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News
University of Vermont students launched the literary magazine Crossroads, but its roots can be traced off-campus to Burlington's Light Club Lamp Shop. There, every Monday evening, poets and other writers meet to share their work open-mic style. That's where the Crossroads founders cemented their love of poetry, met future contributors and collaborators, and, most importantly, found a community they thought could be served by a new publication devoted to verse.
Alexander Ellis and Jack Wheaton started Crossroads in 2017 after one of those readings. Production involved a fair amount of furtive feeding of card stock into printers at the UVM library and late-night stapling sessions. That first issue, Ellis said with a laugh, was "really crappy." But to them, it was exciting just to see their words in print.
The 2020 edition of firstwriter.com’s bestselling directory for writers is the perfect book for anyone searching for literary agents, book publishers, or magazines. It contains over 1,300 listings, including revised and updated listings from the 2019 edition, and over 400 brand new entries.
Graphic novels aimed at younger readers are skipping the superheroes and taking on serious subjects like mental health and body image, setting off a boom that is bolstering the children’s publishing industry.
These graphic novels are resonating with children and young adults and making readers out of some youngsters who had ditched books for their cellphones. Publishers including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins, a unit of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp., are launching graphic-novel lines aimed at those ages 13 to 18, as well as the juvenile market of readers 7 to 12 years old.
Independent press that aims to publish daring new literary writing by the most exciting authors working today. Send a pitch through the website submission system, including covering letter, details about you and your writing, literary CV, info on how you can help promote your book, and your contact details. See website for full guidelines.
Articles
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?
Today, prolific writers can earn six-figure incomes entirely through stories self-published on Amazon. If they'd lived in the mid-twentieth century, those same writers might have instead turned to science fiction magazines, a source of income that has all but dried up today.
"Payment rates haven’t kept up with inflation," says Alec Nevala-Lee, the writer and biographer whose latest book, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, is out this week and covers the era that saw the rise of our modern conception of science fiction, the years roughly between 1939 and 1950. The book follows John Campbell, one of the genre's most influential figures and, not coincidentally, editor of the magazine that offered the highest rates on acceptance. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction paid writers after accepting their work, rather than paying them only after publishing the story, as many other magazines did. It gave him outsized influence in the field. But that payment rate — and influence — has plummeted in the decades since.
A vibrant new wave of Irish literary journals are offering insights into contemporary trends as well as giving new ideas and new writers an audience
In kindergarten I was tasked with making a shoebox diorama that showed me engaged in my future vocation. The little cardboard me I cut out wasn't playing a professional sport or fighting a fire or walking on the Moon. Instead, Mini Me sat solo in the empty Vans shoebox, in a tiny cardboard chair, behind a tiny cardboard table, in front of a tiny cardboard typewriter. It wasn't a dream I chased very far. At some point growing up I was dissuaded by pragmatism. Having learned that I stood the same chances of becoming a successful writer as my kindergarten classmates did becoming a professional baseball player, I steered clear of ever being caught playing the dreamer.
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