Bronte Festival of Women's Writing announces line-up
greatbritishlife.co.uk – Wednesday August 6, 2025
THE director of the new Wuthering Heights film, starring Margot Robbie, will be a guest at this year’s Bronte Women’s Writing Festival.
Taking place in Haworth, the festival will celebrate novelists and the North, with a focus on Bradford, in its year as UK City of Culture, as the home of the Brontes.
Actor, writer and film-maker Emerald Fennell, who wrote and directed cult hit Saltburn, will discuss her much-anticipated big screen version of Wuthering Heights, filmed in the Yorkshire Dales this year and set for release early 2026.
Other guests include best-selling author Tracy Chevalier, who wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring, and Australian author and TV presenter Holly Ringland, reflecting on how their writing has been shaped by the Brontes’ legacy.
This year’s festival theme is Writers From and Based in the North, with a focus on stories shaped by northern landscapes and the influences of the Bronte sisters, and showcasing new work from northern publishers.
New Writing North | Channel 4 Northern Talent Network: Script Hubs
bbc.co.uk – Tuesday August 5, 2025
In partnership with Channel 4, New Writing North's Script Hubs provide peer support and networking to writers across the North looking to take their career in TV forward.
Their next application window is open to all writers living in Cumbria and members of the global majority across the North of England.
Over a five-month period, ten writers in each Script Hub collaborate on a series of peer group sessions and professional development workshops. Each group is led by an experienced facilitator writer, with the workshops featuring guest writers, producers, and other broadcast professionals.
Nero New Writers Prize
brunel.ac.uk – Friday August 1, 2025
Brunel University of London and premium coffee house Caffè Nero have jointly opened submissions for the Nero New Writers Prize, a bold new award searching for the best original short stories from unpublished and aspiring writers from the UK and Ireland.
Entries must be an original, unpublished short story of up to 5,000 words in either fiction or non-fiction, and the Prize is open to adults who are citizens of, or resident in, the UK and Ireland.
Submissions will be judged anonymously on the quality of prose and readability by a panel chaired by author and journalist Sophie Elmhirst, winner of the 2024 Nero Gold Prize for Maurice and Maralyn. She is joined by two of Brunel’s Creative Writing faculty, Bernardine Evaristo, bestselling author and Professor of Creative Writing, and novelist and academic Helen Cullen, Reader in Creative Writing.
FlipHTML5 Launches a Novel Writing AI Tool for Innovative Novel Creation
prunderground.com – Wednesday July 30, 2025
FlipHTML5, a leading digital publishing platform, is revolutionizing the creation and telling of stories with its newly launched novel writing AI tool. With this AI-powered solution, authors no longer need to face the normally overwhelming challenge of developing plotlines, creating characters, writing content, or formatting books for publishing by themselves. FlipHTML5’s AI novel generator provides a seamless and intelligent storytelling experience that takes writers from the first spark of an idea to the final step of digital publishing.
The novel writing AI is not just designed to speed up the writing process, it’s designed to enhance the whole reading experience, too. Writers can now develop new concepts, produce entire chapters, edit manuscripts, and publish multimedia-rich, interactive novels that simulate the experience of flipping through an actual printed book. Authors can simply start with a topic idea or use their existing draft, and the AI novel generator will produce a well-structured book complete with layout design in minutes.
Romance Writing Festival
bournemouthecho.co.uk – Wednesday July 30, 2025
One-day festival celebrating romance writing, offering a mix of panel discussions, agent 1-2-1s, workshops, activities and networking opportunities.
Sunday Times bestselling authors Milly Johnson and Paige Toon will headline the inaugural Romance Writing Festival, taking place in Bournemouth on 18th October 2025. They join fellow Sunday Times bestseller Katie Fforde on an impressive programme featuring award-winning authors, editors, literary agents, and publishers.
The one-day event is dedicated to romance writing, offering a mix of panel discussions, workshops, and networking opportunities. Attendees can also book one-to-one sessions with agents and editors or take part in free activities designed to inspire writers at all stages of their journey.
Straight white author's career finally takes off after he tells woke publishers he's gender queer Nigerian
dailymail.co.uk – Thursday July 17, 2025
A poet said his career skyrocketed within the liberal literary scene by taking on minority personas to promote his work to publishers.
Aaron Barry, 29, of Vancouver, experienced the most success when he posed as writers with identities far from his own, even if the poems were blatantly 'trash.'
His reasoning behind the scheme was simple - to prove the poetry world is more concerned with writers' identities than the quality of their work.
'My thinking was that, if the industry - from small magazines to full-on publishing imprints - could get away with showing a clear preference toward certain groups and, in that same vein, a clear bias against other groups,' Barry began to DailyMail.com.
