'I'm a literary agent - here's what makes me sign a writer instantly and what most authors actually earn'
news.sky.com – Monday May 11, 2026
Want to make it as an author? Or to choose their fate? The Money team spoke with an agent about what makes a good literary submission, the pitching mistake many authors make, and what she finds "offensive" about the industry for our regular careers feature.
If you've ever spent your morning commute daydreaming about starting afresh with your career, this feature is for you. Each week, we speak to someone from a different profession to discover what it's really like. Today we speak to literary agent Maddalena Cavaciuti, from David Higham Associates (DHA)...
A literary agent might start on a salary... between £30,000 and £40,000 if they're building a list from scratch. As agents build a successful and reliable client list that could comfortably rise to a six-figure salary, including bonuses and/or commission. It's worth noting, though, that some agencies don't pay salaries at all - some agents are paid on a commission share only.
How to Publish a Book With the Big 5: 6 Experts Weigh in
pen.org – Friday May 8, 2026
Daunted by the publishing world and how to navigate it? You’ve come to the right blog post.
To unravel insider secrets on how to be published with the Big Five, PEN America hosted a panel discussion where award-winning author Susan Shapiro spoke with six industry experts. Audience members heard helpful tidbits from Johanna V. Castillo, a literary agent at Writers House, Eamon Dolan, an author and editor at Simon & Schuster, Deborah Garrison, a poet and editor at Penguin Random House, Clarence A. Haynes, an author and freelance editor, Emi Ikkanda, an author and editor at Penguin Random House, and Kevin Nguyen, an author and editor at The Verge.
If you couldn’t make the event, hosted at the family-owned independent bookstore P&T Knitwear, here are five takeaways:
Consider starting small.
To kick off the conversation, Shapiro shared one of the lines she frequently tells her students looking to publish books in any genre: “Three pages can change your life.” “Say somebody has an idea, even for a book, I always think it’s a million times easier to write a great three pages and publish that than 300,” she said.
Back when Garrison worked at The New Yorker, the pieces she pulled from the slush pile — written by authors whom “nobody had ever heard of” — would become projects that would be nominated for prizes like National Book Award, she said.
Why Writing Stories For Children is So Much Harder Than Writing Stories For Adults
lithub.com – Thursday May 7, 2026
A few years ago, my longtime children’s book editor rejected my idea for a new middle grade novel. The rejection hit me hard – the story, of the daughter of a celebrity chef who moves to a small town after being adopted by her older brother, was really tugging at my heartstrings. But the editor’s rejection was swift and brutal; there was no version of this manuscript she was going to accept.
Some stories plant deep in your creative brain and come out through songs heard on the radio and random daydreams in the shower. They will not, simply, leave you alone. It occurred to me that the story would actually be much more interesting from the perspectives of the daughter’s brother and one of the elderly women who lived in the town. I wrote the first chapter longhand on a boat and dashed it off to my agent, who confidently told me he could sell it. He did, and so began a brand-new chapter of my career.
Since the publication of that book (The Funeral Ladies of Ellerie County), I’ve written another novel for adults (The Supper Club Saints) and a handful of additional middle grade novels. I’ve continued to carve out a career path in both age groups by the skin of my teeth, somehow finding myself writing for two very different audiences.
Why this group of writer friends decided to launch a literary magazine in Toronto
streetsoftoronto.com – Wednesday May 6, 2026
One spring evening last year, Tia Glista hosted a dinner party for a few friends; she has the very good habit of connecting people from disparate parts of her life together. Not long before the dinner party, Glista, Winnie Wang, Adrianna Michell and Emma Cohen had discussed their struggles writing freelance and had tossed around the idea of starting a literary magazine. After dinner, Michell remembers sitting on the floor of Glista’s apartment, looking around the room at her friends, and pointing out their complementary strengths could make such a concept truly possible.
Toronto Review, the aptly named literary magazine borne out of that fateful dinner party, officially launched on April 27, featuring works from Haley Mlotek, Zak Jones, Furquan Mohamed and Claire Foster, among others.
“An exciting idea that everyone had been ruminating on began to feel possible when we noticed that we were a resourced group of people in terms of the gifts that we could offer one another and the complementarity of those strengths, but also literally our resources beyond the initial group,” says Abby Lacelle, who rounds out the editorial team alongside Glista, Wang, Cohen and Michell, with Sonja Katanic helming the visual design. With one new piece online every week, Toronto Review operates without a paywall to ensure the accessibility of their work.
Some students believe they can be writers without reading. This raises many questions
irishtimes.com – Monday May 4, 2026
Wanting to write without wanting to read is, at best, trying to skip the first stage of an artistic apprenticeship
I read recently, in the context of an essay on expertise in making sushi, about the three stages of Japanese craftsmanship: learning to follow the rules; understanding when and how to break the rules; commanding expertise that rises above the rules.
I’m always suspicious of European summaries of Japanese thinking. A great deal is lost in translation, and the cultural contexts are so different that even an accurate translation might be hard to recognise. Even so, the idea of these stages felt recognisable to me.
I’ve been writing fiction and teaching creative writing for many years. Sometimes I encounter students who believe they can be writers without reading, or without being serious or enthusiastic readers. This raises many questions for me: why would you want to write if you don’t love to read? How do you imagine you will learn to write better if not by reading other writers’ better writing? Where, exactly, do you think writing comes from?
