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February 2009

The website for writers

News Review

• The number of new books published in the UK increased by 4% last year to 120,947, with English language books published worldwide increasing by a whopping 31% to 381,250. News Review looks at what lies behind these figures.

• Amazon has just delivered some sparkling results against a background of retail collapsing. What next for the Kindle and what does this domination mean for the book business? News Review investigates.

• This week's News Review looks at book discounting, actually higher in the UK in 2008 than 2007 - and asks whether it's a danger or an opportunity.

• So who are the most popular fiction writers across the globe? News Review looks at a new study which shows that Ken Follett and Khaled Hosseini feature in more bestseller lists than any other writers in the nine countries studied.

• Children’s books are still doing well in spite of the recession. News Review looks at what's working and some publicly-funded UK programmes which are making a difference.

Comment

• 'People will compare the fresh, untainted voice of my 29-year old self that was completely unselfconscious about writing (it) because I didn’t think anyone was going to read it.  It was innocent, it wasn't trying to be anything, it just was.' Lisa Jewell, author of Ralph's Party, in the Bookseller on working with a new editor and writing a sequel.

• 'Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.' Carl Sagan

• 'Times Books as we know it will be no more, but books themselves, thankfully, seem shockproof against change.  Neither economics nor e-readers will oust the beloved book. We don't stop reading because we are poor, any more than book lovers will give up books for their electronic lookalikes.' Jeanette Winterson, in her final column in Times Books.

• 'Through today’s gloom we may discern a spectacularly bright future in which the rewards to writers and readers and even to publishers will be unprecedented as world-wide multilingual backlists expand online in a cultural revolution orders of magnitude greater than Gutenberg’s world-changing technology generated five centuries ago.’ Jason Epstein, author of Book Business

• 'The heart and soul of any publishing business is its editorial department, the men and women who, crudely, acquire the 'content' on which the imprint depends...  Gone are the days, with rare exceptions, when an editor's positive enthusiasm for a new book could trump the negative anxieties of the sales department, almost the only books that now generate much excitement among publishers are would-be bestsellers.  Robert McCrum in the Observer

Writers' Quote

'If you can't annoy somebody with what you write, I think there's little point in writing.'
Kingsley Amis

 

Sell, don't tell

Some do’s and don’ts if you want to sell a script

If you want to turn your book, dream or idea into a performance script for film, stage or radio, it is going to be a very tough pitch. There are a some pretty strict ‘rules’ which you need to follow if you are to maximise your chance of success. Chas Jones's two part article shows you how to make a successful pitch. Part 1 and Part 2

Getting published

Chas Jones looks at a recent success on our self-publishing service, WritersPrintShop, A Sumerian Observation of the Kofels Impact Event, an intriguing book about a clay tablet on which in 700 BC a Sumerian astronomer had made a copy of a document about an unusual event in 3123 BC. For 150 years this enigmatic tablet had puzzled scholars in the British Museum, now the authors have worked out what the clay tablet said.  

Thanks to the opportunities offered by self-publishing, the authors were able to bypass traditional publishing and publish their book themselves through WritersPrintShop, reaching a global audience through the Internet.

Agents' Listings

The new agents' listings are now available on the site. Coming from the 2009 Writers' and Artists' Yearbook, these listings can be searched and provide the most up-to-date information about literary agents across the world:

UK agents

US agents

Agents from the rest of the world

Children's specialist agents

Writers' and Artists' Yearbook 2009

Our review of the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook

Changes in the book trade

This new series by Chris Holifield looks at the book trade and investigates how fundamental changes in how it works are affecting writers. 

The first article is on Bookselling, the second on  Publishing, the third on Print on demand, the fourth on Self-publishing - 'really great' or career suicide?, the fifth on Writers' routes to their audiences, the sixth at at copyright under pressure and the seventh deals with Creative Commons.

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WritersServices.com Magazine February 2009

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