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Writers' News

New Literary Agency Listing: Inspired Ink Literary

firstwriter.com – Thursday April 10, 2025

We are passionate about discovering exceptional voices and powerful storytelling. We welcome submissions in Historical Fiction, Fiction, and Creative Non-Fiction, with a particular interest in works that captivate, provoke thought, and spark meaningful conversations. Our agency is dedicated to representing authors whose stories resonate with readers, transport them to new worlds, and leave a lasting impression. If you believe your work embodies these qualities, we would love to hear from you.

[See the full listing]

Writing festival to host first naked workshop

bbc.co.uk – Thursday April 10, 2025

Aspiring writers are being urged to "strip off to get inspired", following in the footsteps of authors like Victor Hugo, Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming.

Bournemouth Writing Festival, which runs from 25 to 27 April, has announced it will be offering its first naked writing workshop.

The ticket-only event was organised in partnership with British Naturism and will take place on 23 April at Springbourne Library.

Festival director Dominic Wong said: "Obviously some people may be shy at first but once you're in the swing of it everyone wants to be involved."

The writing festival will feature authors, TV and film screenwriters, journalists, editors, writing coaches and literary agents.

Mr Wong said: "Whilst this session will be a first for the festival, naked writing certainly isn't new in literary circles.

[Read the full article]

New Literary Agency Listing: Mad Woman Literary Agency

firstwriter.com – Tuesday April 8, 2025

A queer-woman-owned, full-service literary agency founded in 2021. The agency has a particular focus on DEAI and prides itself on its highly curated list of talented authors. Values transparency, a spirit of partnership, and author empowerment. We work to foster a sense of community among our clients through annual retreats and virtual educational presentations. We are by each client's side throughout the publishing process from the development of ideas all the way through publication and beyond to support sustainable, long-term writing careers.

[See the full listing]

The AI Romance Factory

bloomberg.com – Monday April 7, 2025

Genre fiction publisher Inkitt has influential backers and a vision for infinitely customizable A.I.-driven content. What would be left for the human creators?

Manjari Sharma hadn’t written much when she decided to start a novel. She’d graduated from university during the Covid-19 pandemic and was reading romance stories to quell her restlessness while locked down in her parents’ house in Lucknow, India. One day she settled into bed and started typing one of her own.

Sometimes in the months that followed, her parents would drift into the yellow-walled bedroom where she liked to work, and she’d scoot over so they could get on the bed and watch the epic series Mahabharat on TV. They knew she was writing but didn’t know the details. Sharma—whose pleasure reading had made her an expert on American romance—was drafting a novel that started with an overweight, insecure American high schooler named Keily being tormented by a hot football player. (“‘You’re fat and dumb,’ James had said with a condescending smirk, ‘like a pig. I should call you Piggy.’”) It would end with them falling in love.

Sharma started publishing installments of the novel on Wattpad’s free platform, titling it Fat Keily; after it was done, seven months later, she also put it on another free platform called Inkitt, based in Berlin. In both places, the novel attracted lots of readers and rapturous comments—“Punctuation be damned! I absolutely love this story!”—and before long, Inkitt was proposing that she move the novel from its free platform to its premium subscription-based platform, Galatea, where Sharma would receive a share of sales. She agreed, and her novel, renamed Keily, took off again. In early 2024 she learned Inkitt wanted to turn it into a series.

This time there was a catch. Sharma recalls being told that she was welcome to write the next books if she could get them done within a few weeks. Otherwise, Inkitt would hire a ghostwriter to do it, though her name would still be on the cover and she’d still get royalty payments.

Sharma had no real choice; her contract with Inkitt gave it the right to do just about anything it wanted with Keily, including come up with sequels. Plus, her life had gotten busy in the years since she first drafted the novel. She’d gotten a master’s degree in mathematics and started an internship in artificial intelligence at the Royal Bank of Scotland. She accepted the ghostwriting offer.

[Read the full article]

The Laurie Lee Prize for Writing: submissions now open

stroudtimes.com – Wednesday April 2, 2025

Stroud Book Festival is delighted to announce that The Laurie Lee Prize for Writing 2025 is now open for entrieswrites Caroline Sanderson.

