From today (or tomorrow, depending on your computer settings) you’ll find all the content from this blog at our new home:

www.writersandartists.co.uk/blog/

We’ll be adding new posts, featuring name writers and industry experts, and including all sorts of useful hints and insider advice, but it wouldn’t be anything without you, so do come and add your comments at our new site.

While you’re there, you might also like to register (it’s quick and it’s free) and create a user profile. You can have your own ‘writer’ or ‘artist’ page at our new site, which means you can share your ideas, dreams, interests and ambitions with our online community of users.

I’m a little sad to wave goodbye to this blog, but it’s exciting to have a new website and I hope you’ll enjoy using it. See you soon at www.writersandartists.co.uk

Best wishes,

Claire

(Publisher, Yearbooks, A&C Black)

We’re about to launch a new website for the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook featuring all sorts of things for emerging writers and artists, everything from expert advice and details of our popular writing competition to the option of creating your own user profile, post a bit about yourself and get in touch with others who share your interests, goals and ambitions, or just fancy a natter.

It does mean this blog is about to go a little quiet, but please don’t think we’ve forgotten you. In fact we’d like you to come and be among the first to visit us at our new website. We’re just moving the blog on to it now, and in a matter of days you’ll be able to access everything related to Writers & Artists in one place.

We’ll let you know as soon as it’s up and running, it won’t be long!

Best wishes,
Claire Fogg

(Publisher, Yearbooks, A&C Black)

You’ve written your manuscript. It’s as good as it’s going to be. It’s time to get it out into the real world – and you need an agent.

Many mainstream publishers no longer read work that isn’t represented, which is where the literary agent comes in. Find yourself a good agent and they’ll use their experience to match your work with the best publishing house, and push to get the best deal for you.

If you’re new to the writing game, these are my five pointers, based on my experiences of the industry (others will have their own tips but these are mine and I’m sticking to them) – for finding yourself an agent:

1. Know your writing
   By this I mean, consider what you have written. What genre is it? Which other authors’ work do you admire? Try to match your title to an agent who is known for the sort of work you are aiming to get published.
2. Be as original as can be
   You’ll need your own voice if you want to be taken on by an agent, so don’t try too hard to emulate works already on their list. There’s a fine line between drawing inspiration from published authors and a lack of originality! – and it can be frustrating for an agency to receive imitations of the style and tone of their bestsellers.
3. Speed read the thank-yous
   A quick way to track down an author’s agent is to look at the dedication and thanks pages in their books – they normally mention their agent (particularly if theirs is a solid working relationship!)
4. Choose your preferred style
   Agencies vary in size, location and personal style. Although agents work happily with clients at any distance, consider how easy it would be to get to their offices. Would you rather be represented by a larger agency who has more services ‘inhouse’ – such as the ability to sell your work abroad, or a one person band, where you might develop a closer relationship?
5. Refer to the experts
   Use the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook as a source of agents to approach (it carries a complete listing of all the UK agents you could hope for) as well as further advice from Philippa Milnes-Smith on ‘How to Get an Agent’.

Finally, remember that if you sign up with an agency they should never ask you for money (read our post on vanity publishing vs self-publishing). But they may well suggest your work needs some editorial help, and will either make their own suggestions or recommend a professional who you would pay directly.

Good luck!

Yours, Cressida

Author Emma Bowd

Behind every published author is someone who’s had to deal with rejection. But how do you get over it? Guest blogger novelist Emma Bowd shares her experiences of dealing with the dreaded ‘no thank you’ letters.

As a published author, I can have the luxury of saying that rejection letters are an absolute rite-of-passage. But I’m also not so far away from the coal face to have quite forgotten the sting of disappointment and the emotion of unfulfilled dreams.

My editor, Marian McCarthy, was an enormous pillar of strength throughout the whole process of writing and submitting The Shoe Princess’s Guide to the Galaxy for publication. She is extremely wise and experienced in the publishing world, and had always coached me for the rejection letters from day one.

She used to tell me that being a writer is like being a farmer – you work for many years on a product (without income) and then, when it’s time to go to market, you literally do not know if there is going to be a glut of your product or no demand at all.

She also wisely said that the book would “end up where it’s meant to be” – and painful as it was, I completely agree with this. It is so wonderful to be with a publisher that completely ‘gets’ my work and is so very supportive of me.

So the message is, keep going and believe in your work. Always revisit your manuscript after a rejection letter and take what positive feedback you can from it and tweak accordingly. A manuscript is an evolving entity. And you are the only person in charge of its destiny.

Very best, Emma

Warm wishes, Jo

Because of this, I feel better placed to encourage other writers to do it, to take their own blog of faith and blog on regardless. (Ok, enough of the blog puns. They’ve been done to death and aren’t funny any more.)

And you know what, writing can be a lonely life, with only your cat and your four walls for company. If that’s the case, blogging can remedy things: it’s a way into the real world, a way to reach a huge audience that aspiring writers of days gone by would never had had access to. It’s there to be used.

If you’re a newcomer to blogging, there is heaps of advice on getting started (the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook carries several excellent articles in fact), so don’t let the techie side of things hold you back.

