Happy Half-Term/Reading Week (however you choose to see it) everyone! This also serves as a casual reminder not to come into school this week 😉 But, as ever, the Publishing world is still out there and we still have news (not fake, we promise) to share…

Course Updates

Dissertation Proposals are due on Friday 24th February (i.e. Friday of next week). Make sure to email your personal tutors with any questions or concerns!

Course News

The UCL Publishers’ Prize has closed their submissions box and is preparing for the judges! Thank you from the team to everyone who has submitted – more news should be coming soon, so keep an eye on their Facebook, twitter, and website! (As well as this, ebook versions of the past prizes will soon be available at your favourite online retailers! All proceeds support the prize, both present and future)

Other than that, it’s reading week! Go have fun!

Industry News

The Faber and Faber CEO has opened up about his opinions on the house’s success following their win of independent publisher of the year

So you might have seen that J. K. Rowling and Piers Morgan were locked in a twitter battle over the last few days – and now the Big Green Bookshop in North London has decided to give Piers Morgan the chance to read the entirety of The Philosopher’s Stone… through tweets. Need a crash course in how to be a tweeting activist and one of the most popular authors on earth? Follow @jk_rowling (we love her)

Thoughts about translation from the Jaipur Book Festival

Need some thoughts about writers to watch in Spring 2017 for any essay/research/interest purposes? Publishers Weekly have some ideas…

The CWA Short Story competition is open for submissions here. They’re looking for crime and mystery (ooer)

In a similar vein, cat-burglars have abseiled into a warehouse full of rare books and made off with £2m worth of tomes – reported the Guardian

Lots more fun news on BookBrunch!

Buzzfeed Listicle Fix

Thoughts about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book The Refugees and its application to 2017 America

Fifty Shades Darker (the film version) is out – and it’s insane

Which unimportant Harry Potter character are you?

Want to win books/get them discounted?

Here

Here

That’s it from us this week! As ever, please let us know if you have anything you want us to write about, any news to share, or any comments!

Love,

Helena and Emily

Happy Tuesday to everyone! This Tuesday marks the second day of the second week of our second term here at the Centre for Publishing at UCL (last week we were all inundated with coursework deadlines), so we certainly have a lot to get going with. So without further ado, let’s get on with our weekly round-up, your resource for course news, industry news, and fun little things to do that are (as ever) book-related.

Course Events

The seminar on Discovery and Discoverability, organised by the department, taking place Wednesday 18th, 13.30 for a start at 14.30. It is free to attend for all those on the course. See the email from Nick on how to RSVP.

Similarly, on the 25th January there is a Digital Publishing forum, run by the Publishers’ Association, taking place 16.00 – 17.00 followed by a drinks reception. See the email from Nick on how to RSVP.

Course News

UCL Publishers’ Prize

As always, the UCL Publishers’ Prize is open for submissions! They are accepting all forms of writing to the theme METAMORPHOSIS, with submissions closing at the end of January. They’ve started gathering their judges and prizes (we hear on the grapevine) and submissions are beginning to roll in (we heard that on the grapevine too). Get writing!

Find them and more information on their twitter, facebook, and website.

Work Experience with Penguin

Penguin Random House have officially opened applications for work experience placements from March to May. See here for more information and how to apply!

Publishing News

Penguin Ladybird Experts

Staying true to the brand that is the Ladybird guide books, Penguin are set to release a series of ‘Expert’ Ladybird books for adults on the 26th of January. Topics include Climate Change, Evolution, and Quantum Mechanics. (Thanks to Madison for tweeting this out for us to see!)

Academic Book Week

#AcBookWeek is fast approaching (it’s next week!) a time to celebrate and discuss anything and everything about academic publishing. Follow the # and see the website here to keep up!

What Books helped Barack Obama in his presidency?

The Bookseller reports that Barack Obama has noted The Underground Railroad, The Three-Body Problem, and A Bend in the River as particularly playing a role within his presidency. See the article here (and keep an eye out in-store for the popularity of these books as a result!)

Industry Events

See the BookGig website here for great listings all to do with publishing events!

Bookophile Listicles

32 Exciting Books for 2017

Poll – What Harry Potter thing MUST GO?

Hilarious Tweets about Books

Want to win books??

Here

Here

Here

Here

That’s it from us this week! Let us know if you have any suggestions, questions, if you want to submit a post for the blog – check our blog managers page for our details!

