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Publishing on the Internet

October 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a selection of resources

What if your ambitions are for publishing on the Internet? After all, many writers now launch their work in writers forums, creative writing groups, and even in personal weblogs. The Internet has made it possible to reach a worldwide audience with just a few IT skills – and it’s all for free!

You have the chance to place your work in writers’ groups, you might create your own web site, or you could start blogging. In addition, you could promote your work via a personal website and an email newsletter. Whichever route you choose, you should be aware of the difference between writing for the screen and the printed page.

What follows is guidance and resources covering all these new possibilities. You need to know what is available for writers on the Internet, and where to find it. eBooks and email publishing are a very attractive and cost-effective option you can learn about easily. Blogging is cost-free and currently very hip. And knowing the difference between writing for the screen or for print will show that you know what you are doing.

The Internet: A Writer’s Guide
The main strength of Jane Dorner’s book is that she is a professional writer who practices what she writes about. She writes for both 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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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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The Internet Writer’s Handbook
Karen Scott’s book is a detailed guide to publishers of the two formats which are most digital – e-zines and e-books. It’s in the form of an international A-Z of the best websites for writers to target, with full contact details for all websites listed. She offers plenty of detail on how to submit your work , how much publishers will pay, and even how they are most likely to respond. The topics these eBook publishers cover range from poetry and fiction, through non-fiction feature writing, to specialist technical and hobbyist publications.
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Subediting for Journalists

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the art and skills of subediting for publication

The best thing about Subediting for Journalists is that it is quite clearly based on practical experience in professional journalism. There are some interesting accounts from newspaper and magazine journalists describing exactly how they work. It’s all to do with rigour and attention to detail. They deal with the basics of house style – adhering to a set of standards in spelling and representation. This means taking care with punctuation and grammar, spotting cliché, and getting names right.

Most of what they have to say concerns correcting common mistakes – dangling participles, misused phrases, and unnecessary repetition. Anyone who wants to improve their writing skills could learn valuable lessons here. They also cover all those grammatical niceties such as that/which and who/whom which you look up then forget about by the next time you need to use them. The advice they give could not be more up to date:

your publication …. could be printed, it could be uploaded onto a website, it could be cannibalised for delivery to WAP or G3 mobile phones and it could also appear on television.

There are plenty of examples of re-written news items which illustrate the advice being given. They deal neatly with issues of names, dates, places, accuracy, and getting to the point. There are sections on writing headlines and photograph captions. These need to be snappy, but the advice is the same in both cases – make it accurate.

They outline the main legal and ethical problems confronting subeditors – issues of copyright, libel, slander, defamation, and contempt of court.

They also explain the print production process. This includes the use of computer software such as Quark Publishing System (QPS) to control what can become a very complex collection of documents. It’s like a peek behind the scenes for the uninitiated.

There’s also a chapter on print technology which won’t tell you much about subediting, but which is a fascinating sketch of the revolution which took place in 1983 when hot metal was replaced by digital typesetting.

They finish with a chapter on subediting web pages. They conclude with a glossary of journalism terms, a sample house style guide, and standard proof correction symbols in UK and US style.

This is a good book. It’s readable, written by people who are clearly well-informed, and just about as up-to-date as it’s possible to be in the old-ish world of print publication.

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Wynford Hicks and Tim Holmes, Subediting for Journalists, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.180, ISBN: 0415240859

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The Economist Style Guide

June 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling guide to English usage and style rules

The Economist prides itself on good quality writing. The Economist Style Guide is the print version of their in-house guide on grammar and English usage which they issue to all their journalists. It’s designed to promote precision and clarity in writing – and the advice it offers is expressed in a witty and succinct manner. It gives general advice on writing skills, points out common errors and cliches, offers guidance on consistent use of punctuation, abbreviations and capital letters, and contains an exhaustive range of reference material.

It also includes a special section on American and British English, a fifty-four page fact checker, and a glossary. I particularly like the section called ‘Common Solecisms’ which warns against popular misunderstandings and points to words often used incorrectly.

Anticipate does not mean expect. Jack and Jill expected to marry; if they anticipated marriage, only Jill might find herself expectant.

The emphasis of the illustrative examples is on current affairs, politics, economics, and business – but the lessons in clear expression and the examples of tangled syntax and garbled journalese will be instructive to all writers who wish to sharpen their style.

It takes quite a tilt at the language of political correctness – and I think some of the following advice might be challenged. But it is so refreshingly un-stuffy, one reads on with a smile in the mind.

Avoid, where possible, euphemisms and circumlocutions promoted by interest-groups. In most contexts the hearing-impaired are simply deaf. It is no disrespect to the disabled sometimes to describe them as crippled. Female teenagers are girls, not women. The underprivileged may be disadvantaged, but are more likely just poor.

