Oliver Malcolm launches eponymous publishing transformation agency
thebookseller.com – Wednesday November 13, 2024
Ex-Hodder & Stoughton managing director Oliver Malcolm has launched his own consultancy, Oliver Malcolm Publishing Transformation.
Designed to empower publishers, agents and authors, the consultancy “aims to help navigate the rapidly changing world of publishing” and includes free support for neurodiverse individuals.
The announcement follows news of Malcolm’s departure from Hodder & Stoughton after two years as managing director.
National writing competition for sixth form students open now
girton.cam.ac.uk – Monday November 11, 2024
Girton College’s annual Humanities Writing Competition is now open for submissions.
The competition is an opportunity for students in Year 12 (or equivalent) to research and write beyond the curriculum, using one or more of five selected objects from Girton’s on-site museum, the Lawrence Room Museum as their focus. Essays or creative responses (such as dramatic monologues, short stories, or poems) are equally welcome.
Focusing on Girton’s museum collection in the Lawrence Room, the Humanities Writing Competition aims to use ancient objects as a starting point for thinking across curricular divides – about the varieties of human experience that these survivals from the past can embody and reflect and the trains of thought they can set off.
Hachette Employees Protest New Conservative Imprint
publishersweekly.com – Monday November 11, 2024
A group of employees at Hachette Book Group have penned a letter to management condemning the announced launch of a new conservative imprint, Basic Liberty, and hiring of Thomas Spence, former president and publisher of Regnery, to helm it.
On November 7, two days after the presidential election, HBG and Hachette UK CEO David Shelley announced that the Basic Books Group would be adding to its portfolio the Basic Liberty imprint, described as "a new conservative imprint that will publish serious works of cultural, social, and political analysis by conservative writers of original thought." He also announced that Spence—currently a visiting fellow at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—had been hired to lead the imprint as executive editor.
Spence worked at Regnery for more than 11 years, and led the company for nearly four years after the retirement of longtime president and publisher Marji Ross in 2019. Earlier this year, following Skyhorse’s acquisition of Regnery in late 2023, he joined the Heritage Foundation as a senior advisor.
Have a penchant for writing? Share your work with these top four magazines
msn.com – Wednesday November 6, 2024
‘TIS that time of the year again, when avenues open up for the writer in you to make a debut. Come January, a lot of literary magazines open up their doors for aspiring and budding writers to submit their fiction and poetry. As a lover of fiction himself, this writer decided to do his fellow writers a solid and, apart from a quick curation, also include a few easy tips to ensure your submissions are accepted.
The best way, says Tanuj Solanki, founder-editor of the Bombay Literary Magazine, is to just read the guidelines. Do people not do that, we ask?
“Well,” he laughs, “our fiction submissions, for examples, are supposed to be between 2,000 to 7,000 words but people end up sending entire novellas. As a result, their entries are never read.” Fair, we think. What else? “It never helps to choose topicality over quality,” he adds. “We had stories around the COVID 19 lockdown when it was in effect, and about the Me Too movement before that, but in the effort to make it topical, the story itself was undercooked. ”Go on, then. Here are some lit mags you can send your submissions to. Thank us later.
Independent publisher The Canelo Group acquired by DK
thebookseller.com – Tuesday November 5, 2024
DK has acquired the independent publisher The Canelo Group. Canelo was founded in 2015 by Iain Millar, Michael Bhaskar and Nick Barreto, and has twice been shortlisted for Independent Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards.
According to DK, Canelo will maintain its independent identity "while benefiting from DK’s resources". DK explained that its imprints (Canelo, Canelo Crime, Hera and August) will reach broader audiences while "preserving their unique identities". A top priority following the acquisition will be Canelo’s "commitment to author and agent care", and DK will invest in and scale those efforts across UK and international markets.
Canelo has combined traditional publishing with digital innovation, and since it was founded has grown a large catalogue of bestselling commercial fiction and has "fostered close relationships with authors and literary agents".
How to write your first novel
luxtimes.lu – Saturday November 2, 2024
Ever thought of writing a short story or a novel? It’s often said we all have a book inside, but just how easy is it to put pen to paper and create something someone else wants to read?
Three published authors who live in Luxembourg and write in very different styles, reveal how they got started, what inspires their writing, help with feedback and editing, and the routes to publication.
Zoé Perrenoud has written a trilogy of what she classifies as dark, young adult fantasy. The first one, Bloodlender was inspired by a garden exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Metz where “there was an Italian garden full of fantastical statues.”
John-Paul Gomez, famous for his blog Luxembourg Wurst, had his first book of short stories entitled The Idiot of St. Benedict and Other Stories published last year by Black Fountain Press. It won the National Literary Competition in 2022.
