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The Writer’s Handbook

July 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

addresses, contacts, resources, and advice for writers

The Writer’s Handbook is the ‘other’ reference manual for writers and people working in the media. It lists publishers in the UK and the US, offers advice to would-be writers on how to place their work, and counsels them on how to deal with agents and middlemen if they have the luck to be ‘accepted’. It’s a comprehensive guide which even goes into the detail of listing the key personnel you need to contact if that deathless prose of yours is ever to see the light of public day. How does it differ from the more established Writers and Artists Year Book?

Well, it spreads itself just a little more generously across a wider range of media. There’s a bit more here on newspapers and magazines, more on radio, TV, small presses and theatre companies. There’s a particularly good section on library services, and there are tips on writing from well-known authors.

It’s updated every year, and many of the entries are annotated with subjective but useful comments on how much people pay – an important issue for hard-pressed writers. New features for the latest edition include how to crack the American market; e-books and the future of hard print; how to get into travel writing; and how newspaper serialisations work.

This is the information you will need for Getting Published. Recent editions have also featured best-seller lists and articles written by successful authors. There’s not a lot to choose between this and the Yearbook. Have a look at both and decide which one suits you.

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Barry Turner (ed), The Writer’s Handbook, London: Macmillan, (issued annually) pp.832, ISBN: 0230207294

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The writer’s marketplace

October 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a selection of resources

You’ve written a short story, a novel, poems, your memoirs, or even an article on goldfish or steam engines. The problem is, how to get your work published? How can you find a publisher who will accept what you have produced? You need to be aware of the writer’s marketplace.

If you’ve had a preliminary stab at this, you’ve no doubt received a few rejection slips. Don’t be put off. Everybody gets them. It is not necessarily to do with the quality of your work. It’s much more likely to be a question of matching what you have to offer with what a publisher is looking for. Publishers have audiences and markets. They want to supply these markets with the products which sell.

Some publishers specialise in antiques, travel, or local history; others concentrate on modern fiction, historical fiction, or science fiction. You need to match what you have to offer with what they are looking for. It’s no good sending your family saga to a publisher who specialises in chic lit or travel guides. And if the latest fad in publishing is for Running Over Lemons from a House in Provence – that’s what they will be looking for.

However, many long term best-sellers have been written for niche audiences – such as Walter Wainwright’s walking guides to the Lake District, or Elizabeth David’s cookbooks. So the first thing to do is get to know your market. Fortunately, this problem has been around so long that there are now several excellent books on the market to help you with all the issues involved.

The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook
Without doubt, this is the most successful. It’s a number one best-seller which offers details of publishers, agents, and outlets in the US and UK. It tells you what they are looking for, where to contact them, and how to submit your work. But the real value for beginners is in the short essays offering advice to would-be writers and media workers which punctuate the listings. They cover fiction and poetry; drama scripts for TV, radio, theatre, and film; graphic illustration and design; plus photography and music.

The other features which make it particularly useful are general information on publishing methods, copyright and libel, income tax and allowances, and a list of annual competitions and their prizes. Recent editions have also included lists of the year’s bestsellers – including both the number of copies sold and the amount of money they’ve made. It is issued annually, and gets bigger each year.
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The Writer’s Handbook
Barry Turner’s rival book does much the same thing – but focuses its attention on writers, and covers a slightly broader spread of media. In addition to the key areas of UK and US book publishers and agents, magazines, screen writing, TV and radio, theatre, film and video and poetry, this edition contains features on the appeal of biography; the uses and abuses of the English language; the challenges and rewards of self-publishing; writing poetry; and media contracts. This is well worth considering as an alternative.

Both of these books have extensive listings of all the outlets for creative work – fiction, journalism, sound broadcasting, photography, reporting, and editing. They also include mini-essays on various aspects of the publishing business, advising you how to place your work, where to find agents, and even how to sort out your tax problems after you hit the jackpot.
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The Guardian Media Directory
If your writing is more geared to the mainstream media – newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, the Guardian annual directory is establishing itself as the major source of advice. It lists the addresses, phone numbers, websites and key personnel for companies in every sector of the media, from digital television to magazines, regional newspapers to publishing houses, think tanks to charities. This edition contains over 10,000 contacts and has been redesigned throughout.

