I’m going to be talking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year, on Wednesday 25th August. I’ll be sharing the stage with Keith Charters, managing director of Strident Publishing, and we’ll be discussing how writers can make the most of the publishing opportunities open to them. We’ll be discussing such delights as rights reversions, self publishing, and building promotional platforms, all without the aid of a safety net. I can’t get a reliable link direct to my event so you’ll have to go to the Festival’s home page which I’ve linked to above, click on the “What’s On” tab, and search for me by name–Jane Smith.
This will be your only chance to come and heckle me, as I am taking part in just this one event: unlike our favourite crabbit old bat, Nicola Morgan, who has nabbed herself three sessions in the spotlight.
Nicola has promised to come along and lead the heckling, so it promises to be a lively event with some serious footwear on show. Tickets don’t go on sale until Saturday so you have plenty of time to browse the programme of events before you buy your tickets. I look forward to meeting some of you there: do come up and say hello!
I've received a few emails over the last couple of weeks from readers who were used to following my old Blogger blog from within their own Blogger dashboards, and who now can't tell when I've posted something new here because there's no "Follow" widget on my new site.
If you come into this category, and would ...
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A few weeks ago I blogged about Sally Zigmond's brilliant short story course. It's continuing, and is fabulous and if you're interested in writing fiction of any kind, I strongly recommend you read it and take part. You can find the ...
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Is publishing broken? It depends on your point of view.
Publishing funds itself by selling books to readers. Everything it does is designed to maximise those sales because, like supermarkets and bakers and butchers and car manufacturers and shoe-makers and furniture makers and hat-makers, publishing is a business. It has to make lots of sales in ...
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June 11, 2010 Filed under Uncategorized
There are several organisations which will, for a fee, send your query to agents, editors and anyone else you ask them to. They usually do what they promise, and e-mail your information out to all the names on their mailing lists—and those lists can be vast, with tens of thousands of names on them. But ...
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Run a writing competition, and attract as many entries as you can: the internet makes it easy to find writers' groups and message boards where you can advertise your competitions for free. You don't even have to charge an entry fee: just get as many entries in, as quickly as you can.
You don't need to ...
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There's no doubt that a nice fat dose of fame will help you get your book published: but that's not the only route into publishing.
You don't have to be an established author to get published either. If you follow that particular myth to its logical conclusion, the fallacy is easy to see: ...
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A friend of mine is taking part in this year's Race for Life event on 11 July 2010, a sponsored run (or walk, if you're like me) which raises money for Cancer Research UK. If your life has ever been touched by cancer, as mine has, you'll know how important it is for ...
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Every year the Book Trade Charity raises funds through its action week which this year runs from 7 to 11 June. Publishing's great and good take part, and this year is no exception: cake bakes, a pub quiz, and a spelling ...
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Good literary agents earn their living through commissions on the sales that they make to legitimate publishers, while less scrupulous agents earn by charging fees to the writers that they “represent”. So, if an agency doesn’t charge its writers up-front fees, you’d expect them to be legitimate. Sadly that’s not always the case: the notorious ...
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I'm pleased to welcome M G Harris, my Twitter-friend and author of The Joshua Files series, who concludes her Zero Moment blog-tour here.
Ten Things That Helped Me Get Published
1 Writing Fan Fiction
In the mid-1990s I took up writing as a hobby. ...
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My dear friend Sally Zigmond has begun a short story writing course on her blog, The Elephant In The Writing Room, and even if the short story is a form you've never even considered, I urge you to take part. ...
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I've moved all of my lovely old blog into this nice shiny new one, but there's a whole slew of posts which seem to have lost their comments in the move. And now my internet connection is wilting again.
I'll sort it all out early next week (I think I know what to do...) but ...
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Some posts should be arriving here soon from my old Blogger address. Meanwhile make yourselves at home, try out the furniture, and let me know what still needs sorting out. And wipe your feet before you come in or I'll have a hissy fit.
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I am a big smug show-off because I have lots of writer-friends. But I almost never ask my friends to discuss their own books on my blog because it gets embarrassing when I don't like their books.
There's no danger of that ...
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