firstwriter.com

Writers' Newsletter

Issue #261
December 2024

Writers' Handbook 2025 now available to buy

Writers' Handbook 2025 now available to buy

firstwriter.com – Saturday December 21, 2024

The 2025 edition of firstwriter.com’s annual directory for writers has just been released, and is now available to buy in paperbook, with the ebook version set to follow in the New Year.

The directory is the perfect book for anyone searching for literary agents, book publishers, or magazines. It contains over 1,500 listings, including revised and updated listings from the 2024 edition, and over 300 brand new entries.

Finding the information you need is now quicker and easier than ever before, with multiple tables and a detailed index, and unique paragraph numbers to help you get to the listings you’re looking for.

The variety of tables helps you navigate the listings in different ways, and includes a Table of Authors, which lists over 6,000 authors and tells you who represents them, or who publishes them, or both.

The number of genres in the index has expanded to over 900. So, for example, while there was only one option for “Romance” in the previous edition, you can now narrow this down to Historical Romance, Fantasy Romance, Supernatural / Paranormal Romance, Contemporary Romance, Diverse Romance, Erotic Romance, Feminist Romance, Christian Romance, or even Amish Romance.

The new edition includes:

  • Over 650 literary agents and agencies;
  • Over 400 magazines; and
  • Over 500 publishers that don’t charge fees.

International markets become more accessible than ever, with listings that cover both the main publishing centres of New York and London, as well as markets in other English-speaking countries. With more and more agents, publishers, and magazines accepting submissions online, this international outlook is now more important than ever.

There are no adverts, no advertorials, and no obscure listings padding out hundreds of pages. By including only what’s important to writers – contact details for literary agents, publishers, and magazines – this directory is able to provide more listings than its competitors, at a lower price.

The book also allows you to create a subscription to the firstwriter.com website for free until 2025. This means you can get free access to the firstwriter.com website, where you can find even more listings, and also benefit from other features such as advanced searches, daily email updates, feedback from users about the markets featured, saved searches, competitions listings, searchable personal notes, and more.

“I know firsthand how lonely and dispiriting trying to find an agent and publisher can be. So it's great to find a resource like firstwriter.com that provides contacts, advice and encouragement to aspiring writers. I've been recommending it for years now!”

~ Robin Wade; literary agent at the Wade & Doherty Literary Agency Ltd, and long-term firstwriter.com subscriber

The print version is now available to buy at https://www.jpandadyson.com/books/writers_handbook.php.


Dry Bones by G. Miki Hayden Senior officer Aaron Clement brings the worst of the worst to justice in Oklahoma.

News

Some of this month's news for writers from around the web.

Alex Cochran joins Greyhound Literary

Alex Cochran joins Greyhound Literary

thebookseller.com – Saturday December 21, 2024

Alex Cochran has joined Greyhound Literary as a literary agent, after spending 13 years at Conville & Walsh (C&W). He started out first as an assistant, then as translation rights agent and a primary agent. 

Cochran’s client list covers a range of genres, from literary fiction, science fiction and fantasy, crime and thriller and book club to serious non-fiction.

Cochran said: "After many wonderful years at C&W, I’m delighted to bejoining the brilliant team at Greyhound Literary. I’ve long admired the agency Charlie and Sam have built and the breadth of talented writers they represent, and I am looking forward to working with such an impressive and dynamic group of agents."

[Read the full article]

International Copyright Registration

Register your copyright online for instant copyright protection in more than 160 different countries worldwide.

Click here for more information

South West publishing group seeking submissions

South West publishing group seeking submissions

wellington-today.co.uk – Thursday December 19, 2024

NEW and seasoned writers across the south west are invited to submit their work to the Somerset literary group - Axe River Books.

Until the end of January, Axe River Books is requesting submissions of literary fiction that embodies the richness of the region, from writers or manuscripts connected to the south west.

