Kate Burke joins Blake Friedmann
thebookseller.com – Wednesday January 16, 2019
Kate Burke has joined The Blake Friedmann Literary Agency as a senior agent and will focus on commercial fiction.
Burke previously worked as an agent at Northbank Talent Management for six years, and before that spent 10 years as a fiction publisher, at Headline, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House.
Curtis Brown celebrates 120th birthday with novel-writing prize
thebookseller.com – Wednesday January 16, 2019
Curtis Brown is to celebrate its 120th birthday with a series of events spearheaded by a team of young agents, culminating in the Curtis Brown 120 Novel Writing Prize.
Founded in 1899 by Albert Curtis Brown, one of the UK’s longest running independent literary agencies. This year Curtis Brown plans to “celebrate its heritage and offer a unique opportunity to the future.” Agents including Lisa Babalis, Becky Brown, Catherine Cho, Lucy Morris and Norah Perkins will help lead the year's events.
The celebrations will culminate in the Curtis Brown 120 Novel Writing Prize, a mission to find the voices of the future, launched in partnership with the Curtis Brown Creative writing school. The prize will be open to novels both finished and unfinished, across all genres of adult fiction. Details of judging panels, process, prizes and submission dates will be revealed in April.
Robertson Murray Literary Agency launches
thebookseller.com – Tuesday January 15, 2019
Representing fiction, general non-fiction and children’s books, the agency, first announced last summer, is a division of Hilary Murray's talent agency Arlington Management Ltd and is being headed up by Robertson, who most recently was sales and marketing director and paperback publisher at Faber and Faber.
Want to make your writing more collaborative, cross-platform and creative? Try Collab Writers
thebookseller.com – Friday January 11, 2019
The pitch
Collab Writers is a global community for creatives to connect, collaborate and create on poems, flash fiction, short stories and ;novels - and to get those stories on screen.
At the heart of the startup is a hub where members can collaborate to create and publish their work, with assistance and guidance from the Collab Writers team. They will also connect the best writers to the film world, to help adapt their work.
"Creatives at Collab Writers aren't just writers," says co-founder Jennie Griffiths. "We want to encourage a new wave of surrealist creatives to bring pictures, photos, words, images, illustrations, film and music together. We encourage a mash-up of creative genres and mixed media products including short graphic memoirs, manga and stories told through song and screen.
"Collab Writers is a call to action to rise up off the sofa, turn off the box set and awaken your inner creative through connecting and collaborating with like-minded creatives."
Tweet yourself a literary agent in 280 characters
scottishfield.co.uk – Friday January 11, 2019
After the astonishing success of the last three years, XpoNorth’s Writers’ Tweet Pitch is back.
On Friday 11 January, from 9am-9pm, writers from across Scotland can tweet pitch their work to a panel of Scotland’s literary agents and publishers.
Twitter channels will be open to pitches of unpublished fiction, nonfiction and writing and illustration for children from writers living and working in Scotland. Their projects can be complete – or may still be in development.
Greek publisher Papadopoulos sets up UK children’s imprint
thebookseller.com – Friday January 4, 2019
Papadopoulos Publishing, an Athens-based publisher that has been running for more than 70 years, is setting up an imprint in the UK to publish children’s books.
Faros Books will be based in London and will launch in February and will publish 10 titles in the first year, 10-14 in the following year and the aim is to publish 15-20 books in 2024. Most will be translated from Greek.
M.d. of Papadopoulos Publishing Ioannis Papadopoulos said he wanted to launch a business in London because the city is a centre of English language publishing across continents, and is closer to Athens than alternatives such as New York.
Book industry booms as children catch the reading bug
newshub.co.nz – Thursday December 27, 2018
When it came to kid's presents this year one of the most popular items in Santa's sack was a new book.
Publishers are celebrating an industry boom with children's titles flying off the shelves.
The increase in sales is being put down to a number of factors, including a higher quality of offerings on the shelves.
Bottleneck at printers derails holiday book sales in US
businesstimes.com.sg – Wednesday December 26, 2018
THIS year has been, much to everyone's surprise, a blockbuster for the publishing industry. Despite the relentless news cycle, readers have bought books in droves.
Hardcover sales are up, and unit sales at independent bookstores have risen 5 per cent. Multiple titles - Bob Woodward's Fear, Bill Clinton and James Patterson's The President Is Missing and Michelle Obama's Becoming - have passed the million-copy mark, while there is also a surprisingly strong appetite for literary fiction.
But what should be good news for publishers, agents and authors has created headaches during the crucial holiday sales season, as printing presses struggle to keep up with a surge in demand, creating a backlog that has led to stock shortages of popular titles.
Non-fiction ruled even as new wave of authors came to the fore (2018 In Retrospect)
business-standard.com – Wednesday December 19, 2018
Scripting a fresh narrative in Indian publishing, the year saw a sustained interest of both publishers as well as readers in non-fiction while a new wave of authors -- spanning genres and languages -- came to the fore both on the bestseller charts and through recognition at major literary awards.
In fact, the rising popularity of non-fiction and memoirs has been a significant trend over the past few years, but 2018 was the year when the genre firmly cemented itself as the favourite of the readers in India.
This is evident as leading publishers and literary agents have now become sceptical when it comes to considering fiction manuscripts -- some have even set aside only two days of the week for such submissions -- while non-fiction commissioning has climbed a notch higher.
The Borough Press and The Good Literary Agency open submissions for un-agented BAME writers
thebookseller.com – Monday December 17, 2018
The Borough Press has teamed up with The Good Literary Agency to open submissions for un-agented BAME writers with the one winning applicant set to secure a £10,000 publishing contract, agency representation and mentoring from writer Nikesh Shukla.
Assistant editor Ore Agbaje-Williams is calling for authors from BAME backgrounds who have written a literary or literary-commercial novel in keeping with the spirit of The Borough Press list - books people want to talk about, either to question or agree; books that span the globe, whether near home or far afield; energetic, modern and eclectic books that inspire passion in readers - to enter the open submission.
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