How To Get Published

Find out how you can take your writing to the next level with authors Natasha Pulley, Wyl Menmuir and C.L. Taylor as they lead the line-up at How To Get Published, a Writers & Artists full-day conference in partnership with Literature Works.

After the success of last year’s inaugural event, Writers & Artists will once again join forces with literature development charity Literature Works to offer authors a day of getting to grips with writing and publishing practicalities in the form of talks from best-selling authors and insight from experienced literary agents.

Conference line-up:

• Wyl Menmuir, author of the Bookerlonglisted The Many on the process of editing
• The inimitable Natasha Pulley, author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Bedlam Stacks on first chapters and how to immerse your readers in the world you’re creating
• Bestselling author C.L Taylor (The Lie, The Missing) dedicates a session to pace and plot
• Leading literary agents Kate Johnson and Juliet Pickering on how best to submit your work and what agents are looking for in a manuscript.

Booking: The price for this event is £95 and can be booked at www.writersandartists.co.uk or by calling 0207 631 5985.

Literature Works is offering a discount to writers in the South West region. Add LITWORKS30 at the online checkout, or quote over the phone to receive a £30 discount. 

Contact information: For further information about this series of events or Writers & Artists in general, please contact Clare Povey (clare.povey@bloomsbury.com).  For further information about Literature Works, please contact Michelle Phillips (info@literatureworks.org.uk)

Speaker profiles

Alysoun Owen is a publisher with over 20 years' experience as a commissioning editor and running her own publishing consultancy business. She has been the Editor of the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook and the Children's Writers' & Artists' Yearbook for five years and is a regular speaker on how to get published at literary festivals and writer events.

Wyl Menmuir was born in Stockport in 1979. His first novel, The Many (Salt Publishing), was long listed for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. He is also an editor and literary consultant and teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Wyl lives with his wife and two children on the north coast of Cornwall.

Natasha Pulley studied English Literature at Oxford University. After stints working at Waterstones as a bookseller, then at Cambridge University Press as a publishing assistant in the astronomy and maths departments, she did the Creative Writing MA at UEA. She has lived in Japan and Peru, and now works as a visiting lecturer at City University London. Her first novel The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was a best-seller and The Bedlam Stacks, her second novel was published in July to critical acclaim.

C.L. Taylor is a Sunday Times bestseller, and is currently working on her fifth novel. Her short stories have won several awards and been published by a variety of literary and women’s magazines. Her international bestselling romantic comedies, Heaven Can Wait and Home For Christmas were translated into 14 different languages, and her debut was voted ‘Debut Novel of the Year’ by chicklitreviews.com and chicklitclub.com.

In 2014, The Bookseller named C.L. Taylor as one of the year’s Bestselling Adult Fiction Debut Authors for The Accident. The Lie and The Missing were Sunday Times top 10 bestsellers in paperback, and both books hit the #1 spot on the Kindle bestseller list. She has sold 1 million books to date.

Kate Johnson is an agent at Wolf Literary, representing authors and handling rights in both the US and the UK. Prior to joining Wolf Literary, Kate was an agent and vice president at Georges Borchardt, Inc., for more than eight years. She previously edited and reported at StoryQuarterly, Bookslut.com, New York magazine and elsewhere, and graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Her authors have won the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, Whiting Award, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, Whitbread Award, the Nigeria Prize for Literature, and have been longlisted for the National Book Award in non-fiction.

Juliet Pickering worked for Waterstones as a bookseller and fiction buyer before starting at A P Watt in 2003, where she became an Associate Agent in 2007. Juliet joined Blake Friedmann in 2013, becoming Vice Head of the Book Department in 2017. Her authors have been shortlisted for Booker, Costa, and Guardian First Book Awards, won the Whitbread and Green Carnation Prizes and the prestigious French literary award Prix Femina Etranger. Her fiction interests range from literary through to book club, and she enjoys commercial novels with fresh, contemporary and feminist central characters. She also represents many non-fiction writers across the board, including memoir, pop culture, social history, current affairs and political commentary, cookery and food writing, humour, and all sorts in-between.

 About Writers & Artists

The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook is the best-selling guide to all areas of the media and is now in its 111th edition. As well as a website offering a comprehensive database of listings and a free writing community platform (including advice-driven blog posts and an interactive Writing Calendar feature), Writers & Artists  offer numerous online editorial services and run a series of evening masterclasses, half-day events with literary agents, and full-day conferences each year, all dedicated to the writing and publishing process. Visit writersandartists.co.uk

‘An indispensable companion for anyone seriously committed to the profession of author.’ David Lodge

        About Literature Works

Literature Works is the strategic literature development charity for South West England. Their role is to fundraise for the Literature Works Annual Fund, a support and grant scheme providing small awards for literature activity across the region, and where possible securing funding for larger regional projects with delivery partners, advice, advocacy and partnership. They also provide a central resource for literature in the South West region and support the wider literature sector through large scale research and evaluation. Their mission is to support, understand and advocate for the regional literature sector in all its contexts, for everyone, for all ages, and that sector's place, growth.