Harper Collins Launches a Virtual Slush Pile

Dig this from this week's Publishing News:

HARPERCOLLINS UK IS launching a new community site encouraging new writers to submit work, with the most popular titles being considered for publication. Authonomy.com is set to launch in early 2008, aimed at a UK audience, with the intention of expanding to other HarperCollins territories in future.

Aspiring writers can upload their work to the site, and other users will able to leave comments and recommendations for each work. Victoria Barnsley, Chief Executive and Publisher of HarperCollins UK, said: “Very often we hear from budding new authors who tell us their script was loved by their family, book group or wide circle of friends. Authonomy™ is an opportunity for these authors to woo a large audience, get an army of support behind them, and really test whether their work has got what it takes to make it.”

I'm Going to be a Writer's Day Speaker

Head's up. I'm going to be speaking on everything to do with writing and the internet on Writer's Day 24 November 2007

They want me to share my scintillating know-how about the uses of technology and social networking.

Hmm. Perhaps they haven't seen this youtube video of me at work.



(With thanks to Lisa Yee who was blogging about her bad technology day!)

Siobhan Dowd

I was so, so sad to learn from a friend that Siobhan Dowd, author of A Swift Pure Cry and The London Eye Mystery has died.

I was at the London Book Fair when Siobhan appeared at one of PEN’s writing masterclasses. She stood on the stage and gave a deep sigh. Only recently, she said, she had been in the audience of aspiring writers at one of these masterclasses. She couldn’t believe that she was on the stage talking about her book. But when I read her book I realised she was not just a fellow traveller on the thorny path to publication - the emotional honesty and simple beauty of her prose revealed a massive talent.

A few months ago, I asked my husband to read my YA novel but he was reluctant, never having read YA, he didn’t know what standard I was aspiring to. I gave him A Swift Pure Cry. That’s the standard, I said.

A Swift Pure Cry is a beautiful novel with heartrendingly believable characters – from motherless Shell who resorts to shoplifting when she realises she needs her first bra to the alcoholic father who copes by sending the children to pick up the stones in the field.

I do not know Siobhan, but after reading A Swift Pure Cry, I felt like Siobhan knew me.

I grieve for this wonderful writer and, selfishly, I grieve for the books we will not be reading as a result of her death.