A reminder of how good writing happens
poynter.org – Saturday December 28, 2024
Call in the metaphor squad and other writing tips from Poynter's Beat Academy
ew York Times reporter Jeanna Smialek was stalled on a story. She wanted to describe how people of her generation — millennials — were distorting the economy, and all she knew for sure was there was an image she didn’t want to use: the snake and the egg.
“The snake metaphor was gross,” Smialek said. “You don’t want to talk about food moving through a snake in a nut graph. And I’m like, that’s the energy I want to go for, but less disgusting.”
What she came up with was similar, and better. She compared her generation’s economic impact to a person “squeezing into a too-small sweater.”
“At every life stage, it has stretched a system that was often too small to accommodate it, leaving it somewhat flabby and misshapen in its wake.”
We can pause to appreciate the line, but for us at Beat Academy, the real take-home lesson is how Smialek found it.
“If you could only see the hours of time and debate that went into the sweater metaphor,” she said. “I probably made 16 people talk about metaphors with me before I finally came upon one that worked.”
On resisting the pressures of the market
thecreativeindependent.com – Tuesday December 24, 2024
Writer and literary agent Jaclyn Gilbert on resisting easy categorization, honoring the gray areas, and sustainably incorporating feedback.
You are the founder of Driftless Literary, an agenting collective committed to helping authors develop experimental or genre-bending work. What was your vision for the agency and what did it take to get it up and running?
I started Driftless in 2021, when I was in the wake of a lot of transition, spiritually, professionally, as a new parent and as a writer. In my early twenties, I went to a program called the Columbia Publishing Course in New York, and that was basically how I landed my first job in the industry. But after many years of committing to that path, I realized how unsustainable it was for me, not only financially, but creatively. In 2013, when I left publishing to get my MFA, and afterward—when I published my first novel in 2018—I came to see my path through an entirely new lens, a kind of double lens as both an editor/writer.
Moving forward, I knew I wanted to provide authors with the care and attention most agents are unable to provide around the writing process, focused as they are on bringing in sizable commissions around a future book sale. This incentivizes agents to make edits that serve the market, not based on what the work is asking for at its core, and I wanted to be able to offer this as an agent, to carve out a particular niche for this focus.
Writers' Handbook 2025 now available to buy
firstwriter.com – Saturday December 21, 2024
The 2025 edition of firstwriter.com’s annual directory for writers has just been released, and is now available to buy in paperbook, with the ebook version set to follow in the New Year.
The directory is the perfect book for anyone searching for literary agents, book publishers, or magazines. It contains over 1,500 listings, including revised and updated listings from the 2024 edition, and over 300 brand new entries.
Alex Cochran joins Greyhound Literary
thebookseller.com – Saturday December 21, 2024
Alex Cochran has joined Greyhound Literary as a literary agent, after spending 13 years at Conville & Walsh (C&W). He started out first as an assistant, then as translation rights agent and a primary agent.
Cochran’s client list covers a range of genres, from literary fiction, science fiction and fantasy, crime and thriller and book club to serious non-fiction.
Cochran said: "After many wonderful years at C&W, I’m delighted to bejoining the brilliant team at Greyhound Literary. I’ve long admired the agency Charlie and Sam have built and the breadth of talented writers they represent, and I am looking forward to working with such an impressive and dynamic group of agents."
The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction
persuasion.community – Saturday December 21, 2024
Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding.
It’s convenient to assume that readers are to blame for killing literary fiction, and publishers have abandoned it because book-buyers are stupid, have bad taste, and just aren’t reading anymore. But what has actually occurred is death by committee.
One hundred years ago, there were dozens of publishing houses and a robust publishing landscape. This is the idea of publishing that so many of us still have stored away in our collective memory—a competitive marketplace in which publishers needed to nurture, court, outbid, and out-promise each other in landing both emerging and established writers. This process gave us—among so many others—Flannery O’Connor, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Baldwin.
No longer. Mirroring many other American industries, publishing has followed the path of consolidation, starting when Random House bought Knopf in 1960. What followed was a fifty-year feeding frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. In 2012, when Random House and Penguin merged, we were left with today’s “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. The result is a monopsony, a market dominated by only a few buyers. In the absence of genuine competition, monopsonists, like monopolists, have a tendency to reject the laborious pursuit of quality in favor of short-term profit.
We are now at the logical end-point of that process, with the government compelled to step in and block additional mergers in order to keep even a shred of literary competitiveness alive. In 2022, a federal antitrust suit blocked Penguin Random House’s merger with Simon & Schuster. For writers, it was something like a last-minute stay of execution, but the trial laid bare the problems that high-quality fiction faces in a homogenized publishing landscape. Testifying for the government during the trial, Stephen King explained: “Let’s say if you are an agent and your specialty is baseball teams, you have something like 32 teams that you could negotiate with. But when it comes to big publishers, there are five. You know, baseball players have a saying, you can’t hit them if you can’t see them. And you can’t sell books competitively if there are only so many people in the competition.”
