Stuck for a title for that crime novel you’re working on? Or perhaps you have no intentions whatsoever of writing a book, but find yourself preoccupied almost hourly with schemes and plans for murder, mayhem and wildly inventive violence. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a title to go along with your plotting? (Oho! You…
Book Prizes? In The Olden Days, We Were Lucky To Get Slapped
Following on from Tuesday’s rant on writerly whinging, I now want to expand on prizes. Writers’ earnings have always been as cyclical as weather. Yet to hear the Literati today, you’d swear that art would die if it weren’t for bursaries and awards and prizes and residencies and general state-level support for the gargantuan brains of…
6 Reasons Why Writers Need To Stop Bloody Whining
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about earnings in the arts – or to be precise, the lack of them. This article from The Guardian is particularly whiny. It literally does depict an author in his garret. If it weren’t for electricity, you might imagine him setting his fingerless gloves on fire whilst trying…
Is the Bestseller Dead?
In this post back in the wilds of 2013, I explored (with the aid of some lovely data. And maybe some pretty shoddy guesswork, it has to be said) how many books an author has to sell in the English-speaking world to achieve bestseller status. In most countries, a bestseller is defined only by what…
Nice Writing Karma
You probably won’t believe me if I say that when I posted 5 reasons why you should be entering Writing Competitions last week, I had no idea that I’d just been shortlisted for the RTE Today Show / New Island Books ‘Get Your Book Published’ competition. Talk about some gorgeous irony, eh? But that’s what happened.…
Are you writing? Then SHHH! I’ll tell you a secret
Writing competitions might save your life. Unless you’re keen on starving for your art, in which case you should probably stop reading now. Writing competitions are the lowest common denominator of literary prizes. And I mean that in the best way possible. Because we may be living in an era when writing competitions have become the new – if…
OH YES! … It’s The BRAINY Book Title Generator!
I want you to be honest. Go on. You can tell your Auntie Tara. Were you too embarrassed to try the Chick-Lit Book Title Generator? Was it just too darned demeaning, even in the name of fun, to attach your name to book titles for such an apparently fluffy, commercial genre? The sort you would never write? (If you ever were…
What is Assisted Publishing, Anyway?
One thing which keeps cropping up in my investigations into the world of non-traditional publishing is Assisted Publishing. Not quite self-publishing, but definitely not traditional publishing either. So what is it? For instance, people I’ve spoken to in the US have very different ideas of what Assisted Publishing is in comparison to those in Ireland or…
On The Satisfaction of Not Making Your Money From Writing
In this rather disturbing article, The Guardian points out (amongst other hairy statistics) that 77% of self-published authors are making less than £600 per annum. In another article, the figures are a bit different, but no less pessimistic: it states that the median income of authors has dropped from just £6,000 13 years ago to less than £4,000 per annum. This means that…
The Next Big Book Trend: That One From Before
What goes around, comes around. Apparently, we are regressing, in terms of fiction, back to the sensationalistic stories of old. People seem surprised by this. I am surprised by people’s surprise. It’s like being taken aback because skirt lengths have changed again. If you didn’t see it coming, you were standing in the tunnel with…
Tara Sparling writes 