There Is No Such Thing as 'Too Similar' When Publishers All Want the Same Book
jezebel.com – Wednesday October 9, 2019
A few years ago, when I was shopping my now-shelved first novel, an industry insider told me to put the word “girls” in the title. “Girl” novels were big at the moment: Gone Girl, Girl on the Train, The Girls. But a few months later, I was told I had to change the title. There were too many novels about girls.
That is pretty much the way the publishing industry works. Once a title becomes wildly popular, rival imprints rush to get their hands on books that are slight variants on the same conceit until they have too many books on the same topic—say, a woman with a substance abuse problem who witnesses a crime—and once that topic is oversaturated, they move on to something else. In a recent Buzzfeed article, historical fiction novelist Kim Michele Richardson said that details in bestselling author of MeBeforeYou Jojo Moyes’s new novel are too close for comfort to those included in her own work. However, in an industry that frequently gets stuck on the same idea, the similarities in their work look more like byproducts of how well both women know which details are required of their genre, and the fact that many books are becoming difficult to distinguish from one another.
Find a room of your own: top 10 tips for women who want to write
theguardian.com – Saturday October 5, 2019
How does a woman write? This woman is writing on her laptop in bed wearing her lipstick. She looks quite ridiculous. She is wishing the teenagers downstairs would make less noise and will go down periodically to shout at them and to get some biscuits, maybe some cheese, a small snack that she needs to sustain herself every other paragraph or so.
This woman wishes she was like the young people she sees writing in cafés or on the bus, who seem to be able to write anywhere. She wishes she wasn’t so precious about peace and quiet and remembers she didn’t used to be. In fact, she used to sit next to a man in a newspaper office who was covered in nicotine patches, chewing nicotine gum and drinking double espressos until he vibrated. Still, she always met the deadline. He didn’t, so was in a constant state of torture.
What Is A Book Coach? A Guide To Seeking And Becoming One
bookriot.com – Friday October 4, 2019
Are you still scratching your head trying to work out just what exactly a book coach is?
Here’s the scenario:
You’ve got a great idea for a book, you read copiously, and you’re a pretty talented writer (if you say so yourself). You’ve read On Writing by Stephen King and The Writing Life by Annie Dillard and you’re acquainted with copious theories on plot and pacing and characterisation, but you just can’t seem to get that New York Times bestselling book from your head to paper.
Chris Hammer: 'I am a serial killer. I kill my darlings left, right and centre'
theguardian.com – Sunday September 29, 2019
Chris Hammer’s career as a political advisor was meteoric and very, very short.
Three weeks after he started a job with Labor MP Stephen Jones, he got “this fantastic book deal”. “I was laughing and crying, it was just unbelievable,” he says.
That was a Friday. On the Monday, he resigned. “Stephen was most gracious about it all.”
Shortly after that, the international and television rights to Scrublands, Hammer’s debut novel, were sold. Overnight he had became that rare, elusive thing: a writer who could make a decent living from fiction. Yet even now he has difficulty calling himself an author. “It is even more difficult to say I am a novelist,” he tells Guardian Australia.
A penny a word - you pay
By G. Miki Hayden
Instructor at Writer's Digest University online and private writing coach
firstwriter.com – Saturday September 28, 2019
GMH: What common style mistake bugs you the most?
Phyllis Grann, the first woman CEO of a major publishing firm: The use of unnecessary words.
Writers being paid by the word say that instead of “bang,” they might write “bang, bang, bang” for gunshots. That’s really a joke—sort of. While often the length of a story or article is fixed by guidelines and a flat fee is paid, sometimes writers do get paid by the word, even today. But any writer imagining that adding unnecessary words to a piece is a good idea isn’t the writer who is going to sell the story or article. And that’s the long of way of saying that the best writing is economical writing. How many words should the story or article be? As many as telling the story takes, but not a single word more.
