A manifesto for self-publishing authors
thebookseller.com – Monday September 7, 2015
I hereby declare: That I will not renege on the best publishing opportunities for authors ever and I will not allow the publishing industry to renege on its responsibilities to writers and readers...
Bill Clegg on Novel Writing, Agenting, and Obsessing Over Sufjan Stevens
vogue.com – Saturday September 5, 2015
Those who have watched Bill Clegg's career from afar might believe he has nine lives. Clegg is first and foremost a literary agent, and, as a recent Vanity Fair profile asserts, one of the biggest in the industry. He's also a best-selling memoirist...
Can authors compete with 'non-competes'?
thebookseller.com – Saturday August 29, 2015
No publisher would agree, at an author's request, to forgo publishing another author's book on a particular subject. So why should an author assume a similar obligation? But it happens all the time.
Rude awakening: three essential rules for writing good sex
theguardian.com – Friday August 28, 2015
Serious fiction should not ignore physical love, but it's hard to get right. Here are a few lessons I've learned.
Top Tips for "Aspiring" Writers
huffingtonpost.co.uk – Wednesday August 26, 2015
I'm often asked if I have any nuggets of wisdom for aspiring writers.
Being me; terrible at stringing sentences together verbally, and often angsty about my work, I tend to deflect, self-deprecatingly, and redirect the question back into the conversation.
A Book Well Worth the Wait
publishersweekly.com – Sunday August 23, 2015
An editor publishes a book by a writer whose work he fell in love with 20 years ago.
Revealed: Why the Dragon Tattoo girl is really a man (...and why Stieg Larsson wrote off Inspector Morse)
dailymail.co.uk – Sunday August 23, 2015
The heroine should act like a man while the hero should be a ‘bimbo' – and neither should ever behave like Inspector Morse.
These are the bizarre rules of crime writing, according to the stunningly successful author of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
ePublish and Be Damned!
huffingtonpost.com – Saturday August 22, 2015
There's an old cliché in the ink stained trade from which I hail, "Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it."
But in 2004, when I was young, dumb and full of cum, I paid no heed to caution or wisdom. I had a daredevil idea, for a non-fiction book about jails in the USA, and submitted the proposal to several literary agencies based out of London.
Making a living from writing, writing from making a living
theguardian.com – Thursday August 20, 2015
For authors from Ken Kesey to Nathan Filer and Christie Watson, conventional working life has provided a vital resource – and not only in getting the rent paid.
Reply to a bad review
firstwriter.com – Thursday August 20, 2015
In the years that we've been publishing our Writers' Handbook and other titles we've been pleased to get a lot of good reviews: previous editions score averages of four stars on Amazon, and an amazing 70% of reviewers for our 2015 edition gave it the maximum score: five out of five. Customers have called it "excellent", a "wonderful book" and "a must have for writers" – but, inevitably, amongst the generally positive reviews there are also the occasional negative ones. This is only to be expected, of course – you can't please all of the people all of the time – but it can be frustrating when the criticism comes not from a fault with the book, but a customer's misunderstanding of the intent. This isn't the customer's fault, of course – it identifies that, in that instance, we've failed to adequately communicate the reasons for the choices that have been made.
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