The guidance is arranged in logical, separate sections – political terms, metaphors, apostrophes, spelling, Americanisms – so you can easily find what you need. The bulk of the advice deals with common problems of English such as the difference between ‘compare with‘ and ‘compare to‘, but I was glad to see that rather like Keith Waterhouse (Waterhouse on Newspaper Style they do not leave the excesses of their own profession unexamined.

Avoid expressions used only by journalists, such as giving people the thumbs up, the thumbs down or the green light. Stay clear of gravy trains and salami tactics.

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The Economist Style Guide, London: Economist Books, 10th edition 2010, pp.272, ISBN: 1846681758

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The Total Library

February 11, 2011 by Roy Johnson

criticism, journalism, film reviews, and essays

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the few writers to establish an international reputation on the strength of only having written short stories: (Katherine Mansfield is another). In fact because he never wrote any long works, it is often assumed that he didn’t write very much. The truth is the exact opposite: he never stopped writing, and The Total Library, this huge collection of his non-fiction works is only a sample of his vast output.

From his earliest years he produced book reviews, essays, lectures, film reviews, prologues, and translations in addition to his now-famous fictions. He even invented literary genres – the essay which is part philosophic reflection and part fiction; studies of imaginary works; and biographies of people who did not exist. This in addition to spoofs, mind games, and metaphysical writings of a kind that seem to transcend national boundaries – which is partly why he managed to establish his international reputation.

Borges’ attitude to the lecture illustrates both his personality and his versatility. In his earlier years he gave ‘lectures’ by sitting on the stage and letting somebody else read out a prepared text to the audience. After he went blind he didn’t write out a text at all, but sat in front of the audience and improvised monologues on his chosen topic. He is an immensely sophisticated playboy of the literary world

This volume is a very wide collection in chronological terms – from his earliest pieces written in the 1920s to fragments written shortly before his death in 1986. It even includes early work he later disowned, but which here has wisely been included. This allows us to follow (in excellent translation) the development of his approach to writing.

It has to be said that his early work is marked by an inflated and pretentious literary style – for instance his habit of trying to impress with paradoxical statements “all the film’s characters are recklessly normal”. He also seems to have adopted a great deal of whimsy from the English authors who were the favourite reading of his earlier years. But this affectation drops away from the early 1930s onwards.

At their most lightweight, some of these pieces are no more than paragraph long observations, but at their best they offer amazingly perceptive analyses based on his encyclopaedic knowledge and love of literature. For instance in the middle of discussing Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener he persuasively argues that the text prefigures the work of Kafka in its rigorous logic and black humour. This is a perception he elaborated into a full length essay seven years later – ‘Kafka and his Precursors’ (1951) in which he wittily argues that great writers create not only their own works, but also their readers and even their precursors. He illustrates what we now call Kafkaesque elements in the work of Kierkegaard and Robert Browning, then observes:

Kafka’s idiosyncracy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. .. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

There are surprises on nearly every page. Borges repeatedly asserts that whilst James Joyce is a great twentieth century writer, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are ‘unreadable’. In his film criticism, he pours scorn on King Kong and Now, Voyager (‘Across the screens of the most remote movie houses, the film spreads its bold thesis: A disfigured Miss Davis is less beautiful‘). He defends Rudyard Kipling against his political detractors. And his celebration of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass will make you want to dash out and buy a copy, if you don’t already have one.

There would be a good argument for reading this collection backwards – starting with pieces such as the magnificent essay on ‘The Detective Story’ (1951) or on ‘Blindness'(1977) which is a poetic meditation on the advantages he has gained from losing his own sight – which turn out to be his learning Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian languages. Work your way in reverse chronological order through his essays on anti-Semitism and the second world war, via the sketches he produced for Hogar (the Argentinean equivalent of Ladies’ Home Journal) until you reach the material he (understandably) disowned. For those who have read his celebrated short stories in Ficciones, Labyrinths, and The Book of Imaginary Beings, this collection is a welcome addition to understanding a fascinating writer.

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Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library, London: Penguin Books, 2001, pp.560, ISBN: 0141183020

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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.

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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Waterhouse on Newspaper Style

July 23, 2009 by Roy Johnson

writing skills via amusing critique of tabloid journalism

Waterhouse on Newspaper Style has a complex history. It was originally written in 1979 as a series of style notes for journalists on the Daily Mirror, and it has gone in and out of print ever since – whilst simultaneously establishing a reputation as a classic of clear guidance and an analysis of tabloid journalism. Keith Waterhouse is one of the old Fleet Street school who actually care about clarity, accuracy, and good prose style.

Writing from the point of view of a working journalist, he inspects the linguistic practice of the press and reveals its weaknesses in a series of witty mini-essays. He adopts the A-to-Z format – from Adjectives through Metaphor to the Weather – looking at usage and abusage in a way which is both instructive and very amusing.