YA Authors You Should Be Following for Writing Advice
bookriot.com – Thursday September 26, 2019
Writing…is hard. I wanted to say something more profound about the exhausting and turbulent life of a writer and the never-ending worry of publishing and judgment, but when it comes down to it, writing is just hard. We do it anyway, though, because it’s some sort of natural instinct to use our words to say something, anything. We still write, even when we don’t want to. Even when I’ve tried to quit writing entirely, I still come back to it.
And oh, how I wish it was this beautiful, graceful moment where you sit at your perfectly messy-while-still-organized desk, take out your fountain pen, and the most profound and perfect words stream out onto the paper. No, it’s a gruesome process, fighting your way back into writing.
Luckily, we’re never in it alone. Personally, I don’t have a ton of writing friends to bounce ideas off of or get inspiration from, and I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of people. But what’s really pushed me out of a deep, dark writing slump is other writers. And thank god for the internet, because I’ve got an endless amount of writing advice to pick through!
After some deep digging, writing prompts, and podcasts, I’ve gathered some of the most helpful writing advice I’ve found, from some pretty spectacular YA authors.
How Do I Know If I’m Getting a Good Cookbook Deal?
eater.com – Tuesday September 24, 2019
It can feel like everyone in the food world is writing cookbooks these days — big-name chefs, burgeoning Instagram influencers, bartenders with cult followings. They make it look easy, but in truth, the world of cookbooks isn’t as glamorous as it seems, and it’s more important than ever for authors to understand the process and protect themselves before and while writing one.
Eater turned to lawyer Jasmine Moy to learn more about how cookbook deals come together.
How soap operas influence my saga novels by Glenda Young
femalefirst.co.uk – Tuesday September 17, 2019
I’ve been a fan of Coronation Street since before I can remember. It was the show I used to watch with my mum and grandma, all three of us huddled on the sofa. My grandma and I used to love Elsie Tanner, the wicked woman of Weatherfield, no better than she ought to be. She had a string of men in her past and I loved the naughtiness of Elsie, the cheek of her.
I went on to write TV Tie-In books about Coronation Street for ITV. I also contributed to the official ITV Corrie website, to their official magazine and to various one-off ITV publications about the soap. I have also written unofficial fan books. In addition, I set up and now edit the Coronation Street Blog, a fan site written by and for fans. It’s been online since 2007 and remains unique, a labour of love. And I’ve been writing online Corrie weekly updates since 1995. So being a fan of the show and writing about it is in my blood. It comes naturally to me. You could say I’m steeped in soap opera. I know their twists and turns, their cliff-hangers and signposts. Most of all, I know their women.
'I have to put my phone in the wardrobe': how do authors deal with social media?
theguardian.com – Monday September 16, 2019
Zadie Smith “can’t stand the phones”. Nick Laird pointedly owns a phone that’s not smart. Brett Easton Ellis despises Instagram as “that fake place” while Jonathan Coe has said he finds being on Twitter “a bit like writing in a virtual cafe”. Mark Haddon announced a retreat from Twitter when The Porpoise was published because of “a growing sense that it was detrimentally affecting the way I both looked at and thought about the world around me”, but has posted every week since. Ayòbámi Adébáyò, author of Stay With Me, keeps two mobile phones, and when she writes, she hides the one with all the apps in the wardrobe. Authors can have an uneasy time with social media; “always twitching the sleeve with its wants and needs”, as Robert Macfarlane puts it (at which point, he says, he shuts it down for a few hours). So how do writers manage – or deploy – the distractions?
Beginners guide for writing a novel
thriveglobal.com – Saturday September 14, 2019
“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his work” ~ Virginia Woolf
Becoming an author can change your life—not to mention the impact the author’s voice has on the readers. However, writing a novel is not a piece of cake. It is better to call it quits then completing a book. It happens when you run out of ideas, or your own story bores you, or you become overwhelmed by the scope of finishing what you started, compels you to quit.
For a beginner, writing can seem daunting, but if you have a passion to write your own story and know the ways to make the process easier, you can make it to the end of your novel. So without further ado, let’s discuss ten tips which can keep you motivated till the end of your project.
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