- One person's crap is another person's media dragon blog"
“‘He thought he’d wasted his life,’ Carpenter says, ‘and he thought if only he could finish this book, and I could help him, then that would be his immortality.'”
Five tips for would-be writers – No 1: if you want to shine, you have to polish
Of all the possible endeavours to choose from, writing a novel has to be one of the most quixotic. Prepare to sacrifice lie-ins, holidays, and your social life in favour of sitting alone in a room making things up and writing them down, until you have crushed somewhere in the region of 100,000 words into submission, all in the knowledge that the odds of publication are stacked against you.It was with this question in mind that I recently launched the blog myfirstbookdeal.com, where I post interviews with writers on how they surmounted the slush pile and got their first novel published.
Tipping Writers
THE mystery is worth a book in itself. How could a hitherto unknown novel by Harper Lee, writer of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, remain hidden for 60 years, and why was it not published before? For all the swirling questions, there is one certainty. The book will become a blockbuster without Ms Lee so much as signing a copy. If only every author could be so lucky.
Succeed these days authors must be more businesslike ever authorpreneurship
14 Reasons why you shouldn't dream of being a full time author
“Bondage is so last year. Publishers who spent much of the past year in search of the next Fifty Shades of Grey are now seeking to exploit another literary phenomenon: the British public’s seemingly unfettered desire for nature writing.”
Mario Vargas Llosa: “You have such a mass of information about everything that qualification disappears completely, and everything is equally measured…. Now the novels that are read are purely entertainment – well done, very polished, with a very effective technique – but not literature, just entertainment.” The Telegraph (UK)
“Though writers and historians have been arguing since the seventeenth century that Richard III wasn’t the villain whom Shakespeare described, it was a 1951 mystery novel that sparked mass interest in Richard’s redemption. The writer went by the name Josephine Tey, and the novel was called The Daughter of Time.” The New Yorker
“Why not enjoy success? Why not accept that you are a genius, if people insistently tell you that you are? One way or another, from this point on it will be hard to achieve the same concentration, the same innocence, when you return to the empty page and the next stage in a life story that is now radically transformed.” New York Review of Books