A self-published author whose book has recently been made into a film starring Hollywood A-lister Matt Damon has said he never thought about sending his book to publishers. 

Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, said his book started off as blog posts. In an interview with Android Central, Weir says he thought he was writing for a small group of nerds on his mailing list. The book’s success had been rather like winning the lottery.

Talking about the research he did for the book which is the story of an astronaut who gets stuck on Mars, Weir says he mostly looked things up on Google. The research he found fun – while the actual writing part was hard. 

Weir said his book had been well received by the friends he had made at NASA and JPL, although there had been a few situations described in his book that could not have happened.


The Martian is released in the UK on 30 September.

Why not try out the 100-word Friday Flash Fiction challenge?

Run by our site website, FridayFlashFiction, the challenge is just as it sounds - write a short story in 100 words or less.  

To inspire you, here's one of the entries from this week...

Rivalry, by Soma Bose
 
The screen on Radhika's beauty parlour window was badly torn, so she appointed a detective to determine the cause of this mystery.

Radhika repaired the net and waited for results.

The detective noticed a tree leaning towards the window, with branches stretched towards a narrow back street.

One day, the detective watched as a man appeared behind the leaves of the tree. The man jumped on the road, but the detective caught him and found a sharp blade inside his pocket.

He confessed the truth. He was hired by another beautician, Radhika's rival, to do harm in her business.

Sales have shown that romance novels continue to reach a huge audience, according to a piece in Citypaper.

Focusing on the Maryland Romance Writers Stage event which takes place this weekend as part of the Baltimore Book Festival 25, 26 and 27 September, the piece highlights that romance dominates fiction sales, with books bringing in more than a billion dollars a year.

Christi Barth, president of the Maryland Romance Writers Association, said that romance was bolstering the publishing industry, bringing in far more money than any other genre.

The Maryland Romance Writers Stage offers three days of readings by local and nationally known writers, how to write and how to sell workshops and discussions about writing and reading romance.

Barth said people often chose to self-publish romance because “if there are seven vampire books out, you can’t get a publisher to publish an eighth”, but that this didn’t mean the market was flooded with sub-par writing.

In the article, she said there are still good books out there, even if the market couldn’t find them a publisher and that sales showed that romance fiction is finding mass readership. Self-publishing has opened the doors to many new writers, who often question some of the stereotype surrounding the genre.

Maryland-based best-selling romance author Lea Nolan added that romance encompasses many different kinds of stories and many different levels of intricacy and complexity, and that romance often got a bad rap because it’s “written for women by women”. 

The novelist Jackie Collins has died at the age of 77.

The British-born author died in Los Angeles on Saturday after being first diagnosed with breast cancer more than six years ago. Collins was the author of 32 books, including The Stud, The Bitch and The World is Full of Married Men.

Her older sister, the actress Dame Joan Collins, 82, said she was completely devastated by the news. The writer’s three daughters said their mother had broken new ground for female writers in fiction.

Collins' first book, The World is Full of Married Men, was published in 1968. She went on to sell more than 500 million books world-wide. Her books were famous for their racy content - her first novel was banned in South Africa and Australia when it was first published. 

Got a story in you, but pushed for time? Can you tell your story in fewer words?

Friday flash fiction is the ideal place to c raft your writing skills. Writing short, short fiction challenges your editing skills and your vocabulary. It needs to be punchy and yet complete in just a few sentences and paragraphs. Are you up for the challenge?

You can read some great examples of flash fiction here on our sister website, or why not submit a story yourself?

An American university has set up an organisation that aims to critique its members’ fiction, helping authors to become better writers and help get them published.

The University of Southern Mississippi’s fiction society was started by Professor Andrew Milward, and students Jacob Kemp and John Mark Gilder. Chief editor Charles Dunphey said local writers didn’t get enough opportunities to hear feedback from peers on an equal footing and this was one way to do it.

Having published his own novel, Lazarus, he said he hoped his experiences in marketing and publishing would help other authors avoid rookie mistakes, and he described the publishing world as “cruel and often difficult”.

The society concentrates on shorter fiction, though excerpts will be considered.

To read the article in full, see the Student Printz website.

 

We've added another update to our Writers' Diaries section - some recommendations for fantastic local businesses in the Stockbridge area of Edinburgh.

Here at Comely Bank Publishing, we're big fans of books AND food. You can combine both those hobbies in Stockbridge. 

If you have any recommendations for great places to buy books and food, let us know in the comments below or contact us via Twitter or on our Facebook page. 

