It's been a pretty good year for publishers. Bertelsmann revenues were the highest for seven years, although admittedly its profits were down and the acquisition of Penguin is part of the mix. Read more
It's a sign of the times that previously unknown British author E L James has topped the New York Times bestseller list with an erotic romance, Fifty Shades of Grey. Read more
This week's there's an interesting story from the US about writer Kate Alcott, whose first novel The Dressmaker has just sold 35,000 copies in hardback and been sold for translation in five countries. It seems explicable in terms of the subject-matter because The Dressmaker is about a seamstress who goes on board the Titanic as a lady's maid, is wooed by two men from Read more
The staggering number of 285,000 new titles and editions were self-published and published by community presses in the US last year, balanced against a slightly lower figure of 275,000 coming from traditional publishing houses. Read more
So how does the world look as we venture forth into the new decade? This week we'll look at the US and next week at the UK publishing worlds in an attempt to assess how the turmoil in the book trade is affecting writers.
This weekend the Javits Center in New York has been thronged with the thousands of people attending BookExpo, the biggest annual book show in North America. It's clear from the coverage that a mass of interesting author events and the usual promotional round are making this BookExpo seem as busy as ever, and attendance figures are only slightly down. Read more
How is the economic slowdown affecting books? We've managed to stay off the subject of the recession for over two months, so now is the time to have another look at how it is affecting the book business. Read more
No sooner had the dust settled on Bertlesmann's surprise appointment of German print supremo Markus Dohle to succeed Peter Olson as CEO of Random House US, than another unexpected change hit the American publishing world. Jane Friedman, the successful and popular head of HarperCollins, also announced her immediate departure. Read more
In News Review of 5 Novemberwe noted the beginning of the Writers' Guild strike in the US. Since then there have been occasional stories in the media about tv companies being forced to put out a diet of reruns and American audiences deserting their tv screens. Read more
'Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time.
As children, our minds are filled with magic. With all of the information we absorb at a young age, there is no wonder that being a children's author can be very rewarding. Speaking of rewards, a children's author can start off small but eventually make a serious living! Adults that once read their favorite children's book to sleep will eventually read it to their child. Read more
The business school at the Chinese University of Hong Kong has not perhaps inspired many poets. But when Mary Jean Chan describes her journey to becoming one of the world's most promising and admired young writers, she names her decision to leave the business school as a pivotal moment. Read more
When our writing resists us - when it refuses to do as we hope - we often respond with ever more force, pushing it to bend to our will. We ask a friend to tell us which "darlings" to murder. We go through with a red pencil, slashing words. Read more
Fern Michaels is women's fiction royalty and a publishing legend. The author of the wildly popular Sisterhood series, Michaels has written more than 150 books, more than half of which have been New York Times and USA Today bestsellers. She has 75 million books in print, and her work has been translated into 20 languages.
My grandmother read one novel in her life. She told me that fact on more than one occasion and I rather suspect that she enjoyed shocking me with it. Imagine: one single book in 88 years! The much-honored volume was Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, consumed in the wake of Richard Chamberlain doing his conflicted-man-of-the-cloth bit in the 1980s mini-series. Read more
Suppose you've been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated developments in science, technology, and society and ask how they will play out. Telepresence, mind-uploading, an aging population: an elderly couple live far from their daughter and grandchildren; one day, the pair knock on her door as robots. Read more
For a while we were told that books were going to be a thing of the past. A new century had dawned, our lives were being digitised and surely there was no longer any reason to lug the pressed pulp of dead trees around. And yet, over the past decade, it seems clear that the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated. Read more
'Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Read more
'Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.'
Do genre writers receive adequate respect from the literary establishment? ‘Everything's upside down. They assume that to do something that appeals to a huge audience is somehow easier than to do something that appeals to a tiny audience. Because we do a book a year people think you just crank a handle and out it comes.
It's funny, but if you'd asked me a few years ago (when I was 14 and had just finished the first draft of Inside Out) whether the book had anything to do with my disability, I would have given you an emphatic "No". My writing has always been a part of me, much like my disability, but for a long time I kept the two things stubbornly separate. Read more
'If you aren't growing as a writer, you are dead.'
'Dear Aspiring Writer, you are not ready. Stop. Put that finished story away and start another one. In a month, go back and look at the first story. RE-EDIT it. Then send it to a person you respect in the field who will be hard on you. Pray for many many many red marks. Fix them. Then put it away for two weeks. Work on something else. Finally, edit one last time. Read more