine reading at their former outlets. As such, Substack has become something of a referendum on contemporary journalism and, due to the controversy surrounding many of its personalities, a contested development.
Pulp friction: Irish women’s place in genre writing should be rescued from ignominy
irishtimes.com – Sunday October 24, 2021
In 1911 a woman named Mary Helena Fortune died in Melbourne, Australia, her death largely unremarked. By then she was an alcoholic, nearly blind and boasted a career criminal for a surviving son, the exotically named Eastbourne Vaudrey Fortune – better known, unsurprisingly, as George. She subsisted on a small pension from the Australian Journal, and was so poor when she died that she was buried in a grave intended for another.
Only in the 1950s was Fortune connected to the pseudonym WW, or “Waif Wander”, under which she wrote hundreds of crime stories, including a pioneering series for the Journal called The Detective’s Album, detailing the cases of an Australian lawman named Mark Sinclair. So convincingly did Fortune inhabit these first-person accounts that readers were convinced they were the work of a serving or recently retired officer of the law. The Journal did nothing to disabuse its subscribers of this notion, probably figuring the myth would sell more copies than the truth, which was that the tales were being written by a clever, gifted woman born in Belfast in 1833, one who had arrived in Australia via Canada in 1855 with her father and infant son, leaving a bad marriage behind her.
Seven Benefits of a Writing Partner
publishersweekly.com – Sunday October 10, 2021
I used to think I could go it alone as a writer.
As a matter of fact, I preferred it that way. I wanted to rely on myself alone, not bother anyone, not need anyone to get involved. I was doing fine with this philosophy for years. I wrote and edited and rewrote all on my own, bumping along in a quiet, solitary manner, sending stories and poems to literary magazines, receiving rejections, jumping up and down with my beloved cat whenever an editor wrote me a note or I won a contest.
“What does this mean? Are you famous yet?” my husband would sometimes tease.
He isn’t a writer, so I forgave him. But the fact remained: I wasn’t taking any sizable steps forward in my writing career.
What It Would Take to Disrupt the Publishing Industry
publishersweekly.com – Sunday October 10, 2021
Anyone who follows publishing knows that it loves to celebrate a disruptor. Disruptor is a label thrown at anything new, and publishing is unusually easy to disrupt because it is particularly slow to change.
Back when I started She Writes Press in 2012, I was called a disruptor. I confess, I liked it. But it wasn’t exactly accurate, and whenever I spoke at conferences about what we were doing—which was growing a reputable hybrid model based on the systems of traditional publishing—I let audiences know that legacy publishers had been cutting hybrid deals for years, which was an open secret. If I was doing anything disruptive, it was encouraging the authors we published to be proud of publishing nontraditionally. As I mentioned, it doesn’t take much to be considered a disruptor in this space.
Where Have All the Midsize Book Publishers Gone?
publishersweekly.com – Sunday October 3, 2021
When Hachette Book Group acquired Workman Publishing, HBG CEO Michael Pietsch observed that Workman was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, remaining independent trade publishers left in the U.S. Based on available data, a case could indeed be made that Workman was the largest of its kind. Which has raised a question in publishing circles: why are there so few independent publishers of size? There is a dearth of what can be called midsize publishers that fall between the Big Five and the many independent publishers with sales of $20 million or less.
The Houghton Mifflin Harcourt trade division, with 2020 sales of $192 million, was what could have been considered a mini-major before it was acquired by HarperCollins. The Scholastic trade group, with sales of $355 million in the fiscal year ended May 31, is a major player in the children’s trade market, but as part of a $1.3 billion publisher, it is clearly not independent. Other trade publishers that could be considered midsize that are also part of larger companies are Disney’s publishing division and Abrams, which is owned by the French company La Martinière Groupe, which was itself acquired by Media Participations.
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