The company is accepting long-form prose fiction, or any genre with a “literary edge” from both emerging writers and seasoned storytellers. Novellas, short stories, poetry and illustrated books are not accepted for submission at this time.

The community interest company (CIC) was founded in 2022 by three literature enthusiasts to offer publishing opportunities to writers in the south west of England, with a focus on those unpublished or unrepresented by literary agents. Inspired by the Mendip Hill’s river of the same name, River Axe Books provides a platform for emerging voices and promotes original talent from the region.

[Read the full article]

Writers' Handbook 2025 - Out Now!

  • Over 1,500 markets for writers
  • Includes literary agents, publishers, and magazines
  • Available now in print and as an ebook

Writers' Handbook

Click here to buy it now

Bloomsbury snaps up academic publisher in ‘game-changing’ acquisition

Bloomsbury snaps up academic publisher in ‘game-changing’ acquisition

msn.com – Sunday December 15, 2024

The publisher behind Harry Potter books has boosted its academic publishing arm with the $83 (65m) acquisition of Rowman & Littlefield.

Bloomsbury Publishing, which, as well as JK Rowling’s series, is known for its hits in the fantasy and fiction genres, said the move for the academic and trade publisher “significantly accelerates and strengthens [its] academic publishing in North America”.

The acquisition comes off the set of a bumper set of results for Bloomsbury in which the publisher’s success in fantasy fiction helped it to record profits of £41.5m and hiked its dividend by 25 per cent.

The transaction is structured as a sales and purchase agreement, and of the $83m (£65m) cost, $76m (£60m) has already been satisfied, the firms said in a statement to markets. The remaining $7m (£5.5m) is expected to be satisfied post-completion.

Rowman & Littlefield is a privately-owned independent publisher that publishes more than 40,000 academic titles. The firm will add to the Bloomsbury’s already-successful academic publishing division, which releases titles in fields as diverse as Law, Film & Media, Engineering History and International Development.

[Read the full article]

Click here for the rest of this month's news >

Listings

A selection of the new listings added to firstwriter.com this month.

New Publisher Listing: Muswell Press

New Publisher Listing: Muswell Press

firstwriter.com – Wednesday December 18, 2024

We are a small publisher and take on a maximum of 12 new books each year, both agented and non-agented, so both our time and space on the list is limited. That said, we love discovering new writers, so please bear with us, it may take up to three months to respond. We are interested in upmarket fiction, crime and thriller, memoir, biography and travel. Our queer list publishes both fiction and biography. Please consider whether your book would work on our list by browsing our recent titles on the website. We do not publish children’s books, YA, military history, cookery, lifestyle, sci fi, fantasy or poetry.

[See the full listing]


New Literary Agency Listing: Greenstone Literary

New Literary Agency Listing: Greenstone Literary

firstwriter.com – Wednesday December 11, 2024

Represents bestselling, established authors as well as debut writers. We are passionate about great stories and getting them out into the world. Specialising in commercial fiction, our authors’ work has reached millions of readers, listeners and viewers.

[See the full listing]


New Literary Agency Listing: Creative Roots Studio

New Literary Agency Listing: Creative Roots Studio

firstwriter.com – Saturday December 7, 2024

We're building sustainable, long-term careers for children’s book creatives. We developed the three pillars of our business specifically for authors, illustrators and publishing professionals, to maximise creativity, industry knowledge and the opportunity for success. We only accept submissions from traditionally published authors and illustrators. However, we do open our submissions to self-published and non-published creatives from time to time. Please check our social media for these dates and/or subscribe to our newsletter. For published creatives, please enquire using our contact form, telling us a bit about you and your publishing career, including a list of your published books and the publishers you've worked with. Unfortunately, we do not accept physical submissions via post or courier.

[See the full listing]


Click here for more of this month's new listings >

Articles

Some of this month's articles for writers from around the web.

The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction

The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction

persuasion.community – Saturday December 21, 2024

Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding.

