As part of our Literary Conference programme, we opened up a limited number of free tickets to writers whose work our nearby Free Reads partners had deemed to be of merit. These writers had already come through the bursary scheme and were all working on various writing projects across fiction, non-fiction, poetry and scripts. Of these, several have already gone on to win prizes and feature on prize lists, including Stacey Sampson (Northern Writers’ Award, Finalist, Mslexia Novel Competition), Rebecca Swirsky (Highly Commended, Bridport Prize) and Liam Brown (Real Monsters forthcoming with Legend Press). One of those to win a ticket to our Sunday Bonus Day was writer Kate Stewart, who has written a blog about how the Conference changed her thinking about digital publishing, and the opportunities for writers wanting to take matters into their own hands and self-publish their work, a way she now sees as an opportunity to make your work ‘entirely your vision’.
‘I left the Literary Consultancy Conference feeling not, as I had anticipated, as though the dawning of a digital age was somehow sacrilege. The advent of ebooks or means of printing one’s own manuscript began to seem rather as something to celebrate; a means by which authors can take control of the entire process, from writing a book, to formatting it, to editing the way it appears in the public domain; right down to controlling who has access to your work.’
Read the full blog on the New Writing Cumbria website here. You can follow Kate on Twitter: @ditsykate
For a list of articles and blogs relating to the Conference, click here, or go here for write-ups on each of our panels as well as our Bonus Day with Writers’ Fair and workshops.