Love,

Helena and Emily

Happy mid-week, everyone! To help keep us pushing on to Friday and that #fridayfeeling, here is the first of your bi-monthly featured posts from your lovely blog managers. This week I wanted to talk about something fantastic that comes out of the UCL MA Publishing cohort every year: the UCL Publishers’ Prize anthology.

Every year members of our course make up the publishing team for the UCL Publishers’ Prize, a celebration of creative writing from UCL students, undergrad, postgrad, and recent alumni. Since 2014 we have seen four fantastic anthologies produced by the MA Publishing students, including two for 2016 under the themes of Phosphenes and YA Fiction. This year is no different – submissions for the 2017 Prize opened on the 18th of November 2016, accepting writing to the theme ‘Metamorphosis’. They will close (!!!) at the end of January 2017. All submissions will be considered for publication by the team (under a cloak of anonymity), and the ones selected for the anthology will go to an expert panel of judges to award commendations and prizes for the top three. Stay tuned on the Prize’s twitter and facebook for announcements of what these are!

This year’s title ‘Metamorphosis’ has been chosen to tackle and promote key themes of diversity, within the publishing industry and the wider world, and an ever-present desire for progress and change. These are discussions we have been continuously having, both in class and out, and it seems fitting to match this with the writing theme. This year’s Prize seeks to represent the widest amount of voices possible, and promote thought and discussion on a range of topics and ideas. The team is working very hard, as ever, to ensure an anthology that is a vehicle for fantastic, diverse writing; to represent the ‘metamorphosis’ that we are continually going through and should not ignore, nor slow down.

The prize will (if all goes to plan) launch in June at the UCL Festival of Culture. Alongside this, ebook editions of the past prizes will soon be available on Amazon – please go download one to support the publication of this year’s prize! – and there will be a series of events to promote and celebrate the anthologies and their authors, both past and present.

For more information, and the submission guidelines, please see the Publishers’ Prize website here. It’s very pretty and very informative!

Follow the Prize on social media: on twitter @pubprize2017, on instagram @uclpubprize2017, and on facebook here. The prize will be tweeting on #mymeta with updates and more so make sure to give it a follow, and use the hashtag to connect with them!

I’m definitely excited to see what they produce this year and to get it on my bookshelf, and I hope you are too!

Have a good week everyone!

Helena

BY ISABEL POPPLE

Hands up if you’ve heard of the UCL Publishers’ Prize…

Publishing students: if your hand isn’t in the air, then what have you been doing for the last eight weeks? I’m worried about you, truly.

Non-publishing students: the Publishers’ Prize is a writing competition for UCL students. Any student enrolled at UCL can enter, and the shortlisted entries get to be published in an anthology that actual people can buy and read – your writing gets read by lots of cool people, there’s a big prize for the overall winner and, you know, accolades.

Next challenge…

So, hands up if you’ve heard of the UCL Publishers’ Prize for Young Adult Fiction. No? Well, that’s because it’s new this year. Ta-da!

The UCL Publishers’ Prize for YA is an offshoot of the main prize. We’re working alongside each other, but this secondary prize is celebrating the breadth and depth of YA (that’s code for Young Adult). Why is it called the Publishers’ Prize, you ask? Because it’s awarded by UCL’s publishing students, that’s why. And why YA? Well, why not? Many of us are young adults, and plenty of those of us who aren’t, still like a good young adult novel – and we want to celebrate and encourage new writers in this genre (if you can call it that, though really YA is so much more than just a genre…).

The Competition…

I hope you’re all eager to learn more. Yay! Please enter!

Ok, so you have to be a current student at UCL. It doesn’t matter what discipline you’re studying, what level or stage you’re at, or how old you are. You have from now until 22 January 2016 to send us your work. Your entry must be no more than 4,000 words long (I probably should have mentioned that before: it’s a short story competition), it must be your own work, and cannot have been published elsewhere before. You email it as a Word document to us at: uclpublishersprizeya@gmail.com (both saved as with the email subject line: SURNAME_YAPRIZE). You can send us up to three different stories, and you can enter the original Publishers’ Prize too, but only with a different set of writing.

What exactly are we looking for and what is YA? Well, what do you think YA is? It’s not that easy to define when you get down to it! That’s because the best YA is diverse, smart, boundary pushing; it can be fun, it can be dark; it can be light or intense, romantic or adventurous – and with any luck it’s all of these things and more. You decide. After all, you’re readers as much as we are (at least, I hope so) and you know what you look for in a good story.