“All my stories are off-kilter or weird, or as the publisher described – dystopian. In most there is a bit of darkness more than hope,” he explained.
James Leader describes himself as a poet primarily and then a novelist, and most recently published a book of poetry entitled High Talk. Nevertheless, he has published three novels – Chickendance, The Mysteries of Gogos, and The Venus Zone. He will be launching his new novel Into Babel at the Walferbicherdeeg on Saturday 16 November.
Latest News from BBC Writers - Autumn 2024
bbc.co.uk – Saturday November 2, 2024
Jess Loveland gives an update on what we've been up to over the last few months.
One of my favourite parts of this job is meeting a new group of writers as they join us at the start of one of our development groups. Earlier this week it was the turn of the Scripted 24/25 group (the group formerly known as Drama Room). These 12 talented writers were selected following our Open Call, which closed last December. It must feel like a long wait for the group before they finally arrive at the doors of BBC Broadcasting House, but in that Open Call we received a record-breaking number of submissions (just shy of 5000) and it takes us several months to get through the reading process.
The first ten pages of every script we receive through the Open Call are read by one of our team of freelance script readers, with the most promising moving through various stages until we’ve narrowed the submissions down to around 30, with the writers invited to an interview with us in June/July for a potential place in Scripted. These interviews are an opportunity for us to find out more about each writer, their work so far, their passion for television, and what type of stories they are burning to tell. So, as you can see it’s a pretty exhaustive process and the writers who eventually make it into the Scripted group should be very proud of their achievement.
This group will stay with us for a year. The first six months involve taking part in a programme of webinars and workshops exploring the craft of screenwriting and the industry as a whole. They are then paired up with a Script Editor to develop and write a new original television ‘spec’ script which they can use as a calling card to the industry at the conclusion of the programme. We’ll announce this group at the end of their year on Scripted. Keep your eyes open for the announcement of the previous 23/24 Scripted group, who will be finishing with us soon. We can’t wait to tell you about them!
Applications now open for George R.R. Martin Summer Intensive Writing Workshop
medill.northwestern.edu – Monday October 28, 2024
Applications are now open for the second George R.R. Martin Summer Intensive Writing Workshop at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications.
Taught by award-winning novelists and writing instructors, this seven-day, fully-funded writing intensive will support up to 10 mid-career journalists as they seek to publish their first novel. The workshop will take place in Evanston, Illinois, and will run from July 9-16.
“The story telling skills journalists employ every day can be extended into creative works,” said Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Medill’s George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling, who will be leading the workshop. “In our first year of the program, we had 12 fellows who made great strides on their first novels after spending just a week at Medill.”
George R.R. Martin (BSJ70, MSJ71, ’21 H), author of the acclaimed “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels and co-executive producer of the Emmy award-winning “Game of Thrones” series, is generously funding the workshop with a $3 million gift.
RSL launches free writing residencies in Bernardine Evaristo's Ramsgate cottage
thebookseller.com – Saturday October 26, 2024
The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) is launching the Scriptorium Awards, offering free writing residencies in President Bernardine Evaristo’s Ramsgate cottage.
The retreats can be for up to a month at a time and the aim is to offer uninterrupted time for "professionally active" writers to focus on their projects.
Participating writers could be finishing a manuscript against a deadline or starting a new project. They will have exclusive use of the house so they can focus on writing but will not be permitted to bring guests.
"The RSL Scriptorium Awards will reward excellent writers of all literary genres who are struggling to find the time and space to write," Evaristo said. "Many writers don’t have a dedicated writing room to themselves, and there might be financial or family demands that are challenges to completing writing projects [...] As a society, we need to build a more supportive infrastructure to help writers from every background thrive and, in so doing, keep literature, in all its life-enhancing manifestations, alive."
‘We’re losing talent’: authors call on Government to fund writing centre in North
inews.co.uk – Sunday October 20, 2024
More than 80 writers have signed an open letter to the Government in support of establishing a centre for the writing industries in the North East
“Hilary Mantel once said she was simply resigned to the fact that as soon as she opened her mouth people thought she was an idiot,” says Pat Barker, the award-winning novelist.
“Anybody who thought she was an idiot for more than five seconds was intellectually challenged themselves.”
The affliction she shared with her friend Ms Mantel, the late author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and a two-time winner of the Booker Prize, was having a northern accent.
Ms Mantel, who died in 2022, hailed from Glossop, Derbyshire, while Ms Barker, now aged 81, grew up in a working-class family in Thornaby on the banks of the River Tees.
As hugely successful women writers from the North, they are a rarity in England’s literary scene.
A 2021 study by the Publishers Association found 80 per cent of the publishing workforce lived in London or the South East, 7 per cent in the East of England and 5 per cent in the South West – all other regions and nations accounted for less than 8 per cent combined.
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