50 Word Fiction competition: write a story about sailing
scottishbooktrust.com – Wednesday July 29, 2026
Closing date: Tuesday 25 August 2026 at 11.55pm
Each month, we'll provide a prompt to get you started, but where the story goes from there is entirely up to you.
The 50 Word Fiction competition includes four categories: adult writers, all-age Gaelic writers, young writers aged 5–11 and young writers aged 12–18. The entries will be judged by a panel and the four winning stories will be published on our website roughly two weeks after the closing date.
A prize will be awarded to a writer in each category, should they be located in the UK, and we're very happy to offer a certificate (printed or digital, depending on your preference) as well as the below:
More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’
wired.com – Wednesday July 29, 2026
Novelists, journalists, and power LinkedIn posters are embracing first-person narratives and idiosyncrasies to avoid being mistaken for chatbots.
Last year, when the novelist Laura Brooke Robson began writing Love Is an Algorithm—a love story between the cofounder of an AI dating app and a musician trying to survive in the age of large language models—she took extra care not to sound like AI herself.
She wrote sentences she doubts she would have attempted before the advent of LLMs, avoiding what she calls “wishy-washy metaphors,” and took “a more winding path to avoid an em dash or a tripartite list.”
Since the widespread adoption of LLMs, Robson says her writing has fundamentally changed for the better, becoming a deliberate inverse of what she sees as AI’s default lack of style.
“I find myself writing less mechanically,” she says. “I have this urge to make little mistakes, like winks to the reader, to show that there’s a human behind the words. Like: What if I just invented a phrase? What if I did something unexpected with my punctuation?”
Robson is part of a larger cohort of writers who are practicing what could be called an anti-AI writing style. Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.
The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI tells, like lists of three, passive voice, not x but y, and em dashes. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.
Agent Business Models May Be Shifting: What I Fear Will Happen
janefriedman.com – Wednesday July 29, 2026
However you measure it, I find more literary agents operating today than in decades prior. The Guide to Literary Agents directory, published since 1995, started with about 400 listings. The most recent edition, released in 2021, had about 1,000. According to my own reporting, the number of new agents announced per year in 2023, 2024, and 2025 was at least double the number announced in 2022. If you look at the number of contacts in Publishers Marketplace that carry the agent label, there are more than 3,000, although not all of them have reported deals. The number of Publishers Marketplace editors? About 3,800.
What’s driving the increase? It’s probably some combination of the following: Anyone can and does call themselves an agent, more people are agenting as a side gig, and consolidation among major and mid-size publishers has led some industry professionals to take up agenting. For career agents who’ve been in the business for the last couple decades or more, this is probably not a welcome development. It increases competition and creates more submissions for editors to sift through; for years now, agents and authors alike have complained of increased editorial response times. Some part of that is due to increased workloads for editors, but reportedly they’re also getting more material to consider. Longtime agent Kristin Nelson cited this as one reason agenting is harder today, and the situation is not improving.
The surest sign the profession is under pressure: changes at the Association of American Literary Agents. In 2022, the AALA loosened membership requirements. Prior to that year, membership required selling at least 10 books in an 18-month period. Now, anyone working in the field of author care at a literary agency can join. This isn’t in and of itself a bad thing—the organization is moving toward a more equitable and inclusive membership. But it definitely attracts more members unlikely to make a living by selling books.
Is This What Comes After AI Slop?
theatlantic.com – Tuesday July 28, 2026
Daggermouth could be the first best-selling novel partly written by a chatbot.
Most self-published authors can only dream of writing something as popular as Daggermouth. Set in a surveillance state ruled by a masked elite, the novel traces the unlikely romance between the president’s son and an assassin hired to kill him. Since H. M. Wolfe uploaded Daggermouth to Amazon as a Kindle ebook, it has been a viral hit. “Did I finish Daggermouth, or did Daggermouth finish me?” a TikTok book influencer gushed. In February, Simon & Schuster paid seven figures to secure the publishing rights to the book and its sequel, which is due out next year.
Daggermouth has spent months on USA Today’s best-seller list and is ranked No. 1 in Amazon’s “science-fiction romance” genre. It also tops a less prestigious list, one compiled by academics studying AI writing. Among thousands of self-published Amazon ebooks that they identified as containing “substantial AI text,” none was more popular than Daggermouth.
