The World Of Book Publishing Is A Mystery To Many, So We Did Our Best To Show You Behind-The-Scenes
buzzfeed.com – Monday December 19, 2022
Just because an author's name is what's on the front of the book, doesn't mean they're the only one involved!
Do you ever think about how something can go from words on a document to a gorgeous bound book you can hold in your hands?
For books that are traditionally published, this process can take several steps and many different people behind the scenes. So, we wanted to dive in and see what a day in the life might be for folks who are in some of these positions, and luckily, we get to share that with all of you!
Quick reminder, though, that every publisher is different, and every process is different.
Let's imagine this as a journey for our completely and totally made up author Will Shakespeare. Hi, Will! (See below.) In this piece, we'll go through some of the steps you might see in the course of a book's voyage and talk to some epic people who are part of these journeys. Let's get into it.
Q & A with Literary Agent Vanessa
keepthefaith.co.uk – Monday December 19, 2022
Introduction
I am a literary agent at The Authors Care Agency Ltd. My wonderful, talented authors include USA Todaybestseller, Parker J. Cole, who writes historical fiction for Mills & Boon; Nichola K. Johnson, psychological domestic thriller author; and renowned vocalist, Lloyd Wade, who has a very successful music career and writes within the crime and thriller genre. The list is growing and I thank God for the great success achieved so far.
Tell us about your role as a literary agent
A literary agent’s main role is to sell their authors’ manuscripts to publishers. Agents are their authors’ biggest cheerleader and, at times, counsellor. Personally, I like to make sure my authors are doing OK, and if they have writer’s block, we talk through the manuscript together to come up with ideas. Usually, it’s a matter of the author just needing to take a break. I tend to help promote my authors’ books when they are on the market. I check royalty payments, statements and contracts. The role is very varied and I really enjoy it.
Writers defect from Society of Authors to rival union after it was engulfed in freedom of speech row over claims it has not properly defended gender-critical authors from being 'cancelled'
dailymail.co.uk – Monday December 19, 2022
Writers reportedly leave the Society of Authors for a rival union after the former was engulfed in a freedom of speech row over claims it has not properly defended gender-critical authors from being 'cancelled'.
As the UK's largest writers' union, the Society of Authors has upset members over claims it did not support figures like JK Rowling who have been accused of 'transphobia'.
Authors who feared the union was 'lost to cancel culture' are already understood to be defecting to the rival Free Speech Union, which promised to 'come to defence of beleaguered authors'.
How To Publish Your First Book and Sell It Online?
chartattack.com – Saturday December 17, 2022
Are you an aspiring author who dreams of seeing their name on the bestseller list? Publishing a book can be an incredibly rewarding experience, but it can also be quite challenging. In this blog post, we will outline a step-by-step guide on how to publish your first book and sell it online. We’ll also discuss some helpful tips and tricks that will make the publishing process easier for you. So, if you’re ready to take your writing career to the next level, keep reading!
He Used AI to Publish a Children’s Book in a Weekend. Artists Are Not Happy About It
time.com – Thursday December 15, 2022
Ammaar Reshi was playing around with ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot from OpenAI when he started thinking about the ways artificial intelligence could be used to make a simple children’s book to give to his friends. Just a couple of days later, he published a 12-page picture book, printed it, and started selling it on Amazon without ever picking up a pen and paper.
The feat, which Reshi publicized in a viral Twitter thread, is a testament to the incredible advances in AI-powered tools like ChatGPT—which took the internet by storm two weeks ago with its uncanny ability to mimic human thought and writing. But the book, Alice and Sparkle, also renewed a fierce debate about the ethics of AI-generated art. Many argued that the technology preys on artists and other creatives—using their hard work as source material, while raising the specter of replacing them.
Budding authors invited to ‘tweet their pitch’ to secure book deal
futurescot.com – Wednesday December 14, 2022
Budding authors are being invited to use Twitter and ‘tweet their pitch’ in order to secure a book deal.
The call to action came from XpoNorth Digital, a creative industries festival which takes place on Friday 20 January 2023.
