The Fiction Desk Anthology Open for Submissions
Submit your short stories to The Fiction Desk by 31st January for the latest anthology:
Russian Proverb
‘The first pancake is always a lump.’
The first draft is always going to be lousy, but you have to write it so you can fix it. You can’t fix something that’s not on the page.
Seamus Heaney
Year after year: when the mist would start
To lift off fields and inlets, when morning light
Would open like the grain of light being split,
Day in, day out, I’d come alive again
Bethany Ball
Writing a book is like having an empty pool in the yard and every day going out and throwing in a cup of water to fill it.
When writing exercises go bad…
‘Parents claim their kids were ‘traumatised’ after a primary school staged an ‘Elf murder’ as part of a writing exercise.’
A data scientist cracks the code to landing on the New York Times Best Seller list
“Publishers eagerly slap “New York Times Bestseller” stickers on each book that appears on the list’s 15 slots.
A quarter of those, however, have only a cameo appearance, briefly grabbing a spot at the bottom of the list and dropping out after a single week. Only 37% have some staying power and spend more than four weeks on the best-seller list. Even fewer — 8% — attain the No. 1 spot.
Some rare exceptions can lease out a spot for years: “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett lingered on the fiction list for an astonishing 131 weeks, while Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken” stayed on the nonfiction list for a record 203 weeks.
One big misconception is that you have to write a mega-seller to make the list. The majority of titles on The New York Times best-seller list only sell between 10,000 and 100,000 copies in their first year. “The Slippery Year,” a 2009 memoir by Melanie Gideon, made the list with a yearly sale of fewer than 5,000 copies.
How is this possible?
Our data set shows that just about your only chance of making the list is right after your publication date.
That’s because book sales, we discovered, follow a universal sales curve — there’s a single mathematical formula that captures the weekly sales of all books. And that sales curve has a prominent peak right after the release, meaning you sell the most copies during the first weeks after your book’s release. Fiction sales almost always peak within the first two to six weeks; for nonfiction, the peak can come any time during the first 15 weeks.”
Dark Mountain Gatherings & Seeking Collaborators
‘You come here because it’s a good way back from the frontline. You come here when you’re no longer sure where the lines are drawn, when the maps are shaken and old identities scattered. You come here when it’s time to reflect, to ground yourself again, or to catch the whispering of realities that get drowned out in the street-noise of the everyday world.’
Steve Silberman
Life is short and writing – along with the habits of precise observation and close attention to language it requires – is one of the most meaningful and rewarding ways to spend your very brief time on this planet.
London Writing Tips 