There are lots of resources for writers on the Internet: the problem is knowing where to find them. Even trawling through search engine results can be time-consuming, and sometimes a dispiriting experience. Thank goodness then when somebody else has done all the research and written up the results.
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The Internet: A Writer’s Guide
The main strength of Jane Dorner’s guide is that she is a professional writer who practices what she writes about. She writes for print and screen, and promotes her work via a personal web site. This book explores both the new opportunities for writers created by the Internet and the practicalities of publishing on your own site.

She touches on writing groups which exist in the form of mailing lists, websites, newsletters, chat groups, and conferences, and she also deals with eBooks plus annotated lists of all the sources a writer could possibly wish for – from libraries to bookshops, dictionaries to writing circles, newspapers to writing style guides, electronic publishers to free Internet service providers.
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Writer’s Market
This provides no-nonsense advice and authoritative guidance you need to get published and to get paid. With updated listings and ‘need-to-know’ publishing advice, Writer’s Market gives writers over 4,000 listings for consumer magazines, book publishers, trade journals, and contests and awards. It also includes complete contact information for fifty top literary agents.

There are dynamic interviews with established writers, plus publishers, editors and successful freelancers. This is essential publishing information and advice, including pay rates, a guide to book publisher imprints and valuable self-marketing tips. If you want to find out what’s available, or if you are really serious about placing what you have written with a commercial publisher – then sooner or later you will need one of these books. There are others, but these are the best; and every professional writer I have known has one or more of them on the shelf.
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Writers’ Questions and Answers
Writers who wish to publish their work are often baffled by some of the mysteries of the publishing process itself. How can you get the attention of a publisher? Do you need an agent? How much can you expect to get paid? Should you submit an outline – or the complete work? Gordon Wells’ book answers these question, plus lots more which are frequently asked by people trying to get a foothold in the world of published writing.

The press always seems to have stories of first-time authors who have been paid a five or six-figure advance for their first novel. But those who have tried to do the same thing know that it’s a far more common experience to be dealing with rejection slips. How do you break into this seemingly charmed world?

Well, these guidance notes certainly tell you how to learn from rejection – and what to do about it. The advice is all practical, realistic, and based on the clear-eyed realisation that if you wish to succeed in this extremely competitive world – you need to know how it works.

Wells tackles all the most frequently asked questions – Who is the best person to approach with your masterpiece? Does vanity publishing work? What makes a best-seller? What if somebody poaches your ideas? Which publishers pay best?

If you want to move beyond the comforts of your local writers’ circle into the world of commercial publishing, you should read what he has to say. Keep dreams of success in mind by all means, but take the trouble to learn how professional writers actually work.
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Writer’s Market UK 2009
This is a huge, 1,000 page compendium of advice, resources, and detailed information on how writers can locate markets and get their work into print. It has feature articles written by well-known authors giving advice on breaking into print. These are surrounded by listings of publishers, magazines, literary agents, and broadcast outlets. Then come specialized resources such as prizes and competitions, bursaries and fellowships, writers groups, and web sites.

The feature articles are precisely the sort of advice that aspirant writers are most likely to want and need. How to tackle the various genres of fiction writing: the short story, children’s writing, crime, and the novel. What agents and publishers are looking for – and how to approach them. Writing for radio, the Web, newspapers and magazines are all covered well,

There are essays on how books are designed, financed, and marketed, plus why you should know about contracts and legal issues. There are articles on the odd but very profitable field of ghost writing, and when you have made lots of money how to deal with agents, and how to promote your work once it’s published.

There are huge listings of bursaries, prizes, competitions, writers’ foundations, and all sorts of support to help the struggling want-to-be. And testing it out for being up to date, I found all sorts of on line resources for would-be writers: magazines, forums, self-help groups, web sites full of resources, writing software, plus competitions and prizes.

Given the differences in page and font sizes, it’s difficult to do a direct quantitative comparison with its two main rivals, but having looked through all three recently, I’d say that this gives the other two a very good run for their money.
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Write in Style

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

lessons on good writing style – with lots of examples

Write in Style is a good-natured and humane guide to the main elements of producing fluent and accurate English. Richard Palmer’s approach is practical and refreshingly irreverent. He covers good and bad sentences; how to deal with punctuation; how to strike the right tone; and the rules of spelling and grammar – plus all the bewildering exceptions to them. His pace is leisurely and the style conversational. He’s particularly good at explaining the problems and irregularities of the English language. Every point is illustrated with vivid examples – gaffes from the popular press and good style from skilful authors.

He covers all the fundamentals and issues which commonly give people problems – such as the differences between clauses, phrases, and complete sentences. There are also exercises (with answers) at the end of each chapter, so that you can check your understanding of each topic.

