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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
If you’re keen to discover exactly what a literary agent does, take a look at Andrew Lownie’s website.He’s a fabulous agent and has written several very candid articles about his work, in which he discusses his reasons for rejecting submissions, details his daily routines, and reveals his submissions statistics. It’s funny as ...
There’s a certain sort of writer that I’ve met a lot of over the years: I’ll call her Angela. Writing means a lot to Angela. She considers it a form of high art: an expression of her true nature. She keeps her writing secret for a long time and when she finally lets her friend Beverly ...
Over the last three days I’ve read commenters on several blogs and message boards insisting that the race, gender or political affiliation is the single reason certain writers get rejected, regardless of the quality of their writing.Under the current submissions system, writers send their work in to agents and/or editors; then their work ...
If you want to be published well, you have to start off by doing plenty of research. Do your research before you start writing, so you know if your book has commercial potential and if you really know what you think you know, or if it's actually all assumption and myth. Do your research before you start ...
New writers often wonder if they're doing things right. Should they write in longhand or type straight to screen? Should they revise as they go, or just get their first draft down? Should they make it up as they go along, or plan everything out before they write a single word? Where writing ...
This week I've read of several people whose computers' hard drives have failed: most of them ended up losing their work or paying someone a lot of money to recover their work, but when it happened to me I didn't lose a single bit of work and it only cost me £20, thanks to my ...
I’d advise anyone with the offer of a contract but no agent to negotiate it for them to head straight for the Society of Authors. Once you have that offer in your hand you can join for a relatively low fee (£90 at the time of writing) and once you’ve joined you can send ...