As Christmas draws closer, I thought I’d look back a couple of years to when I chatted to three writers about how they manage their writing businesses during the festive period. In the world of paid employment December is one long month of office parties, Christmas lunches, and arguing with Health and Safety about the fire risk of the red tinsel framing your computer monitor. It’s an entirely different matter for writers. Working in our isolated garrets means the office…
As part of the Shrewsbury Literary Festival, one of the The Guardian’s regular contributors to the Country Diary series, Paul Evans, spoke about his new book: . He explained how the publishers, Batsford Books, were keen to re-vist some of their earlier published works with a view to updating them for a new, modern readership.
Last weekend I retreated. It’s an annual thing with the writers’ group I go to. Three or four nights, somewhere cheap (well, we are writers!), which is usually in Wales, and an opportunity to immerse ourselves in one or two of our current writing projects. It’s always interesting watching how other writers work. Whenever we go anywhere new, the sense of exploration overwhelms us. Then there are the midnight walks to beaches, and the evening social gatherings. But at some…
When it comes to the business of writing, one of the most important tools is the software we use to collect our words and thoughts and put them into some sort of order. For years, this has been Microsoft Word, and its .doc and .docx file types are the industry standard when it comes to submitting to publishers. So I was interested to read this post on the Guardian’s website, about how Word is losing its shine, even in large…
Have you ever written naked? No, I’m not talking about those times when you can’t being bothered to get dressed in the morning (although, perhaps that might influence what you write). Instead, I’m talking about being free to write what you want to write. SJ (Sarah) Banham has just published a book of writing prompts, which she’s called Writing Naked, that are designed to undress writers from the fashionable constraints we sometimes put ourselves under, if not the constraints of…
It can be daunting, sometimes, sitting down to write an article. So when the editor of Writing Magazine asked me to write six pieces for a series called the Business of Writing I was both excited and a little intimidated. Could I come up with six ideas? Actually, the answer was yes. But coming up with six ideas is not the same as coming up with six complete articles. I managed it. Not only that, but I kept managing it….
A couple of years ago author Jennie Ensor shared with me her thoughts about how, via the publishers Unbound, she’d crowdfunded her novel . I began by asking her why she’d chosen this particular route. What had led her to make this decision?
Write book. Publish Book. Go on book tour in nightwear. Simon Whaley explores the modern way to promote books. Gone are the days when publishers organised country-wide book tours for every author, dropping them into every major town and city bookstore to promote their latest offering. Many authors are probably thankful for this, for such events were frequently gruelling and exhausting. Today, a good book tour still requires energy and effort on an author’s part, but the modern virtual book…
Back in 2015, I chatted to Glynis Scrivens, author of about those moments in a writer’s life when we have a crisis of confidence. While many people experience these crises, whatever job they do, writers in particular are more susceptible to these moments of doubt, because we tend not to have that team of work colleagues to help us put things into perspective. It’s therefore extremely useful to have mechanisms for coping with these confidence-crushing moments.
Two’s company, three’s a crowd … but six can be a good marketing strategy, says Simon Whaley. It doesn’t matter whether we’re traditionally published or self-published, when it comes to marketing most of us are pretty much on our own. It’s a little ironic that traditional publishers usually allocate the biggest marketing budgets to those already- famous authors who have cost them significant sums of money in advance payments, which those said publishers then need to recoup: hence the bigger…
A brief post this week, just to point you to an article that was recently published in The Guardian, written by Alison Flood, about the anger from Woman’s Weekly’s writers at the exploitative new contract. You can read Alison’s piece here. We were hoping for a better, more detailed response from TI Media. Their response that they will continue to credit writers does not answer the question about why they need copyright, and their response to waiving moral rights enables…
“If you want to be successful in this business, don’t be different. Be like someone else.” That’s how Phil Rickman, author of the popular novels, opened his talk at the Church Stretton Arts Festival last week. And it’s a perfect reminder of how publishers (particularly those publishing fiction) want more of the same. Ideally, they want more bestsellers. (Don’t we all?) “Publishers want something … they don’t really want something different. They want something that is guaranteed to sell.”
The snowball is gathering momentum. It was slow to start off with because when you’re not big name writers, it’s difficult to make yourself heard. It’s been an uphill struggle. But now the direction is sloping gently downhill, enabling the snowball to gather pace and potential clout. Much of this has been thanks to the tweets of Joanne Harris. When @BigFatLion tweeted a link to my open letter to the leadership team at TI Media she also brought it to…
Back in Womag-land, there’s been no feedback from TI Media (that I’m aware of) regarding their change of contracts to All Rights, and their cutting of payments by a third. Although, some writers have received some interesting emails. Woman’s Weekly has emailed a couple writers who’ve had stories that just failed to make the grade in the past (so were rejected, but encouraged to rewrite and resubmit them) enquiring whether they’ve had a chance to rewrite those stories yet.
At the end of June I posted about the recent changes being made at Woman’s Weekly concerning their latest contract, which demanded All Rights from their fiction writers. Now, I’m not a prolific short story writer, but I have been published in Woman’s Weekly’s Fiction Special, and therefore this is a market in which I have an interest. And although I have other writing priorities at the moment, writing short stories for the women’s magazine market is something I plan…