All the common marks of punctuation are fully explained, including the much-misunderstood apostrophe. There’s a whole chapter devoted to advice on writing academic essays – a very good discipline to acquire for anybody who wants to develop their writing skills. Then he does the same thing for reports, reviews, and the quite tricky precis and summary.

This will appeal to people who want to be taken by the hand and led through the complexities of English by a reassuring teacher. The strength of this book is that every point is thoroughly explained and illustrated by good and bad examples – many of them very amusing.

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Richard Palmer, Write in Style: a guide to good English, London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2002, pp.255, ISBN: 0415252636

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Writer’s Market UK

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

where and how to sell what you write

The best-selling guide to marketing your writing so far is The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, with The Writer’s Handbook a close second. But there’s always room for competition in an open market – and Writer’s Market UK is competition writ large. It’s a huge, 1,000 page compendium of advice, resources, and detailed information on how writers can locate markets and get their work into print. The format for these books is now fairly standardised.

They have feature articles written by well-known authors giving advice on breaking into print. These are surrounded by listings of publishers, magazines, literary agents, and broadcast outlets. Then come specialized resources such as prizes and competitions, bursaries and fellowships, writers groups, and web sites.

The usefulness of this information relies on its being accurate, up-to-date, and annotated to explain the nuances and differences between one source and the next. In other words, the compilers need to know what they’re talking about. This book scores well on all counts, and the editor Caroline Taggart has done a good job.

For instance, the feature articles are precisely the sort of advice that aspirant writers are most likely to want and need. How to tackle the various genres of fiction writing: the short story, children’s writing, crime, and the novel. What agents and publishers are looking for – and how to approach them. Writing for radio, the Web, newspapers and magazines are all covered well,

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Caroline Taggart (ed), Writer’s Market UK, London: David & Charles, issued annually, pp.976, ISBN: 0715332856

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Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook

May 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling guide to publishers, agents, and outlets

If you’ve just finished producing your masterpiece, this writer’s yearbook will help you to bring it to the marketplace. It’s a well-established reference guide for writers, journalists, photographers, and other people in the creative arts. The heart of the book is its amazingly comprehensive listings. It offers full contact details of publishers, agents, and institutions who deal with writers and creative arts people. The lists cover the UK and US, as well as other English-speaking countries.

In recent years, short essays have been added to each section offering advice to would-be writers and media workers. Pay attention to these: they’re written by professionals with experience and a proven track record. The information they offer will repay the price of the book ten times over. They cover fiction and poetry; drama scripts for TV, radio, theatre, and film; graphic illustration and design; plus photography and music. The other features which make it useful are general information on publishing methods, copyright and libel, income tax and allowances, and a particularly useful list of annual competitions and their prizes.

Bonus items seem to be added with each edition – such as a list of the highest earning books of the previous year, specialist literary agents, how to prepare and submit a manuscript, and even (if the worst comes to the worst) how to claim social security benefits. The latest edition also includes sections on e-publishing, ghostwriting, distribution, adaptation, and digital imaging.

Additions to the latest edition include: Self-publishing; How to publicise your book; How to get an agent’s attention: Getting cartoons published; Blogging; Crime writing; and Can you recommend an agent?

Like many other reference books, it represents very good value for money in terms of bulk information – but more importantly it’s information which is reliable, up-to-date, and difficult to locate elsewhere.

If you have any serious intention of entering the commercial market as a writer or someone working in one of the other creative arts – then this is a book which you will need sooner or later. It’s no wonder that it sits near the top of the Amazon ratings all the year round.

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Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook, London: A & C Black (issued annually) pp.816, ISBN: 1408192195

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Writers’ Questions and Answers

July 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

practical self-help manual and resources guide for writers

Writers who wish to publish their work are often baffled by some of the mysteries of the publishing process itself. How can you get the attention of a publisher? Do you need an agent? How much can you expect to get paid? Should you submit an outline – or the complete work? Gordon Wells’ book Writers’ Questions and Answers provides responses to these queries, and raises lots more questions lots more which are frequently asked by people trying to get a foothold in the world of published writing.

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Gordon Wells, Writers’ Questions and Answers, London: Allison & Busby, 2001, pp.143, ISBN: 0749005319

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Writing for the Internet

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

beginner’s guide to electronic writing skills

Oxford University Press have just brought out a series of short beginners’ manuals on communication skills. Their emphasis is on compact, no-nonsense advice directly related to issues of everyday life. Jane Dorner’s guide Writing for the Internet is for people who want to write effective text on web sites. There’s also an element of good design principles – because these considerations are inseparable if you are writing for the screen.