'Then there was nothing to say that such power couldn't be abused in the future, whether it be to adhere to shifting trends or politics, or to discriminate against additional demographics.
'Such treatment would leave writers in a state of peril and anxiety, forever having to look over their shoulders while navigating their careers.'
From 2023 to 2024, Barry had managed to fool 30 respected literary journals around the globe and got about 50 of his 'nonsensical' poems published.
He published dozens of pieces as Adele Nwankwo, a 'gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,' including one titled After Coming Out: A Wrestling Promo.'
The Novelry Offers $100,000 Prize to Break Publishing Barriers
publishersweekly.com – Monday July 14, 2025
The Novelry, an online creative writing school founded by Booker Prize–longlisted author Louise Dean, has launched a $100,000 writing prize aimed at reaching writers outside traditional publishing circles. With submissions closing July 31, the Next Big Story competition has already received over 5,000 entries and expects to reach more than 10,000 total submissions. An entry requires the first 1,500 words of manuscript and a $15 admission fee, submitted through Submittable.
Dean said the competition aims to reach nontraditional writers. "What I'm really interested in is reaching people who would exclude themselves from writing way before they got to apply for scholarships and bursaries," she told PW. "These are the sort of people who would have been where I was and made the assumption that to be a writer, you've got to be clever or posh. I don't think I had those, therefore, I won't. But I discovered that in fact, you don't need either of those, and they can be quite detrimental."
The competition requires only the first three pages of a novel concept, an approach Dean said targets "real people who probably love really high drama, high concept things" and "probably heavy consumers of genre fiction."
The Sunday Post short story writing competition is back for 2025
sundaypost.com – Sunday July 13, 2025
The word is out. The Sunday Post is on the hunt for Scotland’s best unpublished, amateur fiction writers and you may well be among them.
If you can spin a good yarn, if your imagination knows no bounds, if the characters in your head won’t rest until they’re on the page, then we want to hear from you.
Today The Sunday Post launches its hotly awaited annual Short Story Competition – the third since it began in 2023.
So popular was are the contests that the crème de la crème of Scotland’s writers – Sir Alexander McCall Smith, and Bloody Scotland festival founders Dr Alex Gray and Lin Anderson – are back to judge entries, along with The Sunday Post and P.S. magazine books editor and competition co-ordinator Sally McDonald.
So, if you’ve missed our previous contests, or entered and didn’t win, now is your chance.
Bestsellers LLC Unveils Data-Driven Publishing Model to Transform Authors into Industry Dominators
westernslopenow.com – Sunday July 13, 2025
SAN DIEGO, CA, UNITED STATES, July 12, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- New "Bestseller Blueprint" Guarantee Program Cuts Through Publishing Guesswork, Using Analytics to Land Titles on Amazon, WSJ, and USA Today Lists
Bestsellers LLC, the publishing industry's first data-engineering partner for authors, today launched its flagship Guarantee Program designed to propel books into bestseller rankings through algorithmic targeting, strategic launch sequencing, and hyper-optimized Amazon campaigns. Unlike traditional publishers or à la carte services, Bestsellers LLC treats every book as a "product launch," deploying market analytics to secure visibility, sales velocity, and category dominance.
"The publishing industry runs on hope; we run on data," said the CEO of Bestsellers LLC. "Most authors invest thousands into editing and cover design, only to sell 50 copies. Why? No customer targeting, no Amazon SEO, and no launch science. Our engineers map niches, reverse-engineer algorithms, and deploy precision ads, turning manuscripts into revenue-generating assets."
404 Ink publishing house to close
list.co.uk – Sunday July 13, 2025
Ten years since its inception, award-winning Scottish book publisher 404 Ink has announced it will close next summer. Established in July 2016 by Heather McDaid and Laura Jones-Rivera, 404 Ink has published books by authors including Chris McQueer, Helen McClory and Nadine Aisha Jassat. Last July, the publisher released Victor & Barry’s Kelvinside Compendium by Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson. When we spoke to Laura in February, she talked about some of the struggles the industry is facing.
The publishers described their first book, Nasty Women (inspired by Donald Trump’s infamous description of Hilary Clinton during the US presidential debate in 2016), as ‘a collection of essays, interviews and accounts on what it is to be a woman in the 21st century’. Acclaimed author Margaret Atwood backed the book's Kickstarter appeal, describing it as ‘an essential window into many of the hazard-strewn worlds younger women are living in right now.’ We awarded 404 Ink the top spot in our annual Hot 100 in 2017.
Their ambitious, non-fiction Inklings series, described as ‘small books with a big impact’, is responsible for dozens of titles covering subjects as diverse as colonialism, foot fetishism, Doctor Who, women in hip hop, and the relationship between apocalyptic fiction and contemporary society.
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