Death of a publishing dream: how the Unbound revolution became untethered
observer.co.uk – Sunday August 10, 2025
The literary disrupters enjoyed great success with their crowdfunding model, signing authors that other publishers overlooked. And then the money ran out…
The revolution started in a small writer’s shed in 2011, amid the deck chairs, tents and bunting of the Hay festival, the highlight of the literary calendar. The talk was of shooting a rocket through the world of publishing.
Three friends – John Mitchinson, Justin Pollard and Dan Kieran – were launching a new company, one that they hoped would “democratise the book commissioning process”, with authors pitching their ideas directly to readers, who would choose whether or not to invest. Writers would crowdfund and profits would be split 50:50 between publisher and author – far more generous terms than the 10% royalties usually offered by others.
It would be author-led, author-first, the founders said. It would be a way for books that would otherwise be passed over by the old-school editors in traditional publishing houses to find their audience, and fly.
I’m a best-selling children’s author – this is how to write a good book for kids
inews.co.uk – Saturday August 9, 2025
When I meet someone new, the conversation often goes like this: “What do you do?” “I’m a children’s book writer.” “Oh, I have a great idea for a book… a toaster who wants to be a pop star!”
But despite what people think, it’s surprisingly difficult to write a good picture book. With a standard length of just 32 pages and around 1,000 words to play with, you must weave a satisfying story that is concise, engaging and entertaining enough for an audience who are forever tempted by one more episode of Bluey. How do you write a story that will stand out on a crowded bookshelf? Where do you even start?
My journey into children’s book writing was slightly accidental. When I graduated, I just knew I wanted to do “something creative”. Luckily, a supportive friend weighed in with a suggestion, presumably inspired by watching me spend the past three years knitting, painting and learning the ukulele rather than going to English lectures. “You’re basically a child – have you considered children’s book publishing?”
The authors who make millions through self-publishing
telegraph.co.uk – Friday August 8, 2025
Tens of millions of books have been self-published online since Amazon first made it possible in November 2007. Many languish in obscurity with zero sales, so writing a bestseller is anything but straightforward. But the rewards for getting it right are enormous.
“It felt like winning the lottery,” says Simon McCleave, 55, a crime novelist whose debut novel, The Snowdonia Killings, has sold half-a-million copies since he published it in 2020.
“I’d written a book that thousands of people wanted to buy and they were asking for another one,” he adds. “I thought, ‘Can I give up my job?’” A thought that doesn’t often occur to debut authors who publish through traditional channels, controlled by agents and publishers.
The Spec Script
bbc.co.uk – Wednesday August 6, 2025
As the dates for our next annual Open Call will be announced very soon, we turned to Script Consultant Philip Shelley to outline some of the key things you should be thinking about if you are considering entering your script.
What is a Spec Script and Why is it Important? Will it get made?
‘Spec’ as in speculative. Also known as a ‘calling card’ script, 'specimen' script or ‘writing sample’.
For new screenwriters looking to break into the industry – indeed even for experienced writers looking to refresh / relaunch themselves – spec scripts are absolutely fundamental. They are your currency as a writer. Everything good will come from a promising spec script. And without it, potential employers won’t be able to engage with you as a serious proposition.
The Channel 4 screenwriting course is all about the spec script. Initially we choose 12 writers largely based on the script they have submitted. The main purpose of the course is for them to then write another script. So, by the end of the course, they should all have two outstanding spec scripts.
I have witnessed these scripts kickstarting and indeed sustaining careers over many years. That’s the very good news. The less good news is that while, over the years, many of these projects have been optioned by production companies and taken into active, paid development, they pretty much never seem to end up getting made. What they do instead is get you in the door, initiate conversations and relationships with the producers and development executives who have the power to commission you to write your next scripts.
Writing What You Want to Learn: The Joy of Real-World Research When Crafting a Novel
crimereads.com – Monday August 4, 2025
I have never believed in the adage Write What You Know. How boring is that? Frankly, my life’s just not that interesting. Instead, I prefer to write what I want to learn.
Case in point, I travelled to Yorkshire, England to do location research for Tea with Jam and Dread, the newest Tea by the Sea mystery. I’ve been to London several times but never to Yorkshire. In earlier books in the series it was mentioned that the grandmother character, Rose Campbell, had been a kitchen maid at a grand manor house near Halifax in her youth before marrying a visiting American, and moving to his country.
When I decided I wanted to take Rose back to Thornecroft Castle House, which is now a hotel, for the hundredth birthday celebrations of Elizabeth, the Dowager Countess of Frockmorton, I knew right away I’d have to make the trip myself before I could take my characters there.
These days you can do an enormous amount of research on the internet. Examine historical records, check up on the weather and the climate, study other people’s tourist photos, follow the layout of roads and streets on maps and zoom in at the level of an individual house or pan out to see the spread of the coastline.
The end of the road? What The Salt Path scandal means for the nature memoir
theguardian.com – Saturday August 2, 2025
When The Salt Path came out in 2018, it was a publishing phenomenon, going on to sell more than 2m copies globally. As even those who haven’t read it are likely to know by now, the book charted Raynor Winn and her husband Moth’s emotionally and physically transformative long-distance walk along the South West Coast Path in the wake of utter disaster: a financial collapse that cost them their home, and Moth’s diagnosis with an incurable neurological disorder. Winn followed it with two further books in a similar vein, The Wild Silence and Landlines, also bestsellers. Earlier this year came a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. That original book by a first-time writer had become what writers, editors and booksellers all dream of: a bestselling, spin-off generating brand.