It’s convenient to assume that readers are to blame for killing literary fiction, and publishers have abandoned it because book-buyers are stupid, have bad taste, and just aren’t reading anymore. But what has actually occurred is death by committee.

One hundred years ago, there were dozens of publishing houses and a robust publishing landscape. This is the idea of publishing that so many of us still have stored away in our collective memory—a competitive marketplace in which publishers needed to nurture, court, outbid, and out-promise each other in landing both emerging and established writers. This process gave us—among so many others—Flannery O’Connor, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Baldwin.

No longer. Mirroring many other American industries, publishing has followed the path of consolidation, starting when Random House bought Knopf in 1960. What followed was a fifty-year feeding frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. In 2012, when Random House and Penguin merged, we were left with today’s “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. The result is a monopsony, a market dominated by only a few buyers. In the absence of genuine competition, monopsonists, like monopolists, have a tendency to reject the laborious pursuit of quality in favor of short-term profit.

We are now at the logical end-point of that process, with the government compelled to step in and block additional mergers in order to keep even a shred of literary competitiveness alive. In 2022, a federal antitrust suit blocked Penguin Random House’s merger with Simon & Schuster. For writers, it was something like a last-minute stay of execution, but the trial laid bare the problems that high-quality fiction faces in a homogenized publishing landscape. Testifying for the government during the trial, Stephen King explained: “Let’s say if you are an agent and your specialty is baseball teams, you have something like 32 teams that you could negotiate with. But when it comes to big publishers, there are five. You know, baseball players have a saying, you can’t hit them if you can’t see them. And you can’t sell books competitively if there are only so many people in the competition.”

[Read the full article]

Legendary writer Kurt Vonnegut cleverly explains how to write the 3 stories everyone loves

Legendary writer Kurt Vonnegut cleverly explains how to write the 3 stories everyone loves

upworthy.com – Sunday December 15, 2024

To be a great fiction writer requires understanding basic story structures and being clever enough to disguise them so your audience doesn’t know they’re watching or reading something they’ve seen before. Academics suggest that there are only a finite number of plots and structures, but that number varies based on who’s doing the talking.

Writer Kurt Vonnegut, best known for his satirical works on American politics and culture, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “Sirens of Titan,” was obsessed with the shapes of stories and summed up his views in one powerful sentence: “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”

In the video below, Vonnegut explains why the shapes of three different types of stories, from “person gets into trouble” to “boy meets girl” to “Cinderella,” can all be summed up on two axes: the Y represents good and bad fortune, the X represents the beginning and end of a story.

[Read the full article]

How to write a holiday rom-com for TV, according to the experts

How to write a holiday rom-com for TV, according to the experts

apnews.com – Friday December 13, 2024

Have you ever watched a holiday rom-com on Hallmark Channel or Lifetime — or any of the other many networks and streamers that now air them — and thought, “I could write that”? It’s harder than you may think — but just as fun.

Regular writers of Christmas fare for Hallmark Channel, Great American Family and Lifetime share the ins and outs, misconceptions and exceptions to writing a Christmas TV movie.

Christmas is 365 days a year

Some say the holiday season goes by quickly, but for those whose jobs depend on it, Christmas is always on the brain. Writers are always looking for their next gig so there’s no real rest or downtime between assignments. The pressure is on to come up with ideas, get them sold and get writing so the films can get made and ready to air.

“I feel like when I’m not writing Christmas movies I’m pitching Christmas movies, so I feel like it’s Christmas all year round,” said Anna White, who executive produced and wrote “The Holiday Junkie,” directed by and starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, premiering Saturday on Lifetime.

It can be challenging, however, to get into the mindset of Christmas when life outside doesn’t match the world you’re creating. Rick Garman, who wrote the 2023 Hallmark Channel hit film “Christmas on Cherry Lane,” along with its three sequels this year for Hallmark+, often writes Christmas movies in June.

[Read the full article]

Click here for the rest of this month's articles >

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