Press & Publicity

The Literary Platform is dedicated to showcasing projects experimenting with literature and technology.  They are also one of the exciting associate partners including Arvon Foundation, Commonwealth Writers, and the Free Word Centre, whose combined expertise, broad reach and understanding of the issues is set to culminate in a first-rate series of discussions, case studies and debates at TLC's Literary Conference: Writing in a Digital Age 8th-9th June 2012.

January 18 The Literary Platform wrote about TLC's Literary Conference in an article that reviewed all the highlights of the conference.

Click here to read the full article.

TLC's Big Publishing Debate created quite a stir back in September and continued interest from overseas writer's magazines shows that these are prevalent issues for the non-English speaking publishing world alike.

Swedish Literary Adventurer, Katarina Trodden, who writes for the Swedish Authors' Union, published an article about our debate and highlighted the important issues for writers that were raised by the panel and the audience that evening. For more information about the original debate or to read Robert McCrum's articles in the Guardian, click here. The Author, published by the Swedish Authors' Union six times a year, publishes articles that deal with authors' and translators' rights, freedom of speech and the publishing industry in Sweden and also includes information about scholarships, events and global publishing news. The website is in both Swedish and English.

Click here to read a summarised version of Katarina's article in English or here for the Swedish version.

Rebecca Swift hosted an up-front Q and A with WriteWords about the role of literary consultancies. WriteWords is an online resource for writers which offers an interesting community for writers, jobs and news.

Below is an excerpt from the Q and A where Rebecca Swift answers a question about TLC readers.

"We stipulate that a reader must have either worked in commercial publishing as an editor, taught creative writing to MA level, and/or be a professionally published writer themselves. We will occasionally make exceptions for readers that come highly recommended and may have had slightly different trajectories (as reviewers, for example, or teachers in literary settings but not on MAs) but usually these qualifications would be those we would require. I always think 'who would I want to read my work?' and think in terms of employing people I myself would trust. Also of course we need to inspire confidence in our clients that we are offering help that has been tried and tested over time.

I should also say that having the qualifications in themselves are not the only important thing, because we do not use readers who don't have sufficient empathy and diplomacy, as well as powers of articulation when writing back to people at any level of ability. This can be a tricky job as you can imagine, to say the least and I admire our readers hugely for what they take on. In addition, readers have to understand commercial markets to some degree, although the in-house team are the market experts. They have to be good talent spotters on top of everything else ... In short, it's a tall order letting a reader loose on the public and we try to protect that public as far as we can although of course no consultancy can be perfect, we do try! We could not understand better how precious people's written work is, and how hope and fear will be bound up in that."

Click here to read the rest of the interview.

Answer one simple question and you could be on your way to a literary adventure in Spain.

The Guardian has teamed up with The Literary Consultancy to offer one lucky winner a place on one of TLC's springtime writing courses. Held at Casa Ana in the heart of the Alpujarras mountain range in beautiful Andalucia, the course is led by expert tutor Rebecca Abrams and allows plenty of time for rest and relaxation alongside a unique writing programme designed by The Literary Consultancy. There will also be visits from guest speakers, Chris Stewart and Michael Jacobs, to inspire you further. The holiday is for one week and runs from 26th March to 1st April, 2011.

The prize includes a place for one person on a room-share basis, at ¾ board and is exclusive of flights. Single supplements may be available on a first-come, first-served basis at an extra cost of £120 per week per person. Click here to enter the competition. For more information about the holiday, please see TLC Literary Adventures.

The closing date for this competition is Monday 29th November 2010.

Start your novel this March!

Orion imprint Weidenfeld & Nicolson has signed a two-book deal with a debut writer, after winning the rights at an auction.

Publishing director Kirsty Dunseath bought UK and Commonwealth rights to two books by Shelley Harris from Jo Unwin at Conville & Walsh for an undisclosed sum. Weidenfeld & Nicolson plan to publish the first book, Jubilee, in 2012 to coincide with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

Dunseath said: "Shelley is a real find. The voice in the novel is delightful, instantly engaging and full of warmth. Jubilee appeals to a certain nostalgia for the days when Abba vied with punk, when Jammie Dodgers were the biscuit of choice, and mothers across the country were busy icing buns red, white and blue... we will of course be asking booksellers to dig out their own memories and photographs."

Set on the day of the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977, the book looks at "race, identity, community and childhood", focusing around a picture of a street party with a small Asian boy staring intensely at the camera.

