This week in the international childrens publishing
community everyone was talking about the genre slap that we took when Kent
University (UK) decided that Childrens Writing was not literary enough to teach
seriously... this followed the sacking of the Times Children’s Book reviewer,
in a budget cut. The children’s writing community in the UK wrote a letter signed by 425 writers and librarians to the Times expressing their outrage at
this. Childrens writers around the world are facing the continual disparagement
of what they do so there was lots of agreement when Keren David wrote this blog piece. There is a beautifully put comment on it from New Zealand’s Maria Gill
who summed up our feelings here pretty well.
As the fallout continues over Learning Media and the sales
of back lists etc etc, anybody who has got an email with new contract terms in
it please check in with NZ Society of Authors before you sign anything.
Be aware that increasingly publishing contracts are now
including tricky little phrases such as ‘all rights in perpetuity’ and
‘Worldwide’ and last month Writer Beware commented on a contract that had
‘Universe wide.’ Check over this handy book contract clause explain-all.
Bob Mayer has been looking at the traits of sucessful
writers these days and it comes down to the fact that they are ‘Outliers.’ This
is a really interesting article.
Continuing in this vein is a great post by C J Lyons who is probably the most sucessful Hybrid author out there. How has she juggled her
writing career stradling both sides of the fence...she went and built a new
paddock.
Bibliocrunch has some tips if you want to look into self publishing.
Phillip Jones of FutureBook has been looking at the slap dealt to the science publishing community from a Nobel Prize winner about the
elitist nature of publishing journals... The Open Access of scholarly work is
the big talking point in the academic community at the moment.
DigitalBookWorld is hosting a webinar on Rights Marketing and Management. Check it out.
Author newsletters...How do you do them and what use are they. This is a nifty bookmark worthy post giving you the low down.
Publishing Perspectives is taking issue with The Best Of 2013 Book lists...which are appearing all over the web at the moment. One ofthe more comprehensive book lists I’ve seen is BookRiot’s. At least I have heard
of some of the books.
In the Craft section,
Susan Kaye Quinn on Brainstorming Your Book. This is a
bookmark it post.
Jodie Renner has pro tips on character description.
Writersinthestorm has a How to write like the wind...
Kirsten Lamb on character duality traits.
Sarah Juckes has discovered a nifty website to help youuntangle your plot.
There are three stellar articles from Jami Gold.
Fix 4 common problems with The Emotion Thesaurus (Angela
Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s amazing book)
In the Marketing section,
Joel Friedman has
a nifty template for anyone wanting to do a dust jacket.
Julie Hedlund has been doing a kick starter for her picture book which became funded yesterday. Take a look at how she broke it down and what she offered.
6 books every marketer needs to read. I have read some of them and they are very interesting even if you are not a marketer.
To Finish,
‘Tis the season to get gifts for yourself (or the writer in your life...) Here we have Chuck’s Ten gifts for writers updated from when he asked people to kidnap
Neil Gaiman.
K M Weiland has the top 10 gifts for writers...(not as extreme...)
and
Writer Unboxed has bypassed the gift list and gone straight
to New Years resolutions for writers...
Spread the Goodwill!
2 comments:
Children's books are probably the most important genre of all. They are the beginning of literacy and imagination...
Completely agree with you…for without children's books we would have no adult readers… who then read and write adult literary works….
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