Some people want to “be writers” without wanting to work on writing. The writers they want to be seem to achieve fame and fortune – neither likely outcomes of a life devoted to literature – fuelled by “inspiration” that descends from the heavens with no effort required. They sometimes claim that reading would pollute this inspiration, exerting unwelcome influence on their pure voices.
Quills at the ready: Five steps to writing a poem
news.fiu.edu – Tuesday April 28, 2026
"Hope" is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
– Emily Dickinson
Poems are powerful, magical and mysterious. They show us life in novel ways.
“A poem is an offering,” says poet and professor Julie Marie Wade. It can sneak up on readers to show them something familiar in an unfamiliar manner. “It might be different for everybody in the room,” Wade explains, “but there’s something to take from [a poem] as a reader and appreciator of our shared world.”
Psychology professor Shannon Pruden also praises poetry’s ability to present various points of view, thereby engendering empathy: “I think reading and writing poetry allows you to understand the perspective of other people, which ultimately leads to a much more complex understanding of emotions and emotional development. Poetry allows you to make that leap.”
Colm Tóibín explores the art of short story writing
spectator.com – Sunday April 26, 2026
When I was 20 and tentatively trying to write, every single person I knew read Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites (1975). It not only gave the short story a good name, but it also gave writing a good name. It was like a punk moment converted into fiction. People used the word “macabre,” but there was a sort of excitement about the characters, the strangeness of the stories, the shortness of some of the stories and just how much contemporary urban life was in them.
Often people suggest I investigate a writer. I was in Toronto about 20 years ago when someone told me about the extraordinary Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod. He had written two books of short stories which were republished in 2000 in one volume called Island: The Collected Stories. The 16 short stories are exceptional in the way they are constructed. They deal with the very fierce, rugged landscape of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. A lot of people living in very isolated ways, where the possibility of love or community is narrowed. It’s almost like having a book of poetry that you can keep to hand and reread.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of American Publishing
scheerpost.com – Saturday April 25, 2026
In January, I wrote for the Winter 2026 issue of LIBERTIES quarterly journal a lengthy consideration of the state of American publishing. LIBERTIES was founded five years ago by Leon Wieseltier, the former longtime literary editor of The New Republic, and my essay is reprinted by ScheerPost with permission. You can access LIBERTIES website at: https://libertiesjournal.com
I’ve been invited by Robert Scheer to write a monthly column. This inaugural essay will give you a sense of my commitment to the world of books and publishing and, more broadly, to the notion that ideas matter. I’m a former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review and have headed up several publishing companies, both in New York at Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and at Times Books, a onetime imprint of Random House, and in California where I am currently and for the past ten years the publisher of Heyday, a nonprofit independent press founded more than fifty years ago in Berkeley. I’m the author of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays.
As for this essay, I can sum up its essence in a sentence: I think we’ve entered a golden age of independent book publishing, more diverse and robust against all expectation that the Goliaths of mainstream publishing would snuff out the small fry.
Philip Pullman: The thing every writer needs to overcome
bigthink.com – Wednesday April 22, 2026
Sometimes, great writing makes me angry.
It’s nothing to do with the ideas inside, of course. Poets and bestselling authors are good at their game. What bothers me is when those ideas are expressed with such perfect beauty that I cannot hope to match them.
There might be a degree of professional pride to this. When I gawp at an old poet like T.S. Eliot or a modern writer like Samantha Harvey, I’m just jealous. Yes, they might be better trained than I am. Yes, they likely took more time on their writing than I did on this article. But, in the main, I’m left bitterly squinting at how someone can be so damn good.
There’s more to it, though. It’s often said that the joy of great literature lies in poets and writers expressing feelings and thoughts in ways we couldn’t imagine. They name emotions we didn’t know we felt. They dig up what was deeply buried away. But this joy is a coin with two sides.
I would like to invent a word: Psychoklepsis. Psychoklepsis — literally “soul-theft” — is when someone expresses your inner life better than you ever could, and you resent it. It’s when you hear a song, read a poem, or watch a movie, and you say, “I can’t express myself better than this stranger expresses me.” Psychoklepsis feels like some magic of the page ripped open your soul and helped itself to your feelings. Ridiculous, of course, but humans can be ridiculous.
Psychoklepsis is something that many writers and artists have to deal with. Left unchecked, it curdles into paralysis — the feeling that everything worth saying has already been said, and said better. But in this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, we explore a way out.
5 Freelance Writing Side Hustles For People Who Love To Write
forbes.com – Monday April 20, 2026
Side hustles are popular amongst working Americans. SurveyMonkey found that 37% of workers have a side hustle. They’re a great way to earn extra income, especially as 43% of Americans did not experience a pay rise in the past year, and living costs continue to bite.
If you’re someone who considers themselves a bit of a wordsmith, you should explore a writing-based side hustle to supplement your income. While AI has lowered the barrier to entry for written content, the myriad of AI-generated “slop” on the internet has led to increased demand for creative, strategic, and nuanced human writers and communications professionals. Tech Radar reports that communications jobs have surged by 25.2%.
Here are several side hustles that leverage your writing expertise and can be turned into a profitable freelance writing business.
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