Article by Catherine Neilan from The Bookseller

I sent my first draft to The Literary Consultancy for a critique and was really impressed with the insightful report . . . read more

Shelley Harris, Jubilee, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Orion)

Free tickets up for grabs for the FLOW festival!

Rebecca Swift is co-founder of The Literary Consultancy (TLC), which offers help to writers in the form of manuscript assessment, mentoring and agent placement. She’s offering you the chance to win a free ticket to an evening event at the FLOW literary festival!

The Literary Consultancy is now firmly established at the Free Word centre, a hub which celebrated its first birthday on 15 September. To mark the occasion, Free Word is launching its second annual literary festival, and this year the main theme and title is FLOW.

We are offering Writers’ & Artists’ website users a chance of winning two free tickets to TLC’s evening events on 22 and 28 September (worth £10 each) open to those who ring first. Call 020 7324 2563 and leave your details quoting ‘Free Word Flow/W&A’.

http://www.writersandartists.co.uk/2010/09/tlc-free-word-and-the-flow-festival/

These days, the task of first sifter generally goes to agents - but even they are feeling overwhelmed. Curtis Brown proclaims on its website, as a point of difference: "We are one of the few agencies who do accept unsolicited manuscripts." Anyone who begins to feel this publishing business is a closed shop has good reason.

But there are other ways to get a hearing. There is The Literary Consultancy, for example, established by Hannah Griffiths and Rebecca Swift in 1996, at a time when many independent publishers were being gobbled up by conglomerates. They began to see, as Swift puts it, that "bottom lines had become all-important, meaning that writers who were perhaps too literary or too experimental are judged with extreme caution by anyone interested in profits first."

In the slush pile Swift saw not guilt-inducing dross, but "a great big neglected pile of people's efforts. Everybody needed and deserved attention." But at the same time, "what they needed to understand was that that was very highly skilled attention, and that to get a really good response should cost money." They charge £75 to read stories of up to 3,000 words; £250 for a one-or two-page synopsis up to 100 double-spaced pages; £1.50 per double-spaced page for the first 300 pages of a longer manuscript, and £1 per page thereafter, providing for that a detailed, thoughtful critique of the entire submission. If they consider a work exceptional, they will recommend it to an agent. They are doing well.

During the weeks of 14th Sept – 5th Oct, the Free Word Centre in Farringdon presents their second annual festival.  The Free Word Centre is England’s first centre for literature, literary and free expression. Shreela Ghosh, the director of Free Word, outlines ten snazzy points about the growing need and desire for literary festivals in the UK. Click here to read the entire article in the Bookseller.

Journalist Liz Bury investigates the growing popularity of self-publishing

The London Book Fair

Did you know that Apple has just made it easier to self-publish to the iBook store? The August 2010 upgrade of Pages, Apple’s answer to Microsoft Word, makes it possible to export an ordinary text document to ePub format. Create an ePub file, upload to the iBook store and bingo, you just self-published your novel.

It’s a simple piece of development by Apple, and a great example of one of the many small technological advances that are fueling a boom in self-publishing.

The Literary Consultancy(TLC), an ms assessment service for writers, now considers self-publishing a legitimate option for many of its clients.

Rebecca Swift, TLC founder, says: “It used to be that an author either made the grade or they didn’t. One would tell people not to spend their money on vanity publishing. That was the moral position. It’s a much more complex world now – and much more exciting for writers.”

Just click on the London Book Fair to read the entire article.

A new year, a new you. Time Out's news editor Rebecca Taylor decided to put her new year's resolutions to the test by finally brushing up her 80 page manuscript and sending it to TLC.  Find out what happened by clicking on her article here.

The Freelance is the bulletin of London Freelance Branch of the National Union of Journalists.

Rebecca Swift of The Literary Consultancy gave advice for an article titled "Get that book published" alongside Matthew Hamilton of literary agent Aitken Alexander.

Here is a quote from the article:

"Both our experts noted book publishing is a much tougher world than even five years ago, and your book proposal has to show you're passionate enough - and have enough stamina - to pull it off. You need to convince an agent that you have the enthusiasm to carry out a labour of love, and only then look at the pragmatic, market-oriented aspects of the project."

Follow this link to The Freelance website to read the full article.

The Literary Consultancy has worked with the Arts Council in helping to raise the voice of culturally diverse arts in Britain. TLC has worked with writers on the Decibel scheme and will also be critiquing the work of runners up in the Penguin Books/Decibel writing competition. Click here to learn more about Decibel.

