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Writers' News

New Literary Agent Listing: Kaitlyn Sanchez

firstwriter.com – Friday October 28, 2022

Looking for children’s books (picture books through YA) in all categories, including graphic novels, nonfiction, and illustration. She is incredibly eclectic in her tastes, with a great affinity for emotional stories as well as funny stories. Always looking for diversity in all forms, including but not limited to BIPOC, neurodiversity, and LGBTQ+. Loves working with artists, so she’s always on the lookout for great illustrators, author-illustrators, and graphic novelists. Generally leans PG and PG-13 for most submissions, though some intensity here and there is fine.

[See the full listing]

The Moth and Caterpillar magazines to cease publishing but prizes will continue

thebookseller.com – Thursday October 27, 2022

Arts and literature magazines the Moth and the Caterpillar will cease publishing next summer, its directors have announced, but the four literary prizes associated with the magazines will continue with increased prize pots. 

Directors Rebecca O’Connor and Will Govan said: “We will have had 13 happy years. It feels like the right time to focus on things other than the publications.”

Govan said back issues of both magazines will be sold online so people can complete their vintage collections. 

[Read the full article]

Dodd steps up at ASH Literary

thebookseller.com – Thursday October 27, 2022

Agency assistant at Saffron Dodd is being promoted to associate agent at ASH Literary, focusing on middle-grade and YA titles.

Taking up the new role on 1st January 2023, Dodd will be building her own list, prioritising UK creators, alongside agency founder Alice Sutherland-Hawes.

Sutherland-Hawes said: “Saffron joined the agency at the start of 2022 and has made a lasting impact on our clients and the work we do. Her passion and joy for the work has been wonderful to witness and I am so excited for her future with the agency. I can’t wait to welcome her clients to ASH Literary.”

[Read the full article]

Lee Child and Andrew Child on Discipline, Dread, and Writing Late at Night

crimereads.com – Wednesday October 26, 2022

Lee and Andrew Child’s new book, No Plan B, was released earlier today, so we asked them a few questions about writing routine, advice, and influence.

What time of day do you write (and why)?

Lee Child: I’m ruled by my biological clock, which mandates one unshakeable conclusion: nothing of value is ever achieved in the morning. Typically I get up late and spend a couple of hours moving from a comatose state into something resembling human life. Then I’ll start work about 1 or 2 in the afternoon. I have learned to sense the point when quality starts to diminish, which is usually about 6 hours later, so I’ll stop then. Often I get a second energy peak around midnight, so I’ll do another couple of hours before bed, especially in the later stages when the story is really rolling. Usually a book takes between 80 and 90 working days, spread out over about 7 months.

Andrew Child: My favorite time to write is at night. I like it best when darkness falls and the world shrinks down to the size of the pool of light that spills from my laptop screen. That just leaves me alone with the story I’m telling, nothing to distract, nothing to interfere.

[Read the full article]

New Publisher Listing: Dahlia Books

firstwriter.com – Wednesday October 26, 2022

We are currently only accepting proposals for short fiction and short stories when presented as a collection from UK based writers. We are particularly keen on publishing diverse voices which are currently underrepresented in publishing.

[See the full listing]

25 Picture Prompts for Writing Scary Stories

nytimes.com – Tuesday October 25, 2022

Happy Halloween! Do you enjoy reading, watching or listening to horror stories? What about writing them?

To celebrate the season, we’ve rounded up 25 haunting photos and illustrations from around The New York Times that you can use as prompts to write your own terrifying tales. Choose an image and then use your imagination to write a short story or a poem inspired by it — or tell us about a memory from your own life that the picture makes you think of.

