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firstwriter.com's listings for writers include details of 22,747 literary agents and agencies, magazines, editors, authors, and more. The database is continually updated: there have been 321 listings added or updated in the last month, and the database was last updated about 1 hour ago. With over a dozen different ways to narrow your search you can find the right market for your writing, fast.

News

dailymail.co.uk – July 17, 2025

A poet said his career skyrocketed within the liberal literary scene by taking on minority personas to promote his work to publishers. 

Aaron Barry, 29, of Vancouver, experienced the most success when he posed as writers with identities far from his own, even if the poems were blatantly 'trash.'

His reasoning behind the scheme was simple - to prove the poetry world is more concerned with writers' identities than the quality of their work. 

'My thinking was that, if the industry - from small magazines to full-on publishing imprints - could get away with showing a clear preference toward certain groups and, in that same vein, a clear bias against other groups,' Barry began to DailyMail.com.   

'Then there was nothing to say that such power couldn't be abused in the future, whether it be to adhere to shifting trends or politics, or to discriminate against additional demographics.

'Such treatment would leave writers in a state of peril and anxiety, forever having to look over their shoulders while navigating their careers.' 

From 2023 to 2024, Barry had managed to fool 30 respected literary journals around the globe and got about 50 of his 'nonsensical' poems published. 

He published dozens of pieces as Adele Nwankwo, a 'gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,' including one titled After Coming Out: A Wrestling Promo.' 

publishersweekly.com – July 14, 2025

The Novelry, an online creative writing school founded by Booker Prize–longlisted author Louise Dean, has launched a $100,000 writing prize aimed at reaching writers outside traditional publishing circles. With submissions closing July 31, the Next Big Story competition has already received over 5,000 entries and expects to reach more than 10,000 total submissions. An entry requires the first 1,500 words of manuscript and a $15 admission fee, submitted through Submittable.

Dean said the competition aims to reach nontraditional writers. "What I'm really interested in is reaching people who would exclude themselves from writing way before they got to apply for scholarships and bursaries," she told PW. "These are the sort of people who would have been where I was and made the assumption that to be a writer, you've got to be clever or posh. I don't think I had those, therefore, I won't. But I discovered that in fact, you don't need either of those, and they can be quite detrimental."

The competition requires only the first three pages of a novel concept, an approach Dean said targets "real people who probably love really high drama, high concept things" and "probably heavy consumers of genre fiction."

sundaypost.com – July 13, 2025

The word is out. The Sunday Post is on the hunt for Scotland’s best unpublished, amateur fiction writers and you may well be among them.

If you can spin a good yarn, if your imagination knows no bounds, if the characters in your head won’t rest until they’re on the page, then we want to hear from you.

Today The Sunday Post launches its hotly awaited annual Short Story Competition – the third since it began in 2023.

So popular was are the ­contests that the crème de la crème of Scotland’s writers – Sir Alexander McCall Smith, and Bloody Scotland festival founders Dr Alex Gray and Lin Anderson – are back to judge entries, along with The Sunday Post and P.S. magazine books editor and competition co-ordinator Sally McDonald.

So, if you’ve missed our previous contests, or entered and didn’t win, now is your chance.

westernslopenow.com – July 13, 2025

SAN DIEGO, CA, UNITED STATES, July 12, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- New "Bestseller Blueprint" Guarantee Program Cuts Through Publishing Guesswork, Using Analytics to Land Titles on Amazon, WSJ, and USA Today Lists

Bestsellers LLC, the publishing industry's first data-engineering partner for authors, today launched its flagship Guarantee Program designed to propel books into bestseller rankings through algorithmic targeting, strategic launch sequencing, and hyper-optimized Amazon campaigns. Unlike traditional publishers or à la carte services, Bestsellers LLC treats every book as a "product launch," deploying market analytics to secure visibility, sales velocity, and category dominance.

"The publishing industry runs on hope; we run on data," said the CEO of Bestsellers LLC. "Most authors invest thousands into editing and cover design, only to sell 50 copies. Why? No customer targeting, no Amazon SEO, and no launch science. Our engineers map niches, reverse-engineer algorithms, and deploy precision ads, turning manuscripts into revenue-generating assets."

