Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency opens first UK branch
thebookseller.com – Thursday November 4, 2021
The Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency will open a London branch in 2022, marking its first UK presence.
The new outlet, which follows branches in Amsterdam and Stockholm, will open on 1st January 2022 in response to the agency receiving a higher volume of fiction written in English.
Agency founder Paul Sebes said: "After a branch in Amsterdam and a second in Stockholm, this is a logical step. Both the Dutch and Scandinavian branches are doing very well, and we have been getting so many manuscripts originally written in English – not just from English-language countries but also from other parts of the world – that starting a London branch made sense.
PEOPLE TO PEOPLE, Elizabeth Ann Atkins on coaching new writers through their first book
youtube.com – Sunday October 31, 2021
Elizabeth Ann Atkins of Two Sisters Writing and Publishing is known as "America's Book Coach." With dozens of titles to her own credit, she says she can help you do the same.
Harper UK to Buy Pavilion Books
lunch.publishersmarketplace.com – Saturday October 30, 2021
Harper Collins UK will acquire Pavilion Books, including six of its imprints: Collins & Brown, Pavilion, Portico, Robson, National Trust and Pavilion Children’s. Pavilion owner and publisher Polly Powell will keep two imprints, Batsford and Pitkin, and operate under the name BT Batsford. (That’s the previous name, under which Batsford operated until going into receivership […]
AI Comes to Audiobooks
publishersweekly.com – Saturday October 30, 2021
Could this be magic? Over the past decade, audiobook sales, driven by digital audio, have exploded. Sales in 2020 exceeded $1.3 billion, up 12% over 2019. The percentage of Americans 18 and older who have listened to an audiobook is now 46%, up from 44% in 2019. One thing hasn’t changed, however: the arduous production process for audiobooks.
But what if it could be done in a fraction of the time, weeks instead of months? And what if it could be done for a fraction of the cost, hundreds of dollars instead of thousands?
Introducing AI-enabled automated audiobook creation.
New Literary Agent Listing: Becca Langton
firstwriter.com – Friday October 29, 2021
Looking for new stories in all shapes and sizes, from middle grade and graphic novel to teen and YA fiction. Reads widely but loves books with compelling voices, twists and brave new ideas. In YA she would love to see some Queer fantasy, rom-coms with plenty of ‘com’ and contemporary stories told from a new perspective. For younger readers she love/hates the books that make her cry and is on the search for characters that stay with her long after the final page. High-stakes adventure stories are welcome as are graphic novels and books that make you want to read just one more chapter…
New Literary Agent Listing: Wayne Arthurson
firstwriter.com – Wednesday October 27, 2021
Currently building his list of talent, looking specifically for YA or adult literary, crime and SFF and narrative nonfiction and memoir. He's actively seeking works by Indigenous writers.
Want to Improve Your Writing? Get 100 Years Of Writing Experience In 20 Minutes
youtube.com – Tuesday October 26, 2021
Want to improve your writing? Get ready to take notes because in this MarieTV, seven famous authors share their best writing advice.
GoodNovel Academy launched to provide free courses to writers who wish to create popular webnovels
wistv.com – Monday October 25, 2021
GoodNovel, a leading online literature platform providing global users with great reading and writing experiences, has launched GoodNovel Academy as an online community for the cultivation, creation and incubation of original authors by the platform. GoodNovel Academy offers free writing courses for authors at all levels, to provide the keys to writing bestselling webnovels.
GoodNovel Academy's goal is to help aspiring writers to create a popular webnovel from scratch. The initial launch consists of five free online sections, with more to follow. The sections start with the construction of a single sentence, and then guide writers through the processes of brainstorming, creating a premise, characterization, world-building and plot summary, all the necessary tools to craft a thrilling, intricate and appealing story. To suit the preferences of different writers on the platform, audio and video versions of the courses are also available.
The courses at Academy are designed by professional and experienced frontline GoodNovel editors, guaranteeing pragmatic methodologies as the foundation of a productive writing career, as well as continuous improvements regarding crafts and techniques.
How the subscription newsletter service Substack is changing the writing game
theglobeandmail.com – Sunday October 24, 2021
One of the great surprises of the COVID-19 era is that some of the most talked-about journalism on the internet is being done through a subscription newsletter service. And, more surprising still, this business model is actually proving to be profitable. I’m speaking, of course, about Substack, a platform that’s gained prominence during the pandemic as a haven for heterodox journalists exiting the mainstream media.
The platform is now home to investigative reporters such as Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, and Glenn Greenwald, a founder of The Intercept; digital media heavyweights such as Vox’s Matt Yglesias; and former magazine columnists such as New York’s Andrew Sullivan. All have concerns about the direction the media is headed, and all now regularly publish pieces that it would be hard to imagine reading at their former outlets. As such, Substack has become something of a referendum on contemporary journalism and, due to the controversy surrounding many of its personalities, a contested development.
Pulp friction: Irish women’s place in genre writing should be rescued from ignominy
irishtimes.com – Sunday October 24, 2021
In 1911 a woman named Mary Helena Fortune died in Melbourne, Australia, her death largely unremarked. By then she was an alcoholic, nearly blind and boasted a career criminal for a surviving son, the exotically named Eastbourne Vaudrey Fortune – better known, unsurprisingly, as George. She subsisted on a small pension from the Australian Journal, and was so poor when she died that she was buried in a grave intended for another.
Only in the 1950s was Fortune connected to the pseudonym WW, or “Waif Wander”, under which she wrote hundreds of crime stories, including a pioneering series for the Journal called The Detective’s Album, detailing the cases of an Australian lawman named Mark Sinclair. So convincingly did Fortune inhabit these first-person accounts that readers were convinced they were the work of a serving or recently retired officer of the law. The Journal did nothing to disabuse its subscribers of this notion, probably figuring the myth would sell more copies than the truth, which was that the tales were being written by a clever, gifted woman born in Belfast in 1833, one who had arrived in Australia via Canada in 1855 with her father and infant son, leaving a bad marriage behind her.
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