The topics she covers include the need for clarity, directness, and chunking; how to make text legible on a computer monitor; keeping in touch with the audience; good web page design; and – most importantly – how writing for the web differs from writing for print media. She is particularly good on what’s new about writing web pages, and she tells you what is required without drowning you in IT jargon or the technical details of HTML coding.

There’s a lot of good advice on editing, and how to use your word processor to better effect. She also has some interesting things to say about punctuation – particularly the influence of email conventions on writing for the screen.

There are also lots of excellent tips along the way – such as printing out your work with double line spacing in an unusual font. This makes it easier to spot mistakes. She also quite rightly advises against editing web pages in Microsoft Word, because it will add lots of unnecessary code.

Writers new to the Internet may be surprised to learn that one of the main skills required is that of summarising, and the guidance notes are right to draw attention to this. This means writing condensed, accurate, and descriptive titles for pages; succinct paragraphs; one or two-word section titles; and hyperlinks which say more than just “Click here”.

For academic and professional writers there are some interesting notes on how to show quotations and references, plus why you need to need to manually check sorted lists and indexes.

She describes how to approach the design of a site by using three examples – a set of personal home pages, a commercial site (brochureware) and a community site. She also provides tips on how to get the basic navigation right, then finishes with a series of checklists, notes on style, web resources, and a glossary of terms.

The chapters of this book are short, but almost every page is rich in hints, tips, and quotes in call-out boxes; and there are suggestions for further reading. The strength of this approach is that it avoids the encyclopedic volume of advice which in some manuals can be quite frightening.

Jane Dorner scored a big success with her previous book The Internet: A Writer’s Guide. Her latest is strongly recommended for anyone who wants to start writing Web pages and communicating effectively on the Internet.

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Jane Dorner, Writing for the Internet, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp.128, ISBN: 0198662858

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Writing for the Web

October 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a selection of resources reviewed

The first thing you need to know about writing for the Web is that it’s not the same as writing for print publication. This is because reading on screen and on the page are different. Text is not as sharp on a monitor as it is when printed with ink on paper.

Most people find reading on screen quite tiring. For this reason, you need to break up what you have to say into short chunks. And your sentences should be shorter than normal too. This might affect your normal writing style.

Writers new to the Internet may be surprised to learn that one of the main skills required is that of summarising. This means writing condensed, accurate, and descriptive titles for pages; succinct paragraphs; one or two-word section titles; and hyperlinks which say more than just “Click here”.

Writing for the Internet
Jane Dorner’s book is probably one of the best places to start. This is for people who want to write effective text on web sites. There’s also an element of good design principles – because these considerations are inseparable if you are writing for the screen. The topics she covers include the need for clarity, directness, and chunking; how to make text legible on a computer monitor; keeping in touch with the audience; good web page design; and – most importantly – how writing for the web differs from writing for print media.
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Hot Text: Web Writing that Works
If you want to look into the issues of chunking, summarising, and labelling in more detail, Jonathan and Lisa Price’s book is the most thorough approach to Web writing I have come across. It’s aimed principally at technical authors, but the book is so good anyone can profit from the principles they are offering.

It’s packed with good examples of how to produce efficient writing – leading with punch lines; reducing ambiguity; how to write menus; creating the right tone; how to arrange bulleted lists; and where to place links grammatically for best effect. They cover a wide range of digital genres – web marketing copy, news releases, email newsletters, webzine articles, personal resumes, Weblogs – and they even provide tips for would-be job seekers.
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Creative Web Writing
If you are mainly interested in traditional creative writing Jane Dorner has another book which shows you the skills you need if you want to put your writing onto the Internet. She is speaking to those people who have been creating poems and stories in their back rooms and getting nowhere. This guide covers collaborative story-telling, research online, interactivity and flexible text, as well as the nuts and bolts of styling for screen reading. Most importantly, she explains the range of new markets, new technologies, and how to apply them. Creative genres are covered, including autobiography, poetry, broadcasting, screen-writing and writing for children.

She also describes how to look carefully at contracts, how to submit your writing to an electronic publisher, and how to deal with Print on demand (POD) outlets.There’s a very useful survey of the various delivery methods and payments for eBooks. This is one of the most popular methods for aspiring authors to reach new readers. This section will be required reading if you are thinking of venturing into this world.

