What's in a Blurb?: The History of Book Blurbing
bookriot.com – Wednesday July 28, 2021
It’s cliche, but books are judged by their covers. For one thing, often the cover lets the reader know what kind of book they are buying. White woman in a gown or a shirtless muscle-bound man: romance. Bright cartoon picture superimposed with san serif: young adult. Dark with silhouetted figure in the mist: mystery. Dripping font titles: probably horror. So, let’s say you’re a genre reader, have found your section in the bookstore, and are trying to find something new. The next thing to examine are the blurbs. If Neil Gaiman stans see he’s read and endorsed a book, they will be more likely to give it a try. Haruki Murakami says this book is a must read? Then read you must.
Festival of Words guests talk fantasy writing, defining genre during panel
moosejawtoday.com – Sunday July 18, 2021
A selection of fantasy authors joined together to talk about how they approach writing a genre that includes anything the imagination can create, during the ongoing Saskatchewan Festival of Words.
The panel was pre-recorded, as part of a small series of sessions from the Festival of Words available for attendees to watch anytime.
Moderated by crime writer Wayne Arthurson — who said he was an avid fantasy reader excited to join the discussion — authors Melanie McFarlane, C.L. Polk and Hiromi Goto sat down to talk about the details of creating fantasy fiction.
The Bleeding Cool List Of Agents Selling Graphic Novels To Publishers
bleedingcool.com – Wednesday July 14, 2021
So this is what I have been doing, on and off, for the last two weeks. You're welcome. A compilation of every announced graphic novel from a major publisher over the last year-and-a-half, arranged by which agent negotiated the deal – if they did. The bookstore graphic novel market has been booming, and so many deals for 2022, 2023, and 2024 are being done through the lockdown and pandemic. Speaking with many major comic book creators wondering about projects out there, I discovered that most haven't even considered an agent and just try and use their own personal contacts and knowledge which they often find lacking. Here's an attempt to highlight the people working on comic book creators' behalf in what is an expanding graphic novel bookstore market.
Putting the Self in Self-Publishing
publishersweekly.com – Sunday July 11, 2021
Have you ever written a character based on your life or experiences? Like most writers, even when I’m writing characters who are no-thing like me, I will still borrow places I’ve been, feelings I’ve had, or things I’ve experienced to build out my characters. But, though I routinely draw from my experience as I write novels and short stories, this doesn’t mean that these stories fully mirror my life or are accurate representations of me.
Autofiction
Can you write a character who is like you but has completely different experiences? You can! Autofiction plays with the idea of truth, which, for an author, can be creatively liberating. In autofiction, significant details, plots, and characters are mod-ified to fit the story and don’t necessarily indicate what actually happened.
What this wordy writer learned by keeping it short
eu.azcentral.com – Sunday June 27, 2021
When I took this assignment three years ago, moving my column to the top of Page A2 and writing six times a week instead of once, my editors told me I could write about anything I wanted. Just do it in 326 words.
Heck, it practically takes me 326 words to say hello.
My predecessor, Clay Thompson, had done it. When Clay was my editor in my early years at the paper, he'd chide me to "Write tight, and make it sing."
I never took to it. The license plate on my car says, LNGSTRY.
Calling time on comps
thebookseller.com – Saturday May 29, 2021
It goes without saying that when agents, editors, publicists, marketeers and sales people have a book to get in the hands of readers, they use every means they can to ensure it is published well.
Unfortunately, to “publish well” has increasingly become a hopelessly standardized process, one in which every actor involved in the publishing process, according to the size of their respective companies, has to tick certain boxes in order to avoid savage retaliations from their fellow agents, editors, publicists, marketeers and sales people.
One of these boxes, which a Bookseller article pointed out this week, comes labelled “comparative titles”, i.e. those already-successful published titles to which a new book is compared when being pitched.
I am not sure when the habit of using comp titles became such a thing, nor why. I like to imagine that it started when an editor went to pitch a very quirky book to their publisher, and their publisher did not have time to read it so they asked the editor what it was like, and the editor said: “it is unlike anything that has been done before”. And the publisher said: “Let’s leave it, then. If no one has done it before, there is surely a reason why”. So from then on the editor learnt how to compare their picks to successful things which had been published in the past.
Writing A Book? Start With Some Advice From 5 Of The Best Female Authors
girltalkhq.com – Wednesday May 26, 2021
In 1950 just 30% of best-selling novels had female names on the cover. Today, that figure is almost 50%. So to celebrate how far women writers have come, we decided to look at some of the best pieces of writing advice from female authors. Who knows, it could even inspire that last push toward equitable outcomes in contemporary fiction. These five women authors were featured in a recent article by Ivory Research that looked at 15 lessons from successful writers.
10 tips on how to get your first book published
harpersbazaar.com – Thursday May 13, 2021
Speaking at our inaugural literary salon, Ali Smith said, "A really good book, like a buoy in the ocean, will surface no matter how stormy the weather." Yet, for debut authors, it can seem like an impossible task to get your manuscript in front of the right person’s eyes. This is why we asked three publishing experts – Alexandra Pringle, group editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury whose portfolio of authors includes William Boyd, Esther Freud and Patti Smith; Karolina Sutton, literary agent at Curtis Brown who represents Margaret Atwood and Malala Yousafzai; and Bazaar’s former editor-in-chief, Justine Picardie – to share their wisdom on how to seal the deal and ensure your work rises above the competition.
How I write: For crime writer Kathy Reichs there are three phases to her routine
stuff.co.nz – Wednesday May 12, 2021
Forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs has brought her own dramatic work experience to her thrillers. She continues the journey of Temperance Brennan in her latest novel, The Bone Code. Here she shares with The Dominion Post readers some of her thoughts on writing.
What's your writing routine?
My writing process unfolds in three phases. First comes the phase when my mind collects and stashes tidbits. Then I move to the paper phase, making lists, drawing charts, scribbling outlines. I ask myself, what if this, what if that. I consider plot twists, various endings. When all the imagining and weaving and juxtaposing are done, it’s on to the computer phase. Bum to the chair, eyes to the screen, fingers to the keyboard. I like to begin early in the morning, wrap up by mid-afternoon. Then I read or do more research.
How to write a book
cambridgenetwork.co.uk – Monday May 3, 2021
Whenever I go anywhere, meet anyone, and introduce myself, a comment authors are pretty much guaranteed to hear is:
- I've always wanted to write a book.
If that's you, and there's a book hiding inside you, longing to come out...
This is how to go about writing it.
One word of warning first.
What I'm not going to talk about are the ingredients of a book, the characters, settings, plot, research, all that.
This blog specifically focuses on how to motivate yourself to write a book, and ways to deal with some of the most common concerns.
If these help, there are plenty of resources to help you do the actual writing. I'll mention a couple later.
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