Free to enter, the Laurie Lee Prize for Writing was created in 2022 to acknowledge and  honour the work of Stroud’s most famous son, Laurie Lee (1914-1997). It was established  under the umbrella of Stroud Book Festival with the blessing of Laurie Lee’s family, and his literary estate. The 2024 winners were Laura Kinnear and Estella Jones. 

The Prize is open to unpublished writers currently resident in Gloucestershire, and to those  who were born in the county. The criteria also now permit entries from anyone studying at school or university or working in Gloucestershire. 

The theme for this year’s prize is JOURNEYS, and submitted writing on that theme can be fiction, non-fiction or poetry. 

[Read the full article]

Why AI can’t take over creative writing

theconversation.com – Wednesday April 2, 2025

In 1948, the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, proposed modelling language in terms of the probability of the next word in a sentence given the previous words. These types of probabilistic language models were largely derided, most famously by linguist Noam Chomsky: “The notion of ‘probability of a sentence’ is an entirely useless one.”

In 2022, 74 years after Shannon’s proposal, ChatGPT appeared, which caught the attention of the public, with some even suggesting it was a gateway to super-human intelligence. Going from Shannon’s proposal to ChatGPT took so long because the amount of data and computing time used was unimaginable even a few years before.

ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) learned from a huge corpus of text from the internet. It predicts the probability of the next word given the context: a prompt and the previously generated words.

ChatGPT uses this model to generate language by choosing the next word according to the probabilistic prediction. Think about drawing words from a hat, where the words predicted to have a higher probability have more copies in the hat. ChatGPT produces text that seems intelligent.

There is a lot of controversy about how these tools can help or hinder learning and practising creative writing. As a professor of computer science who has authored hundreds of works on artificial intelligence (AI), including AI textbooks that cover the social impact of large language models, I think understanding how the models work can help writers and educators consider the limitations and potential uses of AI for what might be called “creative” writing.

[Read the full article]

Scandal-hit creative writing website NaNoWriMo to close after 20 years

theguardian.com – Wednesday April 2, 2025

The US nonprofit, whose online community encouraged members to write a novel in a month, has been rocked by controversy in recent years

NaNoWriMo, the US-based nonprofit organisation that challenged people to write a novel in a month, has announced it is closing down after 20 years.

NaNoWriMo – an abbreviation of National Novel Writing Month – fostered an online community of participants aiming to write 50,000 words of fiction in November. It began informally in 1999 before becoming a nonprofit in 2006. Each year, tens of thousands signed up to the organisation’s flagship programme.

On Monday, NaNoWriMo announced its closure to community members via email. A 27-minute YouTube video posted the same day by the organisation’s interim executive director Kilby Blades explained that it had to close due to ongoing financial problems, which were compounded by reputational damage.

[Read the full article]

How to Format and Submit Your Children's Book Manuscript

litreactor.com – Wednesday April 2, 2025

So, you’ve finished writing your children’s book. Congratulations! You’ve taken a significant step on the road to publication. However, the journey doesn’t end here — you’ll need to polish up your manuscript before you start pitching your story to agents and publishers.

In this post, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about getting your manuscript ready for submission, from industry-standard formatting to personalizing your query letter. Let’s get started!

[Read the full article]

Bournemouth to host romance writing festival for writers

bournemouthecho.co.uk – Saturday March 29, 2025

The Romance Writing Festival will be taking place on October 18.

The event will feature Sunday Times bestsellers Milly Johnson, Paige Toon and Katie Fforde.

The programme is filled with panel discussions, workshops and networking opportunities.

Writers will also have the chance to book one-to-one sessions with agents and editors.

The festival will take place at Royal Bath Hotel, where attendees can explore a marketplace to connect with industry professionals.

[Read the full article]

New Publisher Listing: Adventure Books by Vertebrate Publishing

firstwriter.com – Friday March 28, 2025

Publishes books on climbing; walking; gravel cycling; running; outdoor swimming; and stand-up paddleboarding (SUP). Looking for books which inspire and equip people to plan their own adventures, with great photos and well-researched information; and practical guides to training, technique, nutrition; and injury in the above areas. Specifically, we’d currently love to hear from you if you have a proposal for: an outdoor swimming guide to Wales or London and the Southeast; gravel cycling guides; books aimed at climbing/running/cycling training.

[See the full listing]

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