New Publisher Listing: Mensch Publishing
firstwriter.com – Thursday August 18, 2022
No mission statement nor other worthy but meaningless platitudes. Its aim is simply to help authors reach readers with minimal intervention and maximum impact and to reward them proportionately.
Writing a Romance versus Writing a Mystery
crimereads.com – Wednesday August 17, 2022
Is there that big a difference between falling in love and solving a murder?
Um, yes, there is, especially when writing about love and murder. For me, it’s not just about content but about the craft and process of writing in those separate genres. I find it fascinating that although I’ve been writing for over twenty years, my beginning process for writing cozy mysteries is vastly different than it is for writing in the romance genre.
I started writing romances because I love to read them. It’s not a billion dollar industry for nothing! Comprised of formulaic and original plots, as well as a guaranteed happily ever after (HEA,) the genre breeds voracious readers who want engaging lead characters, a romantic main plot, and that all-important HEA (or HFN—happily for now, which has become accepted in the genre.)
New Publishing Imprint Listing: Red Feather
firstwriter.com – Wednesday August 17, 2022
Seeks to create groundbreaking sacred tools with a purpose that are made with pride, giving honor to the subject matter of each and every project.
New Magazine Listing: Shorts Magazine
firstwriter.com – Wednesday August 17, 2022
Online magazine published four times a year, and includes short fiction, flash fiction, sci-fi, life writing, poetry, essays, science, research, opinion pieces, monologues, drama, top ten lists, photography, featured artists.
New Literary Agent Listing: Beniamino Ambrosi
firstwriter.com – Wednesday August 17, 2022
Represents English-language nonfiction and literary fiction, and authors in translation.
New Magazine Listing: The Soho Review
firstwriter.com – Tuesday August 16, 2022
Humor magazine based in New York. Constantly looking for jokes, cartoons, poems, and short stories. Pitch ideas by email.
Unwritten — The crisis in creative writing
honisoit.com – Monday August 15, 2022
When she sat down to craft her debut novel in 2020’s lockdown, months after finishing her undergraduate degree, Diana Reid had never considered a career in writing before. An incisive debut about the interplay of sexuality, feminism, and power at an Australian university campus, Love and Virtue (2021) surfaced to overflowing critical acclaim and was named Book of the Year by the Australian publishing industry in June.
But, in hindsight, it very well might not have been written.
“It kind of terrifies me, actually,” Reid says. “I was so dependent on this very freak circumstance [lockdown] before I actually sat down and opened a blank word document.”
Writers and Liars: On Fact, Fiction, and Truth
lithub.com – Sunday August 14, 2022
I’ve often heard authors say that fiction is merely lies. George R. R. Martin has said that “we’re writing about people who never existed and events that never happened…[a]ll those things are essentially untrue.” Norman Spinrad characterizes these fictional lies as differentiating the genre from “biography, history, or reportage.” The list of writers with this viewpoint goes on and on. There’s even a fiction writing group, for whom I once had the pleasure of being a guest speaker, called the Pocono Liars Club.
It’s not hard to understand this perspective. As a novelist, I do make things up for a living. But I believe the job of the author is to tell emotional truths, and that the best way to do that is rarely by relaying facts and figures or repeating events just as they happened. Journalism and documentaries have an important place and often use the same toolbox as fiction does, however, fiction is uniquely suited to truth-telling because humans have storytelling baked into our DNA. We understand the world best through stories, and these are an incredible way to arrive at something approaching a universal truth.
Richard Charkin: Dear Literary Agent
publishingperspectives.com – Friday August 12, 2022
Friends and colleagues, I may sometimes have given the impression that I hold literary agents in lower esteem than they feel they deserve.
Indeed, I’ve sometimes lumped together all professions with agency in their names as 10-percenters and slightly below the salt. Think of travel agents, estate agents—realtors in the United States sounds better—talent agents, football agents, all of whom seem to cream off money from unwary individuals and add very little.
Indeed, when I was at Oxford University Press, we were once asked by a distinguished literary agent if he could come to Oxford to meet the editors of the various disciplines in order to offer them choice manuscripts by his authors. We agreed on the condition that he paid us £1,000 [US$1,222] for access to our very busy editors, who had plenty of authors without the intercession of a literary agent. He declined.
Why We Need Independent Publishers
newsletters.theatlantic.com – Tuesday August 9, 2022
Along with most everyone I know who works in or otherwise relies on book publishing for their livelihood, I’ve been following the Biden administration’s antitrust case against the proposed Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster merger. Last week, as John H. Maher of Publishers Weekly live-tweeted us through the opening days of the trial, my timeline was filled with [skull-emoji] quote-tweets of things that many of us aren’t used to hearing folks in publishing say out loud. PRH lawyers have argued that “after the merger, the market dynamic will be just the same,” while the DOJ maintains that combining two of the “Big Five” publishers into one would decrease the number of offers an author might receive, lower book advances, and make it harder for writers to support themselves. In a pretrial brief, the DOJ stated that if the merger goes forward, it “would … give the merged company control of nearly half of the market to acquire anticipated top-selling books from authors”—a point underlined by Stephen “My name is Stephen King, I’m a freelance writer” King when he took the stand last Tuesday. “Consolidation is bad for competition,” he said.
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