It’s the season of dreadful cracker jokes, so in the spirit of ‘When is a door not a door?’* here’s a festive riddle for you: Q: When is a book not a book? A: When it’s a series. OK it’s a rubbish joke, but the point is very serious. One huge mistake that first-time authors […]
Continue readingMy children don’t read this blog. So it’s safe to reveal here two of the presents they’ll be getting for Christmas: original framed illustrations from Judy Hayman’s Dragon Tales series. I published the sixth and last volume, The Dragons’ Call, in October, marking the end of two years of Dragon Tales. They began as bedtime […]
Continue reading…don’t just ask them. If you REALLY want to know if an idea has legs, the best way isn’t to ask people if they’d buy it, it’s to see if they DO buy it when they’re given the opportunity. This is an audacious technique, but Nicholas Lovell used it to great effect when he had […]
Continue readingOne of the students from Falmouth asked if he could interview me about publishing following my talk there last month. Here’s one of the questions he asked, and my response. (Because I’m determined to return the conversation to the FUTURE of publishing, rather than its past….) Did you see the emergence of digital literature as […]
Continue readingA wonderful rare full day/evening in London, running a workshop, meeting a friend for coffee, and joining Women in Publishing for their Christmas party and awards evening. It was a wonderful surprise to find myself shortlisted for the Pandora Award this year, and I’ll treasure my Highly Commended certificate. Justine Solomons of Byte the Book […]
Continue readingToday’s blog is a trip down memory lane over at BookMachine, remembering ten things that used to be part of the daily grind for publishers that just don’t exist any more. Ahh, I loved the smell of ozalids in the morning… https://bookmachine.org/2016/12/06/10-things-that-used-to-be-part-of-a-publishers-day-that-millennials-will-find-hard-to-imagine/
Continue readingI took a break between proofs and manuscript reviews this afternoon to flick idly through Twitter….. …..and discovered that I have been shortlisted for the Women in Publishing Pandora Award ‘for significant and sustained contribution to the publishing industry’. My fellow shortlisted candidates are Kate Wilson, the force of nature behind the amazing independent children’s […]
Continue reading‘Why should you write a proposal? Because YOU need to be clear on this stuff too. Your book represents an investment of your own time and energy, and you need to make the business case to yourself.’ Today’s blog is a guest post over at Birds on the Blog – http://birdsontheblog.co.uk/writing-a-book-start-with-the-proposal/.
Continue readingBack in January, I ran a workshop for 10 would-be authors called The Year of the Book. It was aimed at those who wanted to get serious about the book they’d been talking about writing for months/years and make it happen in 2016. One of those people was Glenda Shawley, and she came away from […]
Continue readingToday’s guest lecturer on the editorial module of the MA in Publishing at Brookes University was Simon Winder, pubishing director at Penguin Press. He has a massive amount of book industry experience from both the publishing and the writing side (his books include Germania and my personal favourite, The Man Who Saved Britain, a cultural history of James […]
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