Writers will be able to put their ideas forward to a panel of literary agents by using a maximum of 280 characters on the social networking platform.
On the day, they will have from 9am to 9pm to express themselves using the hashtag #XpoNorth to be in with the chance of a book deal.
Open to all genres of work, fiction, non-fiction and children’s writing will be accepted, and the only stipulation is that it must be unpublished.
New Publisher Listing: Regal House Publishing
firstwriter.com – Monday December 12, 2022
A traditional independent press dedicated, in collaborative effort with its authors, to the furtherance of finely crafted literature for adult, young adult, and middle grade readers.
Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel?
newyorker.com – Saturday December 10, 2022
During one of my more desperate phases as a young novelist, I began to question whether I should actually be writing my own stories. I was deeply uninterested at the time in anything that resembled a plot, but I acknowledged that if I wanted to attain any sort of literary success I would need to tell a story that had a distinct beginning, middle, and end.
This was about twenty years ago. My graduate-school friends and I were obsessed with a Web site called the Postmodernism Generator that spat out nonsensical but hilarious critical-theory papers. The site, which was created by a coder named Andrew C. Bulhak, who was building off Jamie Zawinski’s Dada Engine, is still up today, and generates fake scholarly writing that reads like, “In the works of Tarantino, a predominant concept is the distinction between creation and destruction. Marx’s essay on capitalist socialism holds that society has objective value. But an abundance of appropriations concerning not theory, but subtheory exist.”
I figured that, if a bit of code could spit out an academic paper, it could probably just tell me what to write about. Most plots, I knew, followed very simple rules, and, because I couldn’t quite figure out how to string one of these out, I began talking to some computer-science graduate students about the possibilities of creating a bot that could just tell me who should go where, and what should happen to them. What I imagined was a simple text box in which I could type in a beginning—something like “A man and his dog arrive in a small town in Indiana”—and then the bot would just tell me that, on page 3, after six paragraphs of my beautiful descriptions and taut prose, the dog would find a mysterious set of bones in the back yard of their boarding house.
After a couple months of digging around, it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to find much backing for my plan. One of the computer-science students, as I recall, accused me of trying to strip everything good, original, and beautiful from the creative process. Bots, he argued, could imitate basic writing and would improve at that task, but A.I. could never tell you the way Karenin smiled, nor would it ever fixate on all the place names that filled Proust’s childhood. I understood why he felt that way, and agreed to a certain extent. But I didn’t see why a bot couldn’t just fill in all the parts where someone walks from point A to point B.
Markus Dohle Steps Down as Penguin Random House CEO
publishersweekly.com – Saturday December 10, 2022
Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle has relinquished his position at the head of the publisher, just weeks after a federal judge blocked the publisher’s attempt to acquire rival Big Five publisher Simon & Schuster. In a December 9 announcement, officials at PRH parent company Bertelsmann said Dohle will step down as CEO and resign his seat on the Bertelsmann executive board at the end of 2022 “at his own request and on the best of mutual terms,” though he will continue to serve in an undefined “advisory" role.
“Following the antitrust decision in the U.S. against the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, I have decided, after nearly 15 years on the Executive Board of Bertelsmann and at the helm of our global publishing business, to hand over the next chapter of Penguin Random House to new leadership,” Dohle said in a statement. “I have led our global book business with great enthusiasm and passion and I am proud of what we have achieved together.”
Sam Lipsyte on the What and the How of Writing
lithub.com – Friday December 9, 2022
Content and style are not separate things. They are different aspects—the what and the how—of the same thing. By the how I mean the way certain syntactical arrangements of words set off chains of thought and emotion and even physical sensation in the reader, create a kind of energy field within which one experiences the text. By the what I just mean whatever somebody is writing about: love, work, art, war, school, politics, sex, faith, family, death. Life, basically, life with others and life alone, the end of life. This is the content. Style is your filter on all of this, the way you see it and feel it— tragically, tragicomically—and how it summons language in you, how life comes to be alive on the page.
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