It’s easy to score points off the tabloid fixation with headlines which combine rhyme, alliteration, cliché, and weak puns [RAMBO BOY ON RAMPAGE]. However, in the course of dissecting these literary weaknesses, Waterhouse forces us to think about the everyday misuse of language in a way which is instructive beyond the pages our daily newspapers.

For instance, in terms of the discourse of the medium, he points out that popular journalism employs an artificial language which nobody actually speaks – as in “the dollar takes a pounding”.

He describes this approach as being like “ransom notes which are made up of lettering cut out of various publications”. And all through this amusing tour of catchwords, journalese, officialese, and tautology he has perceptive advice to offer on the most basic elements of good writing – such as accuracy and restraint in the use of the comma, and alertness to the cliché, the vogue word, and the tired metaphor.

Another of his observations which struck me as usefully perceptive was the reason he gives for distrusting those who use too much jargon:

to use outsiders’ jargon is to take their own evaluation of themselves on trust – or anyway to give the impression of doing so. This is one good reason why journalists should never resort to the jargon of the field they cover.

Waterhouse illuminates the conventions of good and bad writing without once resorting to the polysyllabic terms of conventional grammar. There are no ‘objects of a preposition’ or ‘possessive pronouns’ here. Everything is done via plain prose and good examples. He comes out on the side of the specific, the concrete, and the direct expression. We should write ‘red’, not ‘brightly coloured’, ‘rain’ not ‘bad weather’, and ‘began’ not ‘commenced’.

It’s a joy to read, it’s instructive, and you’ll search your own prose more rigorously to avoid the solecisms he discusses. But the book’s idiosyncratic career still seems to be in progress. My edition is a recent Penguin paperback, yet when I checked the Net, it didn’t appear to be in print. Keep looking. It’s well worth the effort.

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Keith Waterhouse, Waterhouse on Newspaper Style London: Penguin, 1993, pp.250, ISBN: 0140118195

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We the Media

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

open sources – writing and new web technology

O’Reilly publish computer books and software guidance manuals, but they also support the open source movement. This seeks to make the code of software available to be developed and used free of charge. This book is one of their contributions to the polemic. We the Media is a study of committed writing which argues the case for what author Dan Gillmor calls open source journalism. He takes the idea of sharing code into the realms of information exchange. To this is coupled his enthusiasm for blogging as the greatest form of New Journalism. He also discusses the other forms in which information can easily be transmitted – such as peer-to-peer file sharing, Wikis, the mobile connected camera, text messaging, and RSS feeds.

His basic argument is that journalists, news broadcasters, public relations people, political activists, and anybody else who wants their message to be taken seriously should make full use of these latest communication tools. He gives plenty of examples of IT-activism – people mounting public information on web sites when the authorities removed it from public view; others raising political campaign funds from adverts on blogs.

He seems a little over-optimistic about their effectiveness for political activism, but on firmer ground when it comes to more neutral journalistic uses.

For anybody who is short of ideas, his chapters are packed with practical examples of successful enterprises which have been launched on the strength of a new blog. These range from one-person campaigns or news services, to blogs which generate income or sponsorship. One intrepid soul asked people for the money to send him to report the war in Iraq – and he got it.

Gillmor also gives a cautious glimpse into the future by looking at the latest trends in web technology. This includes news aggregators, RSS feeds, and Web Services. All of these enable information to be gathered automatically and customised by the user.

In the latter part of the book he looks at some of the legal implications of the latest technologies – cases where people have claimed to be libeled, copyright cases, cybersquatting, even cases where people have sought to prevent others deep-linking into their sites. He deals with all these issues in a way which supports freedom of speech, whilst recognising that it might sometimes be put to negative purposes.

Strangely enough, he does have some reservations about the current state of copyright, which he sees as increasingly restrictive to the point of abuse:

What were once 14-year terms have now been extended to the life of the author plus 75 years, or 95 years when a copyright is held by a corporation. By amazing coincidence, copyright terms seem to get extended every time Mickey Mouse comes close to entering the public domain

This is a committed and wide-ranging polemic which explores the very latest developments in online communications – both from a technological and a content point of view.

In keeping with the high standards he advocates throughout, he acknowledges and references all his sources, there is a huge webliography listing all the homepages, sites, and blogs mentioned; and the book has its own web site where you can follow up on his arguments, find software, and even download a copy of the book free of charge.

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Dan Gillmor, We the Media: grassroots journalism by the people, for the people, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2006, pp.336, ISBN: 0596102275

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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’ 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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a selection of resources

the art and skills of subediting for publication

best-selling guide to English usage and style rules

criticism, journalism, film reviews, and essays

addresses, contacts, resources, and advice for writers

a selection of resources

writing skills via amusing critique of tabloid journalism

open sources – writing and new web technology

where and how to sell what you write

practical self-help manual and resources guide for writers

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