New Literary Agent Listing: Casey Conniff
firstwriter.com – Thursday July 31, 2025
Currently looking for cozy fantasy, all things romance (romcoms, dark romance, sports romance, small town romance), commercial book club fiction, romantasy, thrillers and suspense, and magical realism. She is particularly drawn to stories with a strong voice and immersive relationships at their core.
FlipHTML5 Launches a Novel Writing AI Tool for Innovative Novel Creation
prunderground.com – Wednesday July 30, 2025
FlipHTML5, a leading digital publishing platform, is revolutionizing the creation and telling of stories with its newly launched novel writing AI tool. With this AI-powered solution, authors no longer need to face the normally overwhelming challenge of developing plotlines, creating characters, writing content, or formatting books for publishing by themselves. FlipHTML5’s AI novel generator provides a seamless and intelligent storytelling experience that takes writers from the first spark of an idea to the final step of digital publishing.
The novel writing AI is not just designed to speed up the writing process, it’s designed to enhance the whole reading experience, too. Writers can now develop new concepts, produce entire chapters, edit manuscripts, and publish multimedia-rich, interactive novels that simulate the experience of flipping through an actual printed book. Authors can simply start with a topic idea or use their existing draft, and the AI novel generator will produce a well-structured book complete with layout design in minutes.
Romance Writing Festival
bournemouthecho.co.uk – Wednesday July 30, 2025
One-day festival celebrating romance writing, offering a mix of panel discussions, agent 1-2-1s, workshops, activities and networking opportunities.
Sunday Times bestselling authors Milly Johnson and Paige Toon will headline the inaugural Romance Writing Festival, taking place in Bournemouth on 18th October 2025. They join fellow Sunday Times bestseller Katie Fforde on an impressive programme featuring award-winning authors, editors, literary agents, and publishers.
The one-day event is dedicated to romance writing, offering a mix of panel discussions, workshops, and networking opportunities. Attendees can also book one-to-one sessions with agents and editors or take part in free activities designed to inspire writers at all stages of their journey.
"The key to creating a character is in the detail": writing advice from best-selling author Jennie Godfrey
goodhousekeeping.com – Tuesday July 29, 2025
Jennie Godfrey is author of Sunday Times bestseller The List Of Suspicious Things, which has sold over 100,000 copies in paperback alone. Her debut was inspired by her childhood in West Yorkshire in the 1970s. Jennie is from a mill-working family, but as the first of the generation born after the mills closed, she went to university and built a career in the corporate world. In 2020 she left and began to write.
She is now a writer and part-time Waterstones bookseller and lives in the Somerset countryside. She is a judge for Good Housekeeping's 2025 writing competition, which is running until 31 August.
7 brilliant pieces of writing advice
1 The best opening paragraphs give a flavour of what's coming and why the reader should care, with a big dollop of voice. For me the voice is the most important aspect of the opening. If I am hooked by the voice, I am hooked full stop.
New Magazine Listing: Crow & Cross Keys
firstwriter.com – Tuesday July 29, 2025
We are looking for beautifully written poetry, flash fiction and short stories with a speculative edge. In the tradition of oral folk tales, we want work that sounds as good when read aloud as it reads on the page. Send us writing that sings. We love the gothic, weird fiction, horror, folk and fairy tales. We love speculative fiction. We love literary fiction that feels speculative.
Writing Morally Gray Characters
vocal.media – Monday July 28, 2025
Let’s be honest: morally gray characters are having a moment. They dominate TikTok, swoon across the pages of romantasy, and spark endless discourse in fandom circles. And as someone who writes fantasy (and reads way too much of it), I totally get the appeal. They’re deliciously complicated, impossible to predict, and often the ones who steal the show.
But here’s the catch — just giving a character a tragic backstory and letting them occasionally stab someone isn’t enough. If you want them to actually matter to the reader, they need to be more than just broody and mysterious.
So, let’s talk about how to write morally gray characters that feel real, layered, and anything but hollow.
Motivation Is Everything
A morally gray character isn’t just someone who does bad things. They’re someone whose choices make sense within their worldview — and who likely sees themselves as the hero of their own story.
Think of Kaz Brekker from Six of Crows. He’s ruthless, manipulative, and has a taste for vengeance — but his motivations are crystal clear. Every calculated move is rooted in trauma, loyalty, and survival. We don’t just see what he does — we understand why.
Fan fiction is everywhere, if you know how to look
washingtonpost.com – Monday July 28, 2025
When Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings began pitching literary agents 15 years ago, they kept their interest in fan fiction a secret.
Known by their combined pen name, Christina Lauren, the best-selling romance duo met through their shared love of Twilight fan fiction. At the time, Billings says, coming from fandom “was much more of a black mark on you” if you wanted to break into mainstream publishing. This was just before “Fifty Shades of Grey” — a novel that began as a rewriting of “Twilight” — became a global publishing phenomenon. Now, Hobbs and Billings work in a publishing industry with a vastly different attitude: one far more receptive to authors who got their start writing unauthorized works online for other fans, based on previously existing characters and worlds.
Fan fiction’s ascendance comes as entertainment and media companies are turning to established intellectual property to shore up the eroding economics of their industries. It also helps that many of the decision-makers grew up online, with active accounts on Wattpad, Tumblr and other fan-fiction-friendly platforms. Agents directly solicit writers of popular fan-made works, and new books proudly advertise their “fic” roots. Fan fiction didn’t invent tropes like “only one bed” or “friends to lovers,” but fic websites popularized tagging and searching through them, and these categories have become a mainstay of promoting genre fiction of all kinds.
New Literary Agency Listing: Bird Literary Agency
firstwriter.com – Monday July 28, 2025
Founded to help give flight to books that will inspire and provoke.
New Publisher Listing: Rymour Books
firstwriter.com – Friday July 25, 2025
Independent publisher publishing books from Scottish authors or of Scottish interest. Send proposals by email.
New Literary Agent Listing: Danielle Marshall
firstwriter.com – Wednesday July 23, 2025
Looking for fresh voices in women's fiction, literary fiction, book club fiction, contemporary romance, historical fiction, mystery and suspense, as well as memoir and selected self-help nonfiction.
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