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Literary Consultancy and Coaching for Writers from Jacqui Lofthouse

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Routes to Publication: our Event at Google Academy

July 18, 2018 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Authors, Bookselling, Community, Corporate, Events, Inspiration, Motivation, Publishing, Self-publishing, The writing coach, Writers Leave a Comment

A Panel Event at Google Academy exploring routes to publication and writerly integrity in the process

Thursday August 16th at 6.30pm- 9.30pm

Jacqui Lofthouse interviews special guests Louise Doughty, John Mitchinson, Clare Morgan and Stephanie Zia

Louise Doughty
Louise Doughty
Unbound, John Mitchinson
John Mitchinson
Jacqui Lofthouse – Founder of The Writing Coach
Clare Morgan, MSt Creative Writing Oxford
Clare Morgan
Blackbird Digital Books
Stephanie Zia

Would you love to find out more about routes to publication – from the traditional route to working with smaller innovative publishers to self-publishing? Are you keen to discuss how to maintain your integrity and individuality as a writer, whilst also having one eye on the marketplace?

We are delighted to announce this one-off special event at Google Digital Academy where you will have an opportunity to network with writers and industry specialists whilst also considering your own best route to market.

Price: £20    Limited to an audience of 60

 

Our Founder Jacqui Lofthouse is thrilled to chair this special panel discussion on 16th August, featuring guests who, between them, know the publishing industry inside-out. Our aim is to help you to unravel the possibilities for your writing – and also to inspire you with a real vision that will enable you to write your very best work – and also to find an audience for it. Our discussion will be full of information and advice to help you make the right choices for your writing – with advice on how to stay true to yourself as a writer and how to choose the ideal route to publication.

Whatever genre you work in, our panel discussion aims to give you the tools to write with confidence and to clarify your vision for publication.

Schedule:

18.30-19.15: Reception drinks, nibbles and Google Virtual Reality Hub

19.15-20.45: Routes to Publication Panel with Jacqui Lofthouse (chair), Louise Doughty, John Mitchinson, Clare Morgan and Stephanie Zia. To be followed by Q & A

20.45-21.30: Networking drinks

Location:

Google Digital Academy, 123 Buckingham Palace Road, Victoria, London, SW1W 9SH

Doors open at 18.30pm, with drinks and nibbles kindly provided by Google

Booking & Payment

The price for this event is £20.

This is not a ticketed event – once you have booked, you don’t need to bring a ticket on the day as your name will be on our guestlist.

 

Our Speakers:

Our speakers have been chosen to give you the broadest view of routes to publication.

Louise Doughty

Louise Doughty is the bestselling author of eight novels, one work of non-fiction and five plays for radio. Her latest book, Black Water was nominated as one of the New York Times Book Review Top 100 Notable Books of 2016. Her previous book was the number one bestseller Apple Tree Yard, shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award and the National Book Award Thriller of the Year and has sold in thirty territories worldwide. A four-part TV adaptation with Emily Watson in the lead role was broadcast on on BBC1. She is a critic and cultural commentator, broadcasts regularly for the BBC and has been the judge for many prizes and awards including the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award. See: www.louisedoughty.com

 

John Mitchinson

 

John Mitchinson is a writer and publisher and the co-founder of Unbound, the award-winning crowdfunding platform for books. He helped to create the award-winning BBCTV show QI and co-wrote the best-selling series of QI books. As a publisher   he worked in senior positions at Harvill, Orion and Cassell. Before that he was Waterstone’s first marketing director. He is co-host of Unbound’s books podcast Backlisted (@BacklistedPod) and a Vice-President of the Hay Festival of Arts & Literature. See www.unbound.com

 

Clare Morgan

Clare Morgan is founder and director of Oxford University’s Creative Writing programme. Her most recent novel A Book for All and None (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best Novel award, and was described as ‘a spell-binding, effortlessly propulsive unity’ by the Independent; ‘written with eloquence and artistry’ by the Mail on Sunday; and ‘too tantalizing to resist’ by Time Out. She has published a collection of stories, An Affair of the Heart, and her short fiction been widely anthologized, and commissioned by BBC Radio 4. Clare gained her D.Phil. from Oxford University, and an M.A. in Creative Writing from U.E.A. She has chaired the Literature Bursaries Panel of the Arts Council of Wales, been Literary Mentor for Southern Arts and Literature Wales, and a literary assessor for publications funded by the Welsh Books Council. She is now an Academician for the Folio Academy. See www.claremorgan.co.uk

 

Stephanie Zia

Stephanie Zia has worked in the arts all her life: at the BBC, the Guardian and as a published novelist. She is the Founder of Blackbird Digital Books which publishes rights-reverted titles by established authors alongside exciting new talent and has sold over 100,000 books,  sharing over £100,000 in royalties 50/50 with her authors. She strongly believes in the on-going promotion of titles rather than the traditional 3-month window, nurturing the creativity of her #authorpower authors and promoting them with the latest, ever-changing, digital marketing techniques. See www.blackbird-books.com

 

Jacqui Lofthouse

Our chair, Jacqui Lofthouse is a novelist and founder of The Writing Coach. In 1992 she studied for her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. She is the author of four novels, The Temple of Hymen, Bluethroat Morning, Een Stille Verdwijning and The Modigliani Girl. Her novels have sold over 100,000 copies in the UK, the USA and Europe. She is currently working on her first YA novel. Jacqui has taught creative writing in a broad variety of settings from City University to Feltham Young Offenders Institution. She is also an actor, training at Identity School of Acting (IDSA). She continues to mentor writers at The Writing Coach where her mission is to help writers to be confident and productive, producing their best work and getting it into print.

