Did You Know This?
By G. Miki Hayden
Instructor at Writer's Digest University online and private writing coach
firstwriter.com – Monday June 17, 2024
I was thinking about what to tell you from my many years of being in this writing game. Maybe you know a few of the following, or maybe not.
You need a Kindle, though perhaps you already have one. Good. This is important. I bought mine so many years ago I don’t remember the version and I need a new exterior cover. Oh well. The great thing is that these devices last and last.
New Literary Agent Listing: Steph Thwaites
firstwriter.com – Monday June 17, 2024
Represents a broad range of writers from debut authors to literary estates, number one and Sunday Times bestselling authors and prize winners writing quality commercial fiction and non-fiction, short stories, YA novels and middle grade fiction. She is currently seeking commercial fiction, thrillers, book-group fiction, romantic comedy and family dramas.
WRITING TODAY: The Realities of Running a New Playwriting Competition
bbc.com – Sunday June 16, 2024
For the last twelve years I’ve co-run Papatango, a theatre company (and registered charity) devoted to opening pathways into playwriting, especially for people who might otherwise have no access to theatre. My entire working life has coincided with austerity, seemingly bouncing from recession to recession, cutbacks piled on cutbacks, so it’s never been easy – but in the last couple of years, the challenges facing the arts, and the new writing sector especially, have exploded. Ironically – or, perhaps, consequently – our greatest successes have come in this period, notching up Olivier, Critics’ Circle, OffWestEnd and South Bank Sky Arts awards as well as a place in The Stage 25 list of industry leaders. That’s pretty good for a small company with no core funding, making world premieres with little known, often debut, writers. We veer from frowning anxiously over spreadsheets to smiling awkwardly at award ceremonies – but most people only see the successes, not the struggle.
That prompted me to share a transparent account on social media of what it takes to run an open call-out for new writing, and what the pressures and risks are. Despite these, we believe giving voice to new writers is more important in hard times than ever. But if we don’t understand the existential challenge facing such opportunities, we risk losing them. So here it is, an insight into Papatango, warts and all…
Publishing perils: why small isn’t always beautiful
thearticle.com – Sunday June 16, 2024
Sorting through a cupboard beneath the stairs, I discovered that many spare copies of my older books had suffered seriously from damp and would have to be thrown out. A few are salvageable, but not many. Beneath these it looks as if old opera programmes and copies of the Wide World which was edited by my grandfather, Victor Pit-Kethley, will have to meet a similar fate. It is sad, but at least many other copies of my old books were read elsewhere and have probably been better preserved by others around the world.
It has a parallel with a publishing disaster I have suffered in the last year. It is time to analyse what went wrong and see if anything can be salvaged. The main component in this disaster is the overpricing of my book, Washing Amethysts in the Bidet. An expensive printer and a lot of illustrations lay at the heart of this. The text could have stood alone without all the images. I have just checked the prices it is being offered for on various Amazon sites. Currently it is £41.38 in the UK, my chief market, €56.33 in Europe and $36.11 in the US. This is a normal size paperback. It is not a coffee table book. And of course, almost nobody wants to buy at those prices. A friend in Tasmania who was keen to read it found out that it would have cost her about £70 including postage. When I signed the contract a few years ago most of the paperbacks produced by this firm were circa £10. I had no way of knowing this was going to happen. Perhaps pricing is an element that should be covered in literary contracts, but it isn’t.
Across my 45 years or so of writing, my experiences of publishing have been very varied. With the largest publishers there was always a high level of competence. You had regular royalty statements and you got answers to letters or emails. This is not always true of the independents.
Lucy Holland to lead Curtis Brown Creative's new Writing Fantasy course
thebookseller.com – Friday June 14, 2024
Curtis Brown Creative (CBC) has launched its new Writing Fantasy course, taught by author Lucy Holland. It is the latest in CBC’s growing range of online courses, and follows the increased interest in fantasy novels.
Applications are now open for the nine-week course, which will run from 8th October to 3rd December. The programme will give 15 students the opportunity to take online teaching classes, workshops and one-to-one tutorials, as well as a Zoom masterclass with Fathomfolk author Eliza Chan (Orbit), and her C&W literary agent Alexander Cochran.