View your blog as an opportunity to own your slice of cyberspace, with which you can do whatever you choose. Forget feeling shy - you’re a writer – your main aim is for other people to read your work. The internet is the ultimate bookshop.

Writing a blog means you can see yourself published in minutes – it’s free, easy, it’s fun (it is!), and has huge creative potential. Look at other successful blogs for inspiration – many professional writers have excellent blogs such as Neil Gaiman, Will Self and George Szirtes.

The blogging writer is carving out a profile for themselves and is often better placed to prove to publishers that there is an audience for their work.

So take a punt on blogging. If you have something interesting to say, people will read it. If you consider yourself to be a natural born writer,  what have you got to lose?

Get off those starting blogs! (last one) and, if anyone has any helpful tips for blog virgins, do tell.

Warm wishes, Jo

This one’s up to you – it’s not imperative to have an agent, but if you’re not business-minded or would rather not deal with that side at all, then it’s well worth it.

Illustrators’ agents take about 30% to 40%, and for this they usually have their own website, they field calls, organise fees, will present your portfolio to clients, invoice clients, advertise (though you’re likely to pay a percentage of this too), and promote your work, give advice and feedback, and basically look after the business side for you.

When you’re finding an agent make sure your portfolio is up to date and scratch, of course, but never underestimate the human side of it all. See whether you actually like who you are meeting, as the illustrator-agent relationship is just like any other – you have to get on, trust and respect each other.

Hope this advice is useful and I wish you fun as well as success in your career.

Best wishes, Clare

So, the shiny red cover may be the same, but what’s between the pages of the new edition (the 103rd edition no less) is very different. I’ve worked my socks off to revise all the listings, add heaps of new ones, update all the articles and commission many brand new and very helpful ones as well as an introduction from Richard and Judy and a foreword by Julie Myerson. Oh, and it also carries details of the new 2010 Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook writing competition.

Copies will be hot off the press and in the bookshops from 30 June.

Get yours.

Warm wishes, Jo

The identity of ‘Jack Night’, the detective constable behind the NightJack blog, has been revealed after a high court ruling, despite his protestations that doing so would put him at risk of disciplinary action.

In April this year ‘Jack’ received the Orwell Prize for his blog. This was the first time the prestigious literary prize had honoured a blog as part of its remit. He also signed a book deal – the holy grail for many bloggers - and was ‘resting’ his blog while he gotdown to the nitty-gritty of writing up. (In the latest twist the blog content has now been completely removed.)

So on the one hand, we are finally seeing the blogosphere gaining recognition as a ‘mature’ or mainstream literary activity, but with that too has arrived greater interest, even satire (with Radio 4’s Diary of an On-call Girl), greater scrutiny, and now, greater intrusion.

The ruling means that “blogging is a public activity with no right to anonymity”.

To date blogging has boomed, not only because of free, or very cheap, readily available, and increasingly user-friendly ‘blogware’, but also because it channels a different form of communication, one that is direct, personal and immediate, with the added benefit of instant audience feedback.

Blogs have enabled and encouraged web users to communicate their thoughts, often unrestricted, usually unmediated, and frequently anonymously, and that has been their making.

So if you are a blogger, will this change what you are writing or doing in any way? And do you think we, the public, need to know the identities of bloggers like Jack Night?

Claire Fogg

(Publisher, Yearbooks, A&C Black)

John Simmons

Our guest blogger author John Simmons believes it’s wrong to draw a line between the ‘proper writer’ and other types of writer. What do you think, do you agree?

Are you a writer? I sometimes get exasperated by people – often people who describe themselves as writers – who insist on ‘restricted borders’ for writing. They separate people into ‘proper writers’ and the rest. By proper writers they generally mean literary novelists and poets.

I’m a reader of those proper writers, but I also believe that writing is a country with many different regions and that everyone can be a writer – indeed everyone is a writer. We all express ourselves in words; and we all have the potential to do that more creatively. It’s simply a matter of finding ways to release that creativity.

I’m a writer for business which, for many, puts me on the wrong side of the border from proper writers.

I could cite Salman Rushdie, Fay Weldon and Justin Cartwright, plus my colleague Jamie Jauncey, as a few of those whose writing craft has been practised on advertising, packaging and marketing materials as well as fiction. But my main evidence for greater inclusiveness comes from my workshops when people (for shorthand purposes ‘business writers’) emerge as better, more confident writers through being exposed to a wider range of writing styles.

They are encouraged to use techniques – constraints that liberate – drawn from many different forms of writing. They try storytelling, poetry, other kinds of fictional writing; then they apply these to their own business writing. It works. The quality of writing improves. It improves because it is more personal and more truthful.

And, yes, I do mean truthful. I know there is a cynical response that says business writing is about the presentation of lies not truth.

The fact is, business writing succeeds best when it is most truthful, when it comes from a genuine expression of personality, when it puts aside the corporate persona and encourages the reader to appreciate that the writer is a human being like you.

John Simmons is author of 26 ways of looking at a blackberry, published by A&C Black. He also runs workshops for business writers.