Until recently, AI fiction has been easy to dismiss as slop. On Amazon, new-book releases nearly tripled from 2022 to 2025. (That’s probably not because humans suddenly dedicated themselves en masse to the written word.) Many are blatant copycats of existing titles, seemingly intended to trick readers into buying them. Their sales figures are generally meager; the reviews, indignant. A suspicious number of them feature protagonists with the same names. Last year, readers of one fantasy novel noticed a line that seemed to be responding to a prompt asking a chatbot to write in the style of another author. But if a book as beloved as Daggermouth were written with a chatbot, it would raise an awkward question: Could AI fiction be getting … good?
Feeling excluded in the literary world, Jews are launching their own publishing houses
jta.org – Tuesday July 28, 2026
Meg Keene, an activist whose own novel failed to sell, is helming an eponymous imprint at Wicked Son Books.
An unpublished novel has paved the way for the birth of a new Jewish fiction imprint, in the leading edge of a flurry of initiatives to combat antisemitism in the publishing industry by taking hold of the means of production.
Meg Keene had an enthusiastic agent with a long track record of sales when she submitted her novel, a romance with Israeli characters, to publishers in 2024. But she said heard over and over that her book seemed too Jewish to publish at a time when the war in Gaza had turned anything that could be perceived as pro-Israel radioactive. As has happened to an untold number of Jewish authors in recent years, her book did not sell.
Now, Keene is the eponymous tastemaker at the helm of a new imprint within Wicked Son Press, a 5-year-old publisher that has released mostly nonfiction that leans right.
Open Book ceasing operations at end of August
quillandquire.com – Tuesday July 28, 2026
Open Book has announced it will cease operations as of August 31.
The online publication, run by the Open Book Foundation, celebrated the Ontario literary scene, with a special focus on books and events from the province’s independent publishers. In a note to readers on July 20, the Open Book team announced that due to “successive reductions in grant funding” it would be unable to continue operating.
“This is not an announcement we ever wanted to make. We feel so privileged to have served Ontario’s literary community by connecting readers with incredible books, amplifying authors’ voices, and showcasing the work of independent publishers across the province,” the notice reads. “We are deeply grateful for the years of public funding and community support that made this work possible. Over the years, investment from our funders allowed Open Book to grow into a trusted resource for readers, educators, librarians, booksellers, and the publishing industry.”
New Magazine Listing: Anthology
firstwriter.com – Tuesday July 28, 2026
Publishes a luxury lifestyle magazine featuring travel destinations, interior design, fashion, beauty, and arts and culture, with a focus on high-profile interviews, fashion spreads, and contemporary cultural coverage. Accepts poetry and fiction through competitions only.
New Literary Agency Listing: The White Editorial
firstwriter.com – Monday July 27, 2026
Handles nonfiction and memoir, inviting query packages by email. Accepts submissions that include a synopsis for fiction or a full book proposal for nonfiction, along with two sample chapters. If no response after three months, assume rejection.
Free International Writing Competition – Six Word Wonder 2026
firstwriter.com – Monday July 27, 2026
Entries are now open for "Six Word Wonder 2026", an annual international writing competition celebrating the art of telling a complete story in exactly six words.
First launched in 2022, the competition is free to enter and open worldwide to anyone aged 16 or over. Writers may submit up to five original six-word stories, memoirs, poems or jokes.
‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ author on how he went from self publishing to New York Times bestseller who is developing a TV adaptation with Seth MacFarlane
pagesix.com – Sunday July 26, 2026
It takes a lot of work to be an overnight success, and nobody knows that more than Matt Dinniman, author of the massively popular “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series of books that’s sold a whopping 13.5 million copies.
“I’ve been writing since I was a kid. My first book came out way back in 2003. It was published with a small press. Back then, you didn’t self-publish because if you did, it meant you weren’t good enough. That stigma still exists,” Dinniman tells Page Six Hollywood during a brief respite from his packed schedule at San Diego Comic-Con.
He finally caught the self-publishing bug in 2017, releasing “Dominion of Blades” in the lesser-known (at the time, at least) Literary Role-Playing Game (LitRPG) genre. In the years that followed, he made a living selling drawings of cats and dogs at conventions (he attended 42 of them in 2019 alone). When those cons took a hiatus in 2020 due to the pandemic, he decided to get serious about his next project: “Dungeon Crawler Carl.”
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