My (Good) Experience Publishing with Speaking Volumes
After two years of pitching my new adult/crossover novel Colorland, I had a two-page list of Canadian publishers who either (1) had rejected it (rejection is part of the writing business, and I work from the assumption that anything I write is rubbish [ed. a common assumption for many of us] and deserves rejection), or (2) had not responded at all (which I also understand, given their piles of unsolicited manuscripts, but which I still find rude).
Read More»The Wisest Fifty Dollars
by Joseph Koot
It started in the living room of a mini-home in Riverview, New Brunswick. There, half a dozen women, members of a friend’s book club, gathered to hear me talk about my memoir Looking for Bill, Finding Myself.
Following this, one woman’s mother contacted me to give a motivational talk to her club. I showed this gathering some photos of my youth and of my hike across Europe. I also recounted my childhood angst and its resolution through the trek described in my book Europe, One Step at a Time.
Read More»Our Words Can (and Do) Travel
by Allan Hudson
While doing research for my novel, Dark Side of a Promise, which takes place mainly in Bangladesh, I learned about a dangerous industry based on dismantling old ships. The work of the ‘ship breakers’ is difficult, with no safety standards whatsoever. Many children and illiterate people are employed in the yards and I could not imagine what it must be like to need that kind of work.
Chittagong is one of the largest yards in the world, where 25,000 men break 250 ships a year. I wanted to write a story on what this might be like, and about the people who might need the work. I had no idea how far those words could travel.
Read More»From novel to screenplay
by Jason Lawson
I recently sold the movie rights of my novel, The Vision, to Canadian film producer Sam Grana (pr. The Boys of St. Vincent’s). Once Grana acquired the rights, he hired me to transform the novel into a screenplay. The experience turned into a highlight of my writing career, but was also a huge learning curve, as I’d never written a screenplay before.
Read More»Step right up to self-publishing
Though the line of respectability between traditionally-published and self-published material is blurring, the line regarding publicity has almost disappeared. Promotion budgets are getting smaller and these days, authors must create their own buzz.
Read More»CBC Creative Nonfiction Competition
This is it! Your first writing assignment of the New Year!
Send us your original, unpublished work of creative nonfiction for a chance to win $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, a writing residency at the Banff Centre and publication in Air Canada’s enRoute Magazine.
Deadline is March 1, 2015.
Visit the CBC site for more info.
TWUC call for submissions
The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC) is pleased to announce that submissions are being accepted until March 1, 2015 for the 22nd Annual Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers. The winning entry will be the best Canadian work of up to 2,500 words in the English language, fiction or non-fiction, written by an author not published in book format.
Malahat Review call for submissions
The Malahat Review, Canada’s premier literary magazine, invites entries from Canadian, American, and overseas authors for the Long Poem Prize.
Two awards of $1,000 CAD each are given. Poets contributing to The Malahat Review have also won or been nominated for National Magazine Awards for Poetry and the Pushcart Prize. The Long Poem Prize is offered every second year, alternating with the Novella Prize.
Self-promotion: making it work
by Chuck Bowie
I’m a New Brunswick author who writes genre fiction. I write for a small ‘new model’ publishing house in Quebec. It’s ‘southward-facing’ in the sense that a big chunk of the target audience is American. Most of the authors write solely for the eBook audience. I’m published in print and as eBooks. I’ve written this article to share my promotional experiences of the past two months.
Read More»Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick launches 2015 writing competition
$2,600 in cash prizes to be awarded
The Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick (WFNB) is now accepting submissions for its 2015 Writing Competition, with $2,600 in cash prizes to be awarded.
The prize purse includes the David Adams Richards Prize in the long fiction category, which is awarded for a collection of short stories, a novella, or a substantial part of a longer novel.
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