We are seven UCL Publishing students: Michela, Naomi, Mia, Natalya, Sarah, Kara, and Isabel. Follow the prize on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or visit our website. Over the coming weeks we’ll be announcing the prizes and the judges. We promise you won’t be disappointed – last year’s judges on the main prize included bestselling crime author Peter James, Waterstones fiction buyer Chris White and Lee Brackstone, the creative director of Faber Social – and more. So we’re aiming just as high this year.

And the prize? Well now, that’d be telling…

We look forward to reading your work and discovering what hidden writing talents this year’s UCL students have to offer!

If Isabel’s writing interests you, then follow her on Twitter @bookythought!

UCL Publishers’ Prize inaugural winners announced

The team behind the UCL Publishers’ Prize have this week announced the winners of the inaugural award, which was launched earlier this year with the aim of discovering a new generation of literary talent among the current student body.

The Prize was set up as part of the MA in Publishing’s Publishing Project module, which requires students to work on their own book-related projects in small groups.

After drawing up a shortlist of just 20 stories from a submissions pile of over 120, the Publishing students were advised on the final decision by three guest judges from the publishing industry: fiction publisher Laura Palmer from Head of Zeus, literary agent Lizzy Kremer from David Higham Associates, and agent’s assistant Harriet Moore, also from David Higham Associates.

Competition was fierce for the first, second and third place spots, with the winners due to receive £300, £200 and £100 respectively. PhD scholars battled undergraduate students, flash fiction took on longer narrative and a variety of different genres vied for top place.

In the end, the winner was MA student Gwyneth Kelly for ‘MoodBeam SunSubstitute’, a speculative story about a sun-replacement salesman searching for authenticity in a world of artificial substitution. Lizzy Kremer called the tale “as finely wrought and fully realised as any short story by a professional writer”.

Second place went to archaeology undergraduate Lucy Smith for ‘Bud, Rose, Thorn’, a fairytale-esque piece about a newspaper reporter following a story of missing children to its chilling conclusion. Harriet Moore praised the story’s “charming and unsettling” narrator who “makes us aware of his own unreliability in a way that draws us in, seduces us even”.

Finally, third place was awarded to MA student Clematis Delany for The ‘Tale of Lena-Jane’, which opens with the narrator’s father dying… and then dying again and again. Laura Palmer called the story “morbid and blackly funny”.

Two further stories were highly commended: a second offering from Gwyneth Kelly entitled ‘Walker of Dogs’, and PhD student Kristen Perrin’s ‘The Rock Monster’.

The shortlisted stories will be published in an anthology which will be launched at an event in London at the end of September, where the winners will read from their pieces. Clays will print the anthology over the summer and the production will be managed by the MA students.

Supported by the recently relaunched UCL Press, the UCL Department of Information Studies and UCL’s Joint Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies, the Prize will be a continuing legacy and will be passed down to the next crop of Publishing MA students.

Project Manager Molly Slight said: “We were delighted with the reception that the Prize had in this, its inaugural year. Our aim was to get over 50 entries and we ended up with over 120! All the shortlisted authors should feel extremely proud, as they were up against some seriously stiff competition. We are grateful to UCL for their fantastic support and to our guest judges, who offered us useful industry insight into which stories they felt were most publishable, and which authors they would like to see more from. I am really excited by the talent we have uncovered and look forward to launching the book and, with this, hopefully launching the careers of some brilliant young authors.”

The full shortlist of stories to be published in the anthology is as follows:
‘The Fourth Floor’ by Nicholas Baines
‘The Boys I Mean Are Not Refined’ by Kathleen Bryson
‘The Tale of Lena-Jane’ by Clematis Delany
‘After Hours’ by Alice Dunn
‘A Run’ by Oskar Gordon
‘The Room’ by Elizabeth Harvey
‘The Party’ by Callie Hitchcock
‘Unseasonable Snowflakes’ by Naomi Ishiguro
‘Untitled 1’ by Bruno Kaapa
‘MoodBeam SunSubstitute’ by Gwyneth Kelly
‘Walker of Dogs’ by Gwyneth Kelly
‘Demand and Supply’ by Yohann Koshy
‘Anne/En’ by Heather Lee
‘Apples’ by Anna Opara
‘The Rock Monster’ by Kristen Perrin
‘Bud, Rose, Thorn’ by Lucy Smith
‘West Country Funeral Honours’ by Luzia Troebinger
‘At The Other End’ by Jonathan Tsang
‘E’ by Sydney Vickars
‘Back Home for Christmas’ by Jeremy Yang

For more information on the Prize, please visit www.uclpublishersprize.com, follow @UCLPubPrize on Twitter or email uclpublisherprize@gmail.com.