 


We can’t wait to meet you at this very special evening for The Writing Coach!

The lure of the independent bookshop

April 22, 2011 by Jacqui Lofthouse Filed Under: Books, Bookselling, Uncategorized 20 Comments

The staircase at Shakespeare and Co. bookshop, Paris

There is nothing quite like an independent bookshop. I know I’m not alone in bemoaning the homogenisation of bookshops these days.  I often feel deflated when I walk into Waterstones and see the “3 for 2” table before me. When I see that, I know I’m being spoon-fed my choice of reading whereas I’d prefer to see a visit to a bookshop as an adventure: a delicious experience that I can enter into, with no idea of my destination.

On my recent visit to Paris, I had such an adventure. I was excited to return to Shakespeare and Co. bookshop and to introduce my children to the delights of this wonderful place. I first visited Shakespeare and Co. in 2010 when I attended Festival and Co. where my husband David was lucky enough to be employed as a graphic facilitator – to officially illustrate the literary festival. The memories of that festival still linger, but this visit was special in an entirely different way.

My daughter, aged 9, is already a Shakespeare fan (she took part in a local Youth Theatre production of The Comedy of Errors) and was particularly keen to visit the shop that she had heard so much about. She was not disappointed. Whilst she tucked herself in a corner of the children’s department, curled up on a cosy seat surrounded by notes left by other children and whilst my son explored the politics shelves, David and I were free to explore the shop and soak up the atmosphere.

The inscription above the doorway in Shakespeare and Co.

Shakespeare and Co. has an illustrious history of course. The original shop was set up by Sylvia Beach in 1919 but the current store, set up by George Whitman in 1951 in a building that served as a monastery in the 16th century, took the name after Beach’s death. An English language bookshop on Paris’s left bank, the shop was a base for many writers of the Beat Generation. The bookstore has become known as a place where writers are invited to sleep and work and writers such as Henry Miller, Anais Nin and Lawrence Durrell have rested their heads there. A prominent inscription above a doorway reads:  “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise”. (That’s my son caught in the rays of light!)

In Shakespeare and Co. second-hand books and new books nestle alongside one another on the many shelves – almost, as David put it, like “a conversation” between authors over generations. The shop is full of what might be termed “forgotten” books. I was particularly struck by one shelf which had rows and rows of back copies of The London Magazine: not just last year’s issues but copies that went back to the seventies. Why did that make a particular impression on me? I began to read the London Magazine in the late eighties when I was starting to write short stories. In 1989 I wrote a short story I was particularly proud of called The Second Line and I sent it to the London Magazine, in a spirit of vague hopefulness. They did not accept the story for publication (I had not really expected them to), but the editor Alan Ross did send me a hugely encouraging letter which made me believe that I might, at least one day, be taken seriously by the literary establishment. It was a turning point.

The London Magazine Shelf in Shakespeare and Co. bookshop

Seeing those magazines brought that memory vividly back to me. But it also reminded me that nothing that is ever published is entirely forgotten. So long as we have independent bookshops that stock old books and magazines, then ideas and literary works that one might otherwise assume are “lost” are in fact not lost at all. They are there, nestling amongst new creations, waiting to be rediscovered. In such an environment, we have a full picture of the literary world.  We are entering an entirely different space. In this space, the cult of the new is not king. A work is not only valued because of it’s “marketability” nor are we only looking at authors who have been bought by publishers because they seem like a potential fresh hot property. Authors who only wrote short works and only published occasionally are not devalued. Authors who went out of print mid-career because they failed to sell enough books have not vanished from the shelves. Rather, all writers who have ever been valued by an editor or publishing house have the potential of being present. And so, a reader entering into such a shop is walking into a kind of bookish paradise, with the kind of choice that is simply not possible in a large commercial book-chain.

I lingered for around an hour. I could have stayed for weeks. The little bed was extremely inviting. Whilst I was there, I enjoyed the sound of music from the shop piano, as several customers paused to play. (Last time I was there, a cellist was practising in the shop.) I had a conversation with a German man about the unique atmosphere of the shop (how often do I converse with strangers in Waterstones?) and he paused to photograph my daughter there. I took in a photography exhibition and browsed the many literary workshops on the noticeboard. I chose two books to take home with me, as did my daughter. The boys were more disciplined and claimed they had “books enough” already.

It was a wrench to leave...

At the checkout, the cashier stamped my books with the Shakespeare and Co. logo. I chose the Winter 2010 edition of The Paris Review which contains interviews with Jonathan Franzen and Louise Erdrich and Book Business: Publishing, Past, Present and Future by Jason Epstein.  (The collected The Paris Review Interviews are a brilliant resource for any writer.) I left the shop even more in love with literature than I was when I entered (if that is possible) and though I confess that I might never entirely quit the Amazon habit, I remain determined to do my in-person book shopping in small stores, especially those that stock a mixture of old and new titles.

I would be delighted to hear your experience of special independent bookshops and if you have any particular recommendations, please do share in the comments section below – wherever you are in the world – so that this post might serve as a small directory of stores worth visiting.

 

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About The Writing Coach

Jacqui Lofthouse

The Writing Coach was founded in 2005 by the novelist Jacqui Lofthouse. An international mentoring and development organisation for writers, it is also an online home for writers, somewhere you can find advice, information, motivation and most of all encouragement for your writing work ... read more

The Modigliani Girl

Anna Bright never wanted to write a novel. At least, that’s what she tells herself. But a chance encounter with a famous novelist and a surprise gift of an art book cut a chink in Anna’s resolve. The short, tragic life of Modigliani’s mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, becomes an obsession and before she knows it, she has enrolled on a creative writing course, is writing about a fictional Jeanne and mixing with the literati.

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