The central part of the book deals with new forms of writing using Web technologies. This is one field in which she has clearly done her homework. She shows examples of writing in the form of Blogs (Web-logs) email (epistolary) narratives, fictions illuminated by graphics, the weird world of MUDs and MOOs, Flash-animated writing, and phonetic poetry.
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Writing in Action

July 10, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Tutorial for creative writing

This is a practical writing guide aimed at students of creative writing. It covers poetry, the short story, theatre, and ‘persuasive writing’ of the kind which appears in essays and reports. Paul Mills starts with the practicalities of sentence construction – which lead immediately into grammatical issues of subjects, verbs, objects, punctuation, and then cliches. The next section of Writing in Action is a stroll through autobiographical writing, where he analyses a number of extracts quoted at length – some from professional writers, others by people learning to master the genre. On poetry he covers form, rhyme pattern and stress, as well as free verse.

A chapter on prose discusses the subtle differences between anecdote and the short story. This leads to a consideration of point of view and the big differences between first and third person narratives. He also deals with character, suspense, and atmosphere.

Writing for the theatre is divided into what he calls ‘personal’, ‘issues’, and ‘experimental’ theatre. He describes plays by Harold Pinter and Peter Brook, and discusses the issue of physical movement on stage – but this section offers very little in the way of practical advice.

The last section deals with ‘persuasive’ writing. The academic essay is given very short shrift, but he does slightly better with journalistic articles on issues of current relevance.

This is a largely descriptive guide. It outlines the issues and characteristics of different forms of writing, and makes suggestions for further exercises. I can imagine it being a useful set text for a creative writing class.

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Paul Mills, Writing in Action, London: Routledge, 1996, pp.224, ISBN: 0415119898

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Writing Short Stories

June 12, 2009 by Roy Johnson

creative theory and practical writing techniques

Can creative writing actually be taught? There is some debate about this question, but the number of university departments devoted to the subject is expanding so rapidly, many people must believe it’s possible. And why not? After all, we believe that the skills of painting, music, and architecture can be taught, don’t we. Ailsa Cox teaches creative writing, and this book is her version of an academic seminar – analysing the details of stories, then suggesting exercises which students (or readers) might complete to develop their own ability in writing short stories

She kicks off with a good shot at defining the short story. How short is short? How long can a story be before it becomes a novella or a short novel? There are no simple answers to these questions. As soon as you think of an answer, you’ll realise there are exceptions. But she explains what most stories have in common. She sets out a series of chapters which explore various types of short story: the suspenseful narrative, the fantasy, the comic yarn, and so on. Her approach is to explain the genre, outline its rules so far as they might exist, then look in detail at examples from masters of the short story, from Edgar Allen Poe to contemporary writers such as Stephen King and even her own work.

She deals with the plotless story – the ‘epiphany’ as deployed by James Joyce in ‘The Dead’ and Katherine Mansfield in ‘Bliss’. Actually, she skids around quite a bit from one genre to another – from the tall tale, to the horror story, and back again via the anecdote – but there are lots of examples enthusiastically presented in such a way that I imagine they will appeal to the aspirant writers at whom the book is aimed.

She’s very keen on fantasy and science fiction, so Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ are given close scrutiny, alongside stories by H.G.Wells and William Gibson. Each chapter ends with a series of practical exercises. These are designed to provide ideas and prompts for the would-be writer – to start the imaginative pump working.

She makes a reasonable case for considering the higher journalism as a form of creative writing, and rightly points out that some of the best reportage can be considered as short stories if seen in a different light (or published somewhere other than in newspapers). She’s not so convincing on her claims for erotic fiction, but fortunately she redeems herself by a sensitive reading of Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’.

The book ends with several useful lists of resources for writers: magazines in print and online which accept short stories; prizes for short story writers; and organisations and databases – though for the ultimate list of resources readers will still need to consult The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook or The Writer’s Handbook.

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Ailsa Cox, Writing Short Stories, London: Routledge, 2005, pp.197, ISBN: 0415303877

More on creative writing
More on writing skills
More on publishing

addresses, contacts, resources, and advice for writers

a selection of resources

lessons on good writing style – with lots of examples

where and how to sell what you write

best-selling guide to publishers, agents, and outlets

practical self-help manual and resources guide for writers

beginner’s guide to electronic writing skills

a selection of resources reviewed

Tutorial for creative writing

creative theory and practical writing techniques

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