As it’s Friday, we are doing our usual call-out to writers – why not submit a flash fiction story to our sister site, Friday Flash Fiction?

As you might have guessed from the title, flash fiction is short fiction. On our site, our longest-running theme is the 100-word story (that doesn't include the title, by the way), but there are also sections for longer and shorter stories.

The Guardian published an excellent article on writing short stories by the author David Gaffney, which you can read here.

In the meantime, here is a recent example of flash fiction from the website:

ALL IN THE NAME OF CONVENIENCE, BY ALISON McHARG

Lift from bag to cupboard. Separate apples from pears. Assess what needs frozen, what stays in the fridge. 

Where’s the bleach – surely not packed with bread?

“Did you get Mini Mars Bars?” a disembodied voice, calling from the pantry.

“That’s them next to the flour.”

“I can’t see any flowers, there is sugar, though, We didn’t need that this week.”

There isn’t time for a monologue on the vagaries of the English language…

Shopping done from a tablet. It all feels like hard work – I need a coffee – problem is, I got coffee ice cream instead. Sigh.

A UK author has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for the Syrian refugee crisis, following an online appeal

Patrick Ness, author of A Monster Calls offered to match up to £10,000 in donations to Save the Children for its refugee appeal.

Within two hours of posting on 3 September, £10,000 had been raised. Further money was match-funded as other writers came forward, with one person offering to make up the total to £200,000 if it reached £195,000.

The total now stands at more than £500,000 after match-fund donations from authors including Philip Pullman, Marion Keyes, Jojo Moyes, Jill Mansell and others. 

Read the full story here.

As always, a Friday means writing here at Comely Bank Publishing.

Some time ago we started the tradition of Friday Flash Fiction, which is just as it sounds – a flash fiction story written on a Friday. The rules for our tradition of flash fiction is that you write a story in 100 words or less, and that it’s original.

Flash fiction is a great excuse to flex those creativity muscles and heck – it doesn’t take long to do.

If you would like to read some great examples of flash fiction or submit a story yourself, check out the Friday flash fiction website here.

Kobo is currently developing new expanded author services for its self-publishing platform Kobo Writing Life (KWL).

In a recent posting on the KWL blog, the e-book retailer talked about a new feature that had appeared for authors on their account dashboards:

Many of you have noticed a new “Author Services” tab popped up in your dashboard. This is a project we’ve been working towards for several years: offering a list of recommended professional services – cover design, editorial help, print on demand, and more – that we trust and believe offer good value for independent authors. When possible, we’ll negotiate a great discount so you’ll get more for your money.

The proposed new expanded services will include editing, print on demand, ISBN purchase and cover design. The services will be outsourced from a recommended list of service providers.

Kobo has already agreed to work in partnership with Publishers Weekly, allowing authors to submit their books for professional reviews.

Kobo is currently assessing author feedback on its proposed new author services, encouraging authors to give opinions on which services they would like Kobo to prioritise.

We've got another great post from Comely Bank Publishing newbie Jane Tulloch in our writers' diaries section.

In the piece, Jane reflects on the values of keeping a dairy and what it offers the writer. 

Check out the piece in full here. Jane's début novel, Our Best Attention is due out early next year. You can pre-order copies from Jane or Comely Bank Publishing. Click on our contact page to pre-order.

Would-be authors are more comfortable with self-publishing, according to a recent article.

The Hartford Courant article says self-publishing has become much more affordable and democratic in recent years.

Self-published titles surpassed traditional books in 2008, and in the years since have increased by 437 percent, to nearly half a million books in 2013, according to the international publishing firm Bowker.com.

The article quotes Carl Pritzkat, who oversees self-publishing operations for Publishers Weekly. The firm set up a website booklife.com for indie books last year, which lists some 7,000 titles. The quality of self-published books is getting better and better, he states.

Hartford Courant feels that authors no longer see self-publishing as a stigma – and that they view the process of bypassing traditional publishing as positive – giving them greater independence and control over their work.

But that doesn’t mean self-publishing is easy. Successful self-published author Laura Noe (Travels With My Son: Journeys of the Heart) tells the Courant that she works hard and her book was vetted, repeatedly critiqued by a writer’s group and a writing coach, edited, and rewritten.

Other self-published writers believe that no one can do it better than they can. Connecticut's poet laureate Robert Rennie McQuilkin went into self-publishing because he did not like the design of his first book of poems, which was published by an established house.

Major houses won’t publish poetry because it is not a big seller, so more and more poets are looking at various kinds of self-publishing, he says in the article – and that even well-known poets are turning to it, for financial and design choice reasons.

Read the full article here.