Product Description

"The Writer's Handbook 2003" has been completely revised, updated and enlarged. It contains over 5500 entries covering every area of creative writing. In addition to the key areas of UK and US book publishers and agents, magazines, screenwriting, TV and radio, theatre, film and video, and poetry, new features for the 2003 edition include: an enlarged and extended US section, plys special feature on how to crack the American market; e-books and the future of hard print; how to get into travel writing; how newspaper serializations work; diary of an aspirint writer, Part 2; Peter Finch on poetry; and Gareth Shannon on contracts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #594156 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 863 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
So you've written your article about sword dancing in Northumberland. You think it's publishable but have never published before and have no contacts. Where do you start? Enter The Writer's Handbook 2003 with its usual detailed listings and helpful advice about the marketing of words.

First published in 1998 the annual handbook includes long alphabetical lists of magazines and newspapers, contact details for book publishers, relevant website addresses and essays to entertain you even when they can't encourage. This year, for example, Mick Sinclair's contribution "Up, Up Away" tells you unequivocally that: "writers hoping to break into travel authorship by recounting a thrill-a-minute tale of death-defying adventure will probably find swimming the Atlantic with a pack of sharks or crossing Antarctic on a toboggan to be much easier than convincing a publisher to commission an account of the exploit."

Of course The Writer's Handbook isn't just for article writers. This is a book for writers in the widest sense so novelists, playwrights, screen writers, and radio "scripters" are all catered for. Neither is it a book just for beginners. There is plenty of useful information here for anyone active in the writing business whether he or she is an established practitioner, a raw recruit or somewhere in between.

Particularly useful are the contact details of festivals from The Round Festival in Wimborne to the well-known Cheltenham Festival of Literature. The organisation listings are good value too. They range from the Big Boys such as Society of Authors and Chartered Institute of Journalists to the Outdoor Writers' Guild and the Association of Christian Writers.

So, back to your sword dancers. Search the magazine and newspaper indexes in The Writer's Handbook for suitable titles, read the advice and try your luck.--Susan Elkin

Review
'This is the book no writer should be without' The Times

The Society of Authors
‘A wise and witty book, packed with useful information’

Customer Reviews

The one to get for UK markets
I use this, as well as Writer's Market and Writers' and Artists' Yearbook. For the UK-oriented writer who can only afford one directory, this is the one I'd recommend. (US coverage and marketing info etc. seems more thorough in Writers' Market. I consider W&A Yearbook to be the weakest and lightest of the three).

Where this volume wins hands-down is in organisation. With the others (and WM in particular), you find yourself flicking back and forward, hunting for an entry - and when you find it, you'd better flag it with a post-it note or it might disappear forever :-) With this one, you just look in the index - which runs to maybe 15% of the total page count, and is broken down into company and subject sections, and then further subdivided along functional (Agent, Publisher, etc) and geographical (Commonwealth, Irish, UK, US, etc) lines. This leads to a wonderfully "granular" index where you can instantly find the chunk on (for example) Irish Agents dealing with travel books, or UK publishers of science fiction.

The competitors may devote more space to general "publishing business" articles, but these books are essentially directories of current market information , and I'd rather see the effort spent - as it is here - on an excellent index. The business side doesn't change much, so why pay for it to be reprinted every year?

A must have for the aspiring writer.
If you're trying to break into the writing industry or you just want to find an interesting creative writing course - this is the book for you. Not only does it provide invaluable contacts, it also contains articles to help you on your writing adventures. If you're a professional writer, or just write for fun, you need this book as much as you need your computer and pen!

Writers' and Artists' Yearbook is better
Before you buy Writers' Handbook, it's worth looking at the main competition, which I much prefer.

Writers and Artists Yearbook has by far the better coverage. There's also a lot more practical articles in it about how to get published, how to get an agent and how to understand a contract for instance. The fact that JK Rowling and Eoin Colfer used it to find their agents speaks volumes.

Obviously, if you've got the money, get both! But if you have to choose, I'd go for Writers' and Artists' Yearbook any time.