Digital sales down 19%, but print strong for trade publishers in first half
thebookseller.com – Thursday November 3, 2016
Trade publishers’ digital revenues have fallen by 19% in the first six months of the year, but print sales are holding strong, new figures from the Publishers Association (PA) have revealed.
Sales data provided to the PA by UK publishing houses across trade, education and academic sectors show that print sales increased by 1% in the first six months of the year (January-June 2016) to £898m in comparison to the same period a year earlier, driven in particular by a 6% growth of trade books.
New Publisher Listing
firstwriter.com – Thursday November 3, 2016
Publishes: Fiction; Nonfiction;
Markets: Adult
Crowdfunding publisher. Submit manuscripts via form on website.
New Publisher Listing
firstwriter.com – Wednesday November 2, 2016
Publishes: Fiction; Nonfiction;
Areas include: Cookery; Crafts; Design; Fantasy; Historical; Lifestyle; Mystery; Nature; Science; Sport;
Markets: Adult; Youth;
Preferred styles: Literary
Publishes nonfiction and young adult fiction. Send query by email, stating "YA" or "NONFICTION" in the subject line, and "AGENTED" if being submitted by a literary agent. For fiction, include 1-2 page query with synopsis and bio. Fiction should be 60-90,000 words with a protagonist aged 15-18. For nonfiction, send one-page synopsis with writing sample and details of any media exposure. See website for full guidelines.
How Do You Capture the 1980s in Writing? Six Novelists Discuss Re-creating the Decade
vulture.com – Friday October 28, 2016
Writers never make things easy on themselves, and nostalgia is no exception. While the phenomenon has a rich literary tradition that sifts down like a dreamy haze through the novels of Marcel Proust, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Virginia Woolf, it’s no mean feat to convincingly render a lost time and place on the page. In film and music, the signifiers of another era are seen and heard, viscerally apparent, with no need for explicit discussion or exposition. Authors, meanwhile, are often stuck describing the particulars.
So how do writers transport us backward through time, especially to a recent decade such as the ever-popular 1980s, without weighing down their stories? We asked six novelists:
How a husband-and-wife publishing team won the Man Booker prize twice in a row
inews.co.uk – Friday October 28, 2016
The 18 publishers which turned down The Sellout must have felt a little sheepish at the 2016 Man Booker Prize ceremony. Paul Beatty’s satire was the second consecutive winner of the world’s leading literary award for Oneworld, a small independent founded by a husband-and-wife team, which has found huge success discovering novels shunned by the large publishing houses.
Gillon Aitken dies
thebookseller.com – Friday October 28, 2016
Literary agent Gillon Aitken of Aitken Alexander Associates has died.
Aitken died peacefully this morning (28th October) after a period of ill health.
Clare Alexander said: "A towering figure in so many of our lives, publishing has lost a great agent from a brilliant generation. He was a wise counsel, a true intellectual and an irreplaceable friend."
She added: "I am sure he would wish to be remembered in the words of some of the many authors who valued his guidance deeply and who came to love him so much."
Is Writing For Free Ever OK? There's A Fine Line Between Exposure And Exploitation
bustle.com – Thursday October 27, 2016
Writing is a tough gig. There's just no way around that. Whether you want to write in print for a magazine, or for your favorite website, there's a lot of time and work to be done before you get there. One of the biggest controversies in the writing community is the idea of writing for free. It sounds simple enough to tell someone, 'Never write for free,' but the reality is more complicated than that. In a perfect world we could maybe tell writers never to write for free, but in the real world, we have to make sacrifices from time to time.
Trade shock and sadness at death of Carole Blake
thebookseller.com – Thursday October 27, 2016
Literary agency Blake Friedmann has announced the sudden death of agency co-founder Carole Blake.
The agency said yesterday (26th): "It is with huge sadness that we must share the news that our beloved mentor, colleague and friend Carole Blake died last night. The loss of such an incredible woman so soon is not something any of us feel prepared for, but we are grateful that she lived so fully to the last, and that she died swiftly and painlessly, on being readmitted to hospital last night, with Julian [Friedmann] by her side."
Science Fiction Writing: Character Building In Radically Different Worlds
scifiaddicts.com – Wednesday October 26, 2016
Science fiction demands particular care from prospective authors. In science fiction writing, character building done correctly can give the story wings, or, if done clumsily or incompletely, drag down a story with a great universe and premises. In this article, I’ll take a closer look at how to construct characters in science fiction stories where the premises are drastically different from the reality we’re used to.
First, I’ll discuss how to frame a character in the context of the universe that you have created that the character lives in. Next, I’ll explain how to make sure that the character has a history that is logical and features which are logical, given the premises that we defined in the first part. Finally, I’ll warn you about anthropomorphizing and creating culturally-blind characters. If you decide to buck my advice, don’t worry: many a science fiction story has successfully depicted characters in wild circumstances.
Discovering New Talent Through #WriteNow
huffingtonpost.co.uk – Wednesday October 26, 2016
A couple of weeks ago I was a guest on BBC Asian Network radio to talk about Penguin Random House’s new initiative to find, mentor and publish new writers from communities under-represented on the UK’s bookshelves.
The WriteNow scheme aims to find and publish new writers who are “under-represented in books and publishing”. Targeted groups are writers from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds, writers who come from LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer) or BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) communities, or writers with a disability.
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