Articles

goodhousekeeping.com – July 29, 2025

Jennie Godfrey is author of Sunday Times bestseller The List Of Suspicious Things, which has sold over 100,000 copies in paperback alone. Her debut was inspired by her childhood in West Yorkshire in the 1970s. Jennie is from a mill-working family, but as the first of the generation born after the mills closed, she went to university and built a career in the corporate world. In 2020 she left and began to write.

She is now a writer and part-time Waterstones bookseller and lives in the Somerset countryside. She is a judge for Good Housekeeping's 2025 writing competition, which is running until 31 August.

7 brilliant pieces of writing advice

The best opening paragraphs give a flavour of what's coming and why the reader should care, with a big dollop of voice. For me the voice is the most important aspect of the opening. If I am hooked by the voice, I am hooked full stop.

vocal.media – July 28, 2025

Let’s be honest: morally gray characters are having a moment. They dominate TikTok, swoon across the pages of romantasy, and spark endless discourse in fandom circles. And as someone who writes fantasy (and reads way too much of it), I totally get the appeal. They’re deliciously complicated, impossible to predict, and often the ones who steal the show.

But here’s the catch — just giving a character a tragic backstory and letting them occasionally stab someone isn’t enough. If you want them to actually matter to the reader, they need to be more than just broody and mysterious.

So, let’s talk about how to write morally gray characters that feel real, layered, and anything but hollow.

Motivation Is Everything
A morally gray character isn’t just someone who does bad things. They’re someone whose choices make sense within their worldview — and who likely sees themselves as the hero of their own story.

Think of Kaz Brekker from Six of Crows. He’s ruthless, manipulative, and has a taste for vengeance — but his motivations are crystal clear. Every calculated move is rooted in trauma, loyalty, and survival. We don’t just see what he does — we understand why.

washingtonpost.com – July 28, 2025

When Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings began pitching literary agents 15 years ago, they kept their interest in fan fiction a secret.

Known by their combined pen name, Christina Lauren, the best-selling romance duo met through their shared love of Twilight fan fiction. At the time, Billings says, coming from fandom “was much more of a black mark on you” if you wanted to break into mainstream publishing. This was just before “Fifty Shades of Grey” — a novel that began as a rewriting of “Twilight” — became a global publishing phenomenon. Now, Hobbs and Billings work in a publishing industry with a vastly different attitude: one far more receptive to authors who got their start writing unauthorized works online for other fans, based on previously existing characters and worlds.

Fan fiction’s ascendance comes as entertainment and media companies are turning to established intellectual property to shore up the eroding economics of their industries. It also helps that many of the decision-makers grew up online, with active accounts on Wattpad, Tumblr and other fan-fiction-friendly platforms. Agents directly solicit writers of popular fan-made works, and new books proudly advertise their “fic” roots. Fan fiction didn’t invent tropes like “only one bed” or “friends to lovers,” but fic websites popularized tagging and searching through them, and these categories have become a mainstay of promoting genre fiction of all kinds.

thecritic.co.uk – July 20, 2025

Not long back, the Society of Authors’ journal, The Author, printed what can only be called a jeremiad by a small publisher named Sam Jordison.

Mr Jordison, together with his wife Eloise Millar, run a distinguished independent press whose successes include Eimear McBride’s career-launching A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and Lucy Ellmann’s Booker-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport, which was ushered onto the Galley Beggar list after its author had been shown the door by messrs Bloomsbury. Galley Beggar are, without doubt, a very good thing.

The gist of Mr Jordison’s lament, supported by a great deal of forensic detail, was that the economics of publishing had become so skewed that it was all but impossible for him to make a profit.

Rising print and paper costs, not to mention Brexit (Galley Beggar export, or rather try to export, books to Europe) had all played their part in this debacle. His conclusion was that whilst in 2015 the margins on a £10 paperback allowed the publisher a small profit, in 2025 he would be lucky to make a few pence.

By chance, Mr Jordison’s j’accuse was followed, a month or so later, by the launch of a new independent, Conduit Books. All the broadsheet newspapers covered the story, which seemed odd until one realised that over the firm’s founding principle rose the scent of novelty. Or rather controversy.

Conduit, helmed by a novelist named Jude Cook and noting the terrific gender imbalance in UK publishing, intends to specialise in novels by men, and “cerebral” ones at that. As Private Eye remarked, “All you middle-brow hussies can keep your distance.”

These news stories seem to be connected. The first shows that the economic model of a certain kind of publishing has all but collapsed. The second suggests its access points are in danger, too.

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