"We’ll be looking at worldbuilding on a character level, as well as ways in which fantasy can challenge us to write outside our direct experience," Holland said. "I’m also excited to cover popular subgenres like myth retellings and romantasy, and how to harness tropes to tell a compelling story."
Ursula K. Le Guin's home will become a writers residency
independent.co.uk – Monday June 10, 2024
Theo Downes-Le Guin, son of the late author Ursula K. Le Guin, remembers well the second-floor room where his mother worked on some of her most famous novels.
Or at least how it seemed from the outside.
“She was very present and accessible as a parent,” he says. "She was very intent on not burdening her children with her career. ... But the times when she was in there to do her writing, we knew that we needed to let her have her privacy.”
Downes-Le Guin, who also serves as his mother's literary executor, now hopes to give contemporary authors access to her old writing space. Literary Arts, a community nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon, announced Monday that Le Guin's family had donated their three-story house for what will become the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency.
Le Guin, who died in 2018 at age 88, was a Berkeley, California, native who in her early 30s moved to Portland with her husband, Charles. Le Guin wrote such classics as “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed” in her home, mostly in a corner space that evolved from a nursery for her three children to a writing studio.
New Literary Agent Listing: Hillary Fazzari
firstwriter.com – Monday June 10, 2024
A highly editorial agent, she is looking for high concept, high stakes stories with deep character development and gorgeous, commercial prose. Overall, she acquires primarily Middle Grade and YA, and is open to any genre in those areas, including graphic novels (but only with illustrators attached). In New Adult and Adult, she acquires more selectively and is open to unsolicited queries in: Rom-coms and rom-com adjacent material (including relevant genre mashups); Romantasy and other SFF/romance mashups (including romantic dystopian); and very select narrative nonfiction that focuses on history.
Books are my business: Founder of Fish Publishing Clem Cairns
irishexaminer.com – Sunday June 9, 2024
Clem Cairns is the founder of Fish Publishing, which he started with Jula Walton in 1994 with the aim of promoting the work of new writers.
It is based in Durrus, Co Cork, and every year publishes the Fish Anthology, featuring the winners of the Fish short story, short memoir, flash fiction and poetry prizes.
How did you get into publishing?
It is 30 years now since we founded Fish Publishing. I was trying to be a writer and there weren’t that many outlets in Ireland at that time for new writers, particularly for short fiction. Myself and my partner Jula Walton decided we would publish short Irish fiction, and we would do it by running a competition.
That was the initial idea. We called it Fish Publishing because I was working on a fishing trawler out of Schull at the time to earn the money to publish my first book of short stories. It was a good metaphor — casting out a net and hauling in the stories. We wanted to promote and encourage a new generation of Irish writers. After a few years, the internet happened and it went worldwide.
Inside Danielle Steel’s Writing Process: Needing ‘Everything Perfect to Start’ And Why She Still Gets Scared
people.com – Sunday June 9, 2024
Danielle Steel has written 212 books — so far — but the bestselling author still feels the pang of nerves before starting a new draft and the thrill of seeing the finished product on shelves when each publication day rolls around.
"It doesn't get old," she told PEOPLE, for a story in this week's print issue. "I'm always grateful. But also, I'm always scared in the beginning. I never think, 'Oh, I can do this. No big deal.' I'm always scared I won't get it right, or it won't be as good as it should be."
The author says it usually takes about 200 pages before she can really relax, and she strives to make her books "better every time."
Her writing process begins with an outlines she does by hand, accompanied by exhaustive research, much of which she does herself because that attention to detail is what makes her books credible, and keeps her readers coming back.
Writers’ Guild of Great Britain demands fair pay for writers ahead of general election
thebookseller.com – Thursday June 6, 2024
The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) has called on the next government to “enshrine protections for writers” in its manifesto recommendations ahead of the forthcoming general election.
The trade union representing writers wants the next government to implement its recommendations around fair pay, fair treatment, sustainability, and copyright and AI.
Ellie Peers, general secretary of WGGB, said: “Writing is a highly skilled job and everything starts with the writer – without them there would be no feature films, TV or audio dramas, no plays, no books, poems or videogames.
“They provide the fuel that fires our creative industries, which in turn makes a major contribution to the UK economy.”
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