South West publishing group seeking submissions
wellington-today.co.uk – Thursday December 19, 2024
NEW and seasoned writers across the south west are invited to submit their work to the Somerset literary group - Axe River Books.
Until the end of January, Axe River Books is requesting submissions of literary fiction that embodies the richness of the region, from writers or manuscripts connected to the south west.
The company is accepting long-form prose fiction, or any genre with a “literary edge” from both emerging writers and seasoned storytellers. Novellas, short stories, poetry and illustrated books are not accepted for submission at this time.
The community interest company (CIC) was founded in 2022 by three literature enthusiasts to offer publishing opportunities to writers in the south west of England, with a focus on those unpublished or unrepresented by literary agents. Inspired by the Mendip Hill’s river of the same name, River Axe Books provides a platform for emerging voices and promotes original talent from the region.
New Publisher Listing: Muswell Press
firstwriter.com – Wednesday December 18, 2024
We are a small publisher and take on a maximum of 12 new books each year, both agented and non-agented, so both our time and space on the list is limited. That said, we love discovering new writers, so please bear with us, it may take up to three months to respond. We are interested in upmarket fiction, crime and thriller, memoir, biography and travel. Our queer list publishes both fiction and biography. Please consider whether your book would work on our list by browsing our recent titles on the website. We do not publish children’s books, YA, military history, cookery, lifestyle, sci fi, fantasy or poetry.
Legendary writer Kurt Vonnegut cleverly explains how to write the 3 stories everyone loves
upworthy.com – Sunday December 15, 2024
To be a great fiction writer requires understanding basic story structures and being clever enough to disguise them so your audience doesn’t know they’re watching or reading something they’ve seen before. Academics suggest that there are only a finite number of plots and structures, but that number varies based on who’s doing the talking.
Writer Kurt Vonnegut, best known for his satirical works on American politics and culture, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “Sirens of Titan,” was obsessed with the shapes of stories and summed up his views in one powerful sentence: “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”
In the video below, Vonnegut explains why the shapes of three different types of stories, from “person gets into trouble” to “boy meets girl” to “Cinderella,” can all be summed up on two axes: the Y represents good and bad fortune, the X represents the beginning and end of a story.
Bloomsbury snaps up academic publisher in ‘game-changing’ acquisition
msn.com – Sunday December 15, 2024
The publisher behind Harry Potter books has boosted its academic publishing arm with the $83 (65m) acquisition of Rowman & Littlefield.
Bloomsbury Publishing, which, as well as JK Rowling’s series, is known for its hits in the fantasy and fiction genres, said the move for the academic and trade publisher “significantly accelerates and strengthens [its] academic publishing in North America”.
The acquisition comes off the set of a bumper set of results for Bloomsbury in which the publisher’s success in fantasy fiction helped it to record profits of £41.5m and hiked its dividend by 25 per cent.
The transaction is structured as a sales and purchase agreement, and of the $83m (£65m) cost, $76m (£60m) has already been satisfied, the firms said in a statement to markets. The remaining $7m (£5.5m) is expected to be satisfied post-completion.
Rowman & Littlefield is a privately-owned independent publisher that publishes more than 40,000 academic titles. The firm will add to the Bloomsbury’s already-successful academic publishing division, which releases titles in fields as diverse as Law, Film & Media, Engineering History and International Development.
How to write a holiday rom-com for TV, according to the experts
apnews.com – Friday December 13, 2024
Have you ever watched a holiday rom-com on Hallmark Channel or Lifetime — or any of the other many networks and streamers that now air them — and thought, “I could write that”? It’s harder than you may think — but just as fun.
Regular writers of Christmas fare for Hallmark Channel, Great American Family and Lifetime share the ins and outs, misconceptions and exceptions to writing a Christmas TV movie.
Christmas is 365 days a year
Some say the holiday season goes by quickly, but for those whose jobs depend on it, Christmas is always on the brain. Writers are always looking for their next gig so there’s no real rest or downtime between assignments. The pressure is on to come up with ideas, get them sold and get writing so the films can get made and ready to air.
“I feel like when I’m not writing Christmas movies I’m pitching Christmas movies, so I feel like it’s Christmas all year round,” said Anna White, who executive produced and wrote “The Holiday Junkie,” directed by and starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, premiering Saturday on Lifetime.
It can be challenging, however, to get into the mindset of Christmas when life outside doesn’t match the world you’re creating. Rick Garman, who wrote the 2023 Hallmark Channel hit film “Christmas on Cherry Lane,” along with its three sequels this year for Hallmark+, often writes Christmas movies in June.
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