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News
Authors and publishers are being invited to pitch for a place at a popular literary festival founded and organised by UCLan Publishing.
The Northern YA (Young Adult) Literary Festival, also known as the NYA festival, will take place on May 21 and 22.
This year there will be a special focus on mindfulness, mental health and humour.
A mysterious fraudster who impersonated publishers and agents to steal book manuscripts in an international phishing scam may have finally been caught, with the FBI arresting a 29-year-old man at John F Kennedy airport in New York on Wednesday.
Filippo Bernardini, an Italian citizen who worked at UK publisher Simon & Schuster, was arrested upon landing in the US on Wednesday. The FBI alleged that Bernardini had “impersonated, defrauded, and attempted to defraud, hundreds of individuals” to obtain unpublished and draft works.
Research says it takes 21 days to develop a new habit. And this maxim is what BookLeaf Publishing banks upon to initiate one to a new habit — writing. With its 21-Day Writing Challenge, BookLeaf Publishing hopes to spur authors into writing their hearts out and to continue doing so even post this three week period, a habit that’s meant to stay.
Once a participant registers for the challenge, they are supposed to submit a write-up — poems, diary entries, haiku, quotes, etc. — every day for 21 days. The team then compiles these write-ups into a draft and helps the author out with formatting, editing and illustrations, if the author so chooses, before proceeding with the book’s publishing. A consultant gets assigned to the author right at the beginning to make the entire process seamless and one-stop.
The idea for the challenge was born of a short survey the company conducted amongst its team members and authors who’d worked with the company earlier. “We realised that although close to 80 per cent of the respondents wrote in some form or the other, only about 15 per cent of them wrote regularly as a habit. We wanted to change that,” says Musavir Khurshid, CEO of BookLeaf Publishing.
The 2022 edition of firstwriter.com’s bestselling directory for writers has just been released, and is now available to buy both as a paperbook and an ebook.
The directory is the perfect book for anyone searching for literary agents, book publishers, or magazines. It contains over 2,500 listings, including revised and updated listings from the 2021 edition, and over 400 brand new entries.
Articles
Several years ago, as an aspiring novelist with stardust in my eyes, I used to spend most of my waking hours in Yahoo’s Books and Literature chatroom in the company of fellow aspiring writers. I clearly remember how one of the main topics of conversations used to be the number of rejection slips one had received on that particular day (or the previous week), agents/publishers who had requested a synopsis or proposal, and those who had just not bothered to respond. All of us were united by the looming sense of uncertainty, suspense, and the palpable realisation that the odds were firmly stacked against us.
Today, having spent more than seven years on the other side, first as a consultant and then an agent, I think many writers have wrong notions about rejections. While most books are rejected because of poor quality and incompetence (as they should be), there are several other factors that play a role in publishing decisions. And these affect “good” books too.
I've fallen in love with printed books. Again. Especially those for children.
Twenty years into my book publishing career—which included marketing for trade book publishers and founding a children's imprint—I had the opportunity to go digital, move into the future, hang out with the cool guys, play games, do the bicoastal thing, and grow a ponytail.
Late last year, novelist Keira Drake said her publisher was giving away copies of her upcoming young-adult novel, “The Continent,” a fantasy set in a world where two nations have been at war for centuries. “It’s raining books!” she wrote.
Her enthusiasm was quickly punctured. Online reviews poured in, and they were brutal. Readers pounced on what they saw as racially charged language in the descriptions of the warring tribes and blasted it as “racist trash,” “retrograde” and “offensive.” Drake and her publisher, Harlequin Teen, apologized and delayed the book’s publication.
When Simon & Schuster announced in late February that it is canceling Milo Yiannopoulos’s book, Dangerous, many in the publishing industry reacted with a sigh of relief. The six-figure book deal that the right-wing provocateur landed at Threshold Editions, S&S’s conservative imprint, late last year caused a wave of criticism—from various factions of the media, the public, and the house’s own authors. And, though it’s still unclear what ultimately motivated the publisher to yank the book, the fervor that the alt-right bad boy’s deal caused put some on alert. Could other publishers be pressured into canceling books by controversial conservatives? Does the industry have a double standard for authors on the right? Does it matter?
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