But it wasn’t the first nature memoir to top the charts, by any means. In 2012, Wild by Cheryl Strayed described the 26-year‑old’s hike across the west coast of America in the wake of her mother’s death and the end of her marriage, and after soaring up the book charts it was made into a film starring Reese Witherspoon two years later. That same year, H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald was a surprise bestseller, telling the story of a year spent training a Eurasian goshawk as a journey through grief after the death of their father. In 2016, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun saw her return to the sheep farm on Orkney where she’d grown up in order to recover from addiction through contact with nature; it was also recently filmed, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role. Meanwhile, in last year’s bestselling Raising Hare, foreign policy adviser Chloe Dalton describes moving to the countryside, rescuing a leveret and rediscovering her relationship with the land.
"The key to creating a character is in the detail": writing advice from best-selling author Jennie Godfrey
goodhousekeeping.com – Tuesday July 29, 2025
Jennie Godfrey is author of Sunday Times bestseller The List Of Suspicious Things, which has sold over 100,000 copies in paperback alone. Her debut was inspired by her childhood in West Yorkshire in the 1970s. Jennie is from a mill-working family, but as the first of the generation born after the mills closed, she went to university and built a career in the corporate world. In 2020 she left and began to write.
She is now a writer and part-time Waterstones bookseller and lives in the Somerset countryside. She is a judge for Good Housekeeping's 2025 writing competition, which is running until 31 August.
7 brilliant pieces of writing advice
1 The best opening paragraphs give a flavour of what's coming and why the reader should care, with a big dollop of voice. For me the voice is the most important aspect of the opening. If I am hooked by the voice, I am hooked full stop.
Writing Morally Gray Characters
vocal.media – Monday July 28, 2025
Let’s be honest: morally gray characters are having a moment. They dominate TikTok, swoon across the pages of romantasy, and spark endless discourse in fandom circles. And as someone who writes fantasy (and reads way too much of it), I totally get the appeal. They’re deliciously complicated, impossible to predict, and often the ones who steal the show.
But here’s the catch — just giving a character a tragic backstory and letting them occasionally stab someone isn’t enough. If you want them to actually matter to the reader, they need to be more than just broody and mysterious.
So, let’s talk about how to write morally gray characters that feel real, layered, and anything but hollow.
Motivation Is Everything
A morally gray character isn’t just someone who does bad things. They’re someone whose choices make sense within their worldview — and who likely sees themselves as the hero of their own story.
Think of Kaz Brekker from Six of Crows. He’s ruthless, manipulative, and has a taste for vengeance — but his motivations are crystal clear. Every calculated move is rooted in trauma, loyalty, and survival. We don’t just see what he does — we understand why.
Fan fiction is everywhere, if you know how to look
washingtonpost.com – Monday July 28, 2025
When Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings began pitching literary agents 15 years ago, they kept their interest in fan fiction a secret.
Known by their combined pen name, Christina Lauren, the best-selling romance duo met through their shared love of Twilight fan fiction. At the time, Billings says, coming from fandom “was much more of a black mark on you” if you wanted to break into mainstream publishing. This was just before “Fifty Shades of Grey” — a novel that began as a rewriting of “Twilight” — became a global publishing phenomenon. Now, Hobbs and Billings work in a publishing industry with a vastly different attitude: one far more receptive to authors who got their start writing unauthorized works online for other fans, based on previously existing characters and worlds.
Fan fiction’s ascendance comes as entertainment and media companies are turning to established intellectual property to shore up the eroding economics of their industries. It also helps that many of the decision-makers grew up online, with active accounts on Wattpad, Tumblr and other fan-fiction-friendly platforms. Agents directly solicit writers of popular fan-made works, and new books proudly advertise their “fic” roots. Fan fiction didn’t invent tropes like “only one bed” or “friends to lovers,” but fic websites popularized tagging and searching through them, and these categories have become a mainstay of promoting genre fiction of all kinds.
A crisis of sex and money
thecritic.co.uk – Sunday July 20, 2025
Not long back, the Society of Authors’ journal, The Author, printed what can only be called a jeremiad by a small publisher named Sam Jordison.
Mr Jordison, together with his wife Eloise Millar, run a distinguished independent press whose successes include Eimear McBride’s career-launching A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and Lucy Ellmann’s Booker-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport, which was ushered onto the Galley Beggar list after its author had been shown the door by messrs Bloomsbury. Galley Beggar are, without doubt, a very good thing.
The gist of Mr Jordison’s lament, supported by a great deal of forensic detail, was that the economics of publishing had become so skewed that it was all but impossible for him to make a profit.
Rising print and paper costs, not to mention Brexit (Galley Beggar export, or rather try to export, books to Europe) had all played their part in this debacle. His conclusion was that whilst in 2015 the margins on a £10 paperback allowed the publisher a small profit, in 2025 he would be lucky to make a few pence.
By chance, Mr Jordison’s j’accuse was followed, a month or so later, by the launch of a new independent, Conduit Books. All the broadsheet newspapers covered the story, which seemed odd until one realised that over the firm’s founding principle rose the scent of novelty. Or rather controversy.
Conduit, helmed by a novelist named Jude Cook and noting the terrific gender imbalance in UK publishing, intends to specialise in novels by men, and “cerebral” ones at that. As Private Eye remarked, “All you middle-brow hussies can keep your distance.”
These news stories seem to be connected. The first shows that the economic model of a certain kind of publishing has all but collapsed. The second suggests its access points are in danger, too.
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