Last month’s announcement that Penguin had signed Pippa Middleton to write a party-planning book for an advance reported to be close to £500,000 caused a bit of a stir in the writing-related corner of the internet. For a couple of days Twitter was clogged with editors, agents and writers despairing about the deal and even…
Category Archives: publishing
YouWriteOn Dissolved?
Regular readers of this blog might remember that in September 2008 I blogged about YouWriteOn’s offer to publish the first 5,000 writers who submitted their work, and that I wrote a few more blog posts about YouWriteOn in the subsequent months. YouWriteOn’s publishing scheme was ill-conceived and badly organised: few books were actually published by…
Why Did They Have It Coming?
Last autumn I ran a short series of blog posts called They Had It Coming, Indeed, in which I analysed a single article written by David A Rozansky, proprietor of Flying Pen Press. My analysis was detailed and pedantic and ran to five posts and a bit, which was significantly longer than the original piece….
Getting Published Is Not Enough: Part IV
This is the fourth and final part of an extended version of a talk I gave at the Festival Of Writing in York this year: you can find the earlier parts here, here and here. f 11) What happens if your book gets nothing but rejections? a) Remember that most writers don’t get their first…
Getting Published Is Not Enough: Part III
This is the third part of an extended version of a talk I gave at the Festival Of Writing in York this year: you can find the first and second parts here and here, and the final part will appear in two days. k 8) So, now we know why we have to be published…
Getting Published Is Not Enough: Part II
On March 26 2011 I appeared at the Festival of Writing in York and talked about the importance of being published well. This is the second part of an extended version of my talk: you can read the first part of it here and the remaining parts will appear here next week. ; 4) Fast…
Bingo!
Yes, I know that other people blogged about this days ago but you know me: I’m a dinosaur and quite remarkably behind the times. I’ve been playing Internet Forum Flounce Bingo for years, but I think it’s time I moved to Electronic Publising Bingo, devised by John Scalzi. It’s a fabulous game: so easy to…
Is It Rude To Ask?
When we want to move house, we find a house that we think might suit and then we ask the estate agent how many bedrooms it has, where it is, how much it’s going to cost us, what sort of state it’s in, and all sorts of other questions too. Asking questions isn’t enough to…
Festival Of Writing, York
This year, the Festival of Writing at the University of York runs from Friday 25 March to Sunday 27, with an optional hangover morning on Monday 28. Be there or be square and heckle Nicola Morgan and me: we’re each running workshops and would love to meet you. I think Nicola’s sessions are sold out…
Publishers’ Websites: How Do You Like Them?
A couple of weeks ago an editor asked on Twitter what people wanted to find when they visited publishers’ websites. You can guess what I said: my books, in prime position. But that was no help to the editor concerned who has more to consider than my ego, like attracting new customers, selling more books,…
Amazon Gives Authors Access To Nielsen BookScan
Yesterday it was announced that Amazon is going to provide access to Nielsen BookScan to all authors who have signed up to its Author Central service. By the magic of the internet, writers will now be able to see their sales mapped out in Amazon-blue and white. I suspect this will only work for US…
Brit Writers’ Awards
Earlier this year I began to see questions about the Brit Writers’ Award competitions cropping up on writers’ message boards. Writers were being notified left, right and centre that they had made it through to the various shortlists; very few writers who entered ended up being told that their work hadn’t made it that far;…
Stealing Is Not Acceptable No Matter What You Call It
On Friday, while I was in the middle of the whirl of posts that so many of you lovely people wrote about copyright, two things jumped up and waved at me. First I received a Google alert which showed that someone had copied seven posts from my blog and pasted them into his without permission…
How I Got Published: Nik Perring
We all know Nik Perring. He’s a good friend and an even better writer, and I’m thrilled to be able to hand my blog over to him for today. First off, I’ll apologise in advance if this is either boring or unhelpful or both. But my route to publication was, compared with the routes of…
What Is Your Platform?
Writers are often told that in order to sell their books they’re going to need one of those remarkable things, A Platform. This isn’t something you can just buy from your local hardware shop: it’s something you really have to build yourself, and often writers aren’t even aware that they’re doing so. Essentially, a writer’s…
Reverse Vanity Publishing
You used to know right where you were with vanity publishers. They charged an extortionate amount to print a few copies of your unedited book and left you to do all the selling. That upfront charge was the way to spot them: no reputable publisher charges its authors anything. Eventually, most writers got wise to…
Mainstream Publishing Is Not Scared of Self-Publishing
(Not even when it jumps out from behind the literary sofa and shouts BOO!) A couple of weeks ago on the social whirl that is Twitter, someone suggested to me that the reason that commercial publishers are so dismissive of self- and vanity-publishers is that they are either scared of them, or in denial over…
They Had It Coming Indeed: Part V
This is the last in a short series of posts in which I analyse an article written by David Rozansky, publisher of Flying Pen Press, regarding literary agent Andrew Wylie’s decision to set up his own publishing house in order to publish some of his clients’ works exclusively in Amazon’s Kindle format. You can read…
Don’t Forget To Listen To ME!
As if you didn’t know already, I’ll be taking part in the live (gulp!) radio programme The Write Lines between nine and ten o’clock tonight, staring in a bit of a fan-girl way at all the other guests. Enjoying the canapes and the excellent chocolate brownies will be Nick Harkaway, who wrote the brilliant The Gone-away…