"The slush pile is the great awkward albatross of the publishing industry", writes Aida Edemariam, when she thinks about her five-month internship at a magazine in New York.  In her Guardian article titled, "File it in the bin", Aida explains how most publishers no longer read unsolicited manuscripts - but that that doesn't stop writers sending them in. Find out why it might be worth your while to properly have your manuscript assessed before submitting it to agents. Aida features TLC prominently in her recent article re slush piles and the publishing industry in the Guardian's G2.

The spring 2008, Staple magazine secured funding for two further years and began their next series with Staple 69/70: The Publishing Issue, a 285pp anthology guest-edited by Rebecca Swift of the UK’s leading manuscript appraisal and writers’ mentoring programme, The Literary Consultancy. The next issues  continue as single themed issues, with Staple 71: The Art Issue and Staple 72: The Music Issue both available, and more to come.

The Publishing Issue, guest edited by Rebecca Swift of The Literary Consultancy, lifts the curtain on the writing industry, from unpublished first draft to final place in posterity. Agents, editors and best-selling authors join forces with fresh talents to dig behind the writing courses and How To Get Published guides and reflect on why we write, and what impact writing can make on the wider world.

Write Words interviews Caroline McCarthy, Manager of The Literary Consultancy, about their new mentoring scheme for writers.

Tell us about the mentoring scheme

In short, the TLC mentoring scheme gives writers the chance to develop their work over the course of a year. It will include 6 one to one “tutorials” (conducted by email or post) by a carefully chosen mentor, who will be an experienced published author. At the end of the course writers will receive a manuscript assessment from a TLC and be invited to spend a day in London meeting with members of the publishing industry, such as literary agents and editors from leading houses. We are offering a discount of over £700 to the first 20 writers who enroll, so it’s a good time to join up! We are immensely grateful to The Arts Council England for supporting this scheme.

Why did you decide to launch a mentoring scheme for writers?

We see many writers who’ve had their manuscript assessed by us return with redrafts time after time, so offering ongoing tuition feels very much like a natural progression for TLC. Both myself, and TLC’s Director, Rebecca Swift, share a passion for working with new writers. We believe in nurturing the creative processes involved in writing, but also encourage people to think realistically about their work. The mentoring scheme – with its TLC read and an ‘industry day’ - fits in perfectly with our ethos: it’s great for people to develop their work but one needs a strong awareness of the realities of getting published.

Click here to read the entire interview and learn more about the mentoring scheme.

TLC first attended the Port Eliot Literature festival in July 2005. Developing authors had the opportunity to have their writing critiqued by our team of expert readers and benefit from a one-to-one tutorial. The festival was also covered in The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent and several other publications.

Rebecca Swift was short-listed for the prestigious Kim Scott Walwyn Memorial Prize and attended a prize-giving ceremony and dinner at Oxford University Press in December 2004, where Kym worked as an editor. The winner was Rights Manager Lynette Owen. Trustees for the prize included Dame Gillian Beer, Francine Stock and Hermione Lee among others. The prize honours an outstanding achievement by a woman in publishing or related fields.

In the article in the Independent on Sunday, Rebecca explains that the idea for the consultancy came while working at Virago.  She realised that writers who had had their submission rejected had no where to turn.  Rebecca writes, " it became clear that a company that took it upon itself to try to perform acts of translation between the world of the writer and the industry should, as Carmen Callil later put it in in a ‘quote’ for us, ‘bridge the gap between agent, publisher and author and be of help to all three.’"

Click here to learn more about the prize and this year's winner.

Rebecca Swift was interviewed on Australian radio channel ABC, when TLC attended the Melbourne Literary Festival in 1999.

In 1997, Rebecca Swift and Hannah Griffiths, co-founders of The Literary Consultancy, published the article, “Style Gurus”,  in The Author. The article examined the situation for new writers in the UK and explained why and how The Literary Consultancy was set up.

"The chances are you will be familiar with being approached by friends or family and asked to read their jottings, autobiography, novel, whatever they have written and about which they want and an opinion – usually good. If you have ever agreed to do this, you will acknowledge the amount of energy required and also the difficulty in formulating an objective response. If it is really poor, both grammatically and structurally, how does one tell the writer? If it has some promise, but needs serious work, have you the time or experience to give detailed help?" Click here to read the entire article.