You can use these images however you like, but if you need more guidance, here are four prompts, as well as articles with advice from horror writers and experts, to get you started:

[Read the full article]

It’s Time To Save Literature From The Woke Publishing Industry

thefederalist.com – Tuesday October 25, 2022

Joyce Carol Oates is a fixture in American letters — she’s won the National Book Award, two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, the Jerusalem Prize, and she’s been nominated for the Pulitzer five times. She taught at Princeton for 36 years, and is, of course, an outspoken Trump critic. A Google search for “Joyce Carol Oates” and “feminist” yields more than half a million results.

And even she thinks the publishing industry has become intolerably politically correct. On Twitter, she recently observed, the “category of straight white males is the only category remaining for villains & awful people in fiction & film & popular culture.” Oates isn’t alone in observing the problem — in June, ubiquitous author James Patterson, whose potboilers have sold more than 400 million copies, said white male writers now face “another form of racism” in the woke publishing industry, before he was bullied into backtracking on his comments.

Of course, if you’ve set foot in a large bookstore recently, what Patterson is saying has obvious merit. On a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, a friend actually took photos and counted up the books on the six new fiction shelves displayed up front. Male authors made up less than 25 percent of the nearly 200 books displayed in the front of the store, and obviously, the percentage of men who were white and/or heterosexual was notably smaller than that.

Oates and Patterson are only now saying what many men with literary ambitions have long known. Iowa Writers Workshop graduate Alex Perez recently gave a scorched-earth interview to the Hobart Literary Journal where he discussed how male-centric literature was being deliberately shut out of publishing. During the interview, he had some choice words for the woke and disproportionately female gatekeepers of the industry:

[Read the full article]

New Literary Agent Listing: Sidney Boker

firstwriter.com – Tuesday October 25, 2022

Loves to read young adult, fantasy, sci-fi, historical, and graphic novels, and almost anything with a strong female lead.

[See the full listing]

Andrew Wylie, ‘The Jackal’ of books: ‘Amazon is like ISIS; it takes no prisoners’

english.elpais.com – Sunday October 23, 2022

The world’s leading literary agent speaks about Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, Donald Trump and the e-commerce giant

Among the literary giants included under the letter B on Andrew Wylie’s endless client list are Giorgio Bassani, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, Paul and Jane Bowles, Joseph Brodsky, William Burroughs and Roberto Bolaño, eight of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Under C, one finds Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Italo Calvino and Albert Camus. Andrew Wylie, 74, is the world’s most powerful literary agent. His agency has offices in New York and London, and they employ 50 people. His reputation for ruthlessness in managing his clients’ rights has earned him a nickname in the publishing industry: the Jackal. However, he maintains that his goal is to defend authors whose books are of high literary quality but don’t often sell many copies. He asks the new agents he hires to prioritize the emotions that a book arouses in them, not how well they think it might sell.

Nobody, living or dead, has a list of clients as impressive as Wylie’s, which includes Milan Kundera, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman, Yasmina Reza, Shakespeare, Orhan Pamuk, Susan Sontag and Louise Glück. The agency represents so many luminaries that Wylie is unable to recall off the top of his head how many Nobel Prize-winning authors he counts as clients.

[Read the full article]

‘Terror’ stopping great work from being published in the UK, Pike warns

thebookseller.com – Sunday October 23, 2022

Arabella Pike, publishing director at HarperCollins’ William Collins, has warned that UK publishers’ “terror” is preventing “some very great work” from being published.

Speaking alongside the founder of Silkworm Books, Trasvin Jittidecharak, and Niko Pfund, president and academic publisher of Oxford University Press USA on a panel entitled “Non-fiction Publishing in the Age of Misinformation” at the Frankfurt Book Fair yesterday (20th October), Pike described the fear of being targeted as a result of a publication as “the chill factor” and argued greater safeguards were needed to prevent abuses of the British legal system such as she experienced.

“The chill factor and the fear that people have is stopping some very great work emerging,” she said. “It varies depending on which part of the world you’re in, but this is something that’s very much happening in the UK. It’s happening in newsrooms and in publishers; people are too terrified to tackle these responsibly published books.”

[Read the full article]

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