Those of you who are following my analysis of an article written by publisher and self-proclaimed Authors' Business Manager, David Rozansky, might like to take a look at Lynn Price's interesting piece over at Behler Publications' always-useful blog. Lynn has started a lively debate on the side-issue of whether or not POD publishing ...
When I read this story in the Daily Mail online last April I assumed it was some sort of hoax: a writer left her manuscript on Richard and Judy's doorstep in the hope of getting herself a book deal and as if by magic, she ...
This blog post is the second in a series in which I analyse an article written by David Rozansky, publisher of Flying Pen Press, regarding the recent decision by literary agent Andrew Wylie to set up his own publishing house and license e-book rights to some of his clients’ works exclusively to ...
I'm pleased to say that a new series of Sue Cook's The Write Lines starts on BBC Radio Oxford on Sunday 5 September, with a stellar line up of publishing's best, and one or two of its worst. It goes out live from 9pm, for one hour and as soon as I find ...
A few weeks ago I spotted a link on Twitter to an article by David Rozansky, publisher of Flying Pen Press. He had written about literary agent Andew Wylie's new publishing venture, Odyssey Editions. I disagreed with a lot of what he’d written, and said so; and along came Mr Rozansky to ask ...
Stories about big advances make good publicity, and so it’s in the publisher’s interests to make these advances sound as big as possible while keeping their actual expenditure as low as they can possibly manage in order to satisfy their accountants and shareholders. So when publishers announce these big deals to the media they’ll often ...
Think again. And read this article from Paul Carr at TechCrunch, in which he provides some pretty safe reasoning which he backs up with facts, figures and citations. It's well worth a read. Although some of the comments which follow contain assumptions and statements which are more than a little dubious.
This is the final part of the talk I gave at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. You can read part I here, and part II here. The Writing Business 44) So, once you’re sure your writing is as good as it can be, you have to work out where to submit it. How can ...
This is part two of the talk I gave at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this week. You can read the first part here, and the final part will appear tomorrow. The Writing Business 25) How hard is it to get an agent? Let’s look at some statistics. 26) At her talk at the Romantic ...
Two days ago I spoke at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (get me!), on the subject of The Writing Business. I'd never done anything like this before, so I was very lucky to share the stage with Keith Charters of Strident Publishing and to have the event chaired by the writer Eric ...
A few weeks ago the London-based literary agent Andrew Wylie announced that he was forming his own publishing company named Odyssey Editions in order to publish the agency’s clients in electronic book format; and that Odyssey had signed an exclusive deal with Amazon, so that those e-books would only be available for the ...
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 ...
Last spring, a writer called Mary Walters suggested that literary agents are killing literature by rejecting work which they consider unmarketable (she provided a nice piece of meta-analysis by simultaneously discussing the discussion which followed over at Authonomy*). Mary proposed that as the work that agents reject doesn't get seen by editors, it doesn't ...
Last spring, the lovely Sally Zigmond linked to this interesting article on her blog. It's a great piece about the value—or not—of publishing by non-mainstream routes.It's essential reading for writers—particularly those who believe that some sort of Great Publishing Conspiracy is in operation to stop new writers from getting published, and ...
On March 17 of this year I posted some self-publishing sales statistics courtesy of Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, and I thought it might be interesting to play around with them a little. I should have been an accountant. In the article I quoted, Victoria wrote, "According to a 2004 article in Publishers Weekly, ...