Being a Writer was launched by The Literary Consultancy (TLC) in May 2020 as an online membership community for authors spanning interdisciplinary learning, research, podcasts, and digital content. It follows a first-of-its-kind new and experimental responsive programming format, allowing the writing community that engages with it to be its co-curators. In a world where competitive industry standards mean that the focus is often on what is written, ‘Being a Writer’ has been designed to help writers explore why they write, and offers creative and practical solutions to help them keep going.

Initiation

Twelve months before Coronavirus gripped the world, I met with the Director of The Literary Consultancy, Aki Schilz, to discuss the qualities of character which empower and enable authors to persist and complete full-length works. On the cross-country train journey to meet Aki, I created a mindmap of the challenges I felt were most pertinent to me in my twenty year career so far as a writer and to which I had to discover solutions by trial and error.

The kinds of challenges I’d faced over the years have varied widely – from finding that, after several months of repeated visits to write in my local copyright library, the National Library of Wales, the atmosphere had become ‘antiseptic’ and it no longer inspired me (this would inform my approach in the course I went on to create for Being a Writer, Making Time and Space to Write). While in my 20s I was beset by imposter syndrome and, in the event that I had gathered up enough amounts of self-belief to submit my poetry to journals or competitions, I would feel dispirited by rejection and I didn’t possess the qualities of character which would have enabled me to bounce back. I had also fallen foul of what Maureen Freely once explained to me was ‘The Tyranny of the Novel’ trying to shoe-horn writing that was resisting the form of fiction. It took me years to trust my artistic impulse and write that work-in-progress in the form that it suggested to me, rather than the form I was imposing onto it. As the train pulled into Euston Station it became increasingly clear to me that being a writer is as much about a state of character and mindset as it is an ability to write…

TLC is the UK’s longest-standing editorial consultancy, working at the coalface of writing development since 1996 with its core services: editing, mentoring, and literary events. At the time of our meeting, TLC was also a consulting partner on a survey on the needs of writers, led by the Royal Society of Literature (A Room of My Own, published June 2019). The survey went on to show that the greatest challenges faced by writers are a lack of money (68%) and time (67%) to write, as well as a lack of confidence in their abilities (54%) and a lack of information about the support available to them (53%). Even though the results of the survey had yet to be published at the time of that first meeting, it was already apparent that there was a need for a much bigger conversation to emerge around the quality of resilience needed in order to be a writer who can truly flourish creatively.

The kinds of questions we wrestled with in that initial meeting included: What is writers’ block? Does where we write affect how we write? Why is it that in writing courses we concentrate on technical questions of craft and technique, but not the qualities of character that sustain an ongoing writing practice? How does fear affect our creative process? Could it be that listening to the impulses in both our minds and our bodies lead to catalysing creative works and making artistic breakthroughs? And finally, what kind of interactive platform could best serve for writers at any stage of their development to gently explore these questions within an online community? This was it. We’d started to co-curate ‘Being A Writer’.

Research

TLC is no stranger to either innovation or spotting opportunities for deepening conversations within the publishing industry: in 2012 it hosted the first conference that put publishers and writers in the same room discussing up to the minute issues, ‘Writing in a Digital Age’. It has hosted book hacks, brought together string quartets with poetry, and its Director has been nominated for awards for her work championing inclusive practices in the book industry. However, it was clear that further scoping was needed for this new idea.

What excited me most about this project was that, back in 2005, I had left publishing to work as a social entrepreneur. At the time, I was disillusioned by the pace of change within the publishing industry; it was also unclear as to how I could progress meaningfully beyond my entry level job which I’d been in for over two years. However, I’d also been volunteering for one day a week during those two years to discover more about environmental and social change. On leaving my job, I became based full-time in London’s first incubation lab for social innovation, the prototype ‘Impact Hub’, in Angel Islington. It sounds quaint now, but back then, along with the social innovators I shared desks with, we were among the first to use Skype and to join Facebook! Futurologists flocked to visit what we were doing.

We were talking about disruption, emergent processes and theories of change in a vocabulary that I had never encountered in the publishing industry. I decided to make up my job title, and I launched a new career as a Thought Pilot; my mission was to guide organisations and individuals through creative processes using my imagination, intuition and creativity and was contracted by Tate Modern, NESTA and Impact Hub. This was an industry that embraced the challenges of social and systemic change by using innovation and taking risks to develop new models of working. Nearly fifteen years later, in TLC, I felt I’d found an organization within the publishing industry which wanted to use its platform to engage in meaningful discussions around what it truly meant to be a writer at a deep level in a changing world. It was also small and agile enough to innovate.

We got to work with research. While there were podcasts, magazines, physical retreats, events, books and YouTube videos to be found, we couldn’t identify a digital membership service in the UK which addressed resilience for authors in the way we imagined. There were some writing for wellbeing courses, but nothing looking at creative resilience in a non-specifically therapeutic setting. TLC, as an organisation which has worked for over two decades in holding the space for authors in the embryonic and emergent stages of the creative process, was well placed to offer this service and by doing so support the wider publishing ecology.

The proposed intervention, then, would address a gap identified around cultivating and safeguarding literary creativity. The space provided online would be one where writers could address such topics as how to surmount the profound spiritual challenge of persevering and seeing their project through to completion, whatever that might look like. This was to be a space which would be about process rather than product, about the inner dialogue writers have with themselves, rather than the dialogue they might type on the printed page.

In fact, by June last year it felt palpable to us that there was more of a risk if we didn’t pursue this line of enquiry, now that the figures from the RSL study were back, and were so shocking. Given the global pandemic we are now undergoing and under which the programme was launched in, the statistics are sure to be even starker. It feels a timely, if unintended, moment to be offering Being A Writer to the writing community online.

Co-Curation

In October 2019, we held the first Being A Writer event, an Interactive Forum at Free Word. Poet Yomi Sode, Comics Laureate Hannah Berry, novelist Dean Atta and activist Nathalie Teitler all shared the stage and presented for ten minutes to different themes, incorporating audio, video, and images. Using the Menti app on mobile phones, our audience’s contributions and feedback were used to inform the content of the first phase of the programme.

We sketched out three online courses based on the needs expressed by the writers we talked to: Making Time and Space to Write, Dealing with Self Doubt, and Breaking Through Writers’ Block. We curated a series of podcasts on topics from Dealing with Rejection to Balancing Work, Family and Writing. 

Collaborations with course creators and other contributors quickly followed. TLC called upon cutting edge holistic practitioners and authors whose expertise lay not only in writing but also the avant garde of self-care to answer the themes which came up in the interactive forum. Wellbeing expert Sarah Salway, poet and Buddhist Sascha Akhtar and novelist Julia Forster wrote the course content; Poetry Pharmacy founder Deborah Alma created bespoke ‘creativity pills’ which are generated with a single click; and TLC devised a Digital Scrapbook interface which allows members to upload inspiring images and snippets of text to share with others. Further interactive features, to really build on the community as it grows, are in the works. Members can feed in suggestions for new templates, resources, even book recommendations on the digital Bookshelf page. An Entry Questionnaire asks a series of questions with each sign-up that are then exported into data sheets for the team to monitor and use to build new content. We don’t yet know what these might look like, and that is both a challenge and a reward of the project; Being A Writer has been made to be agile and dynamic, and it’s an exciting time to be experimenting to see what works. Will it be webinars, ebook resources, a forum, or something entirely new?

The Future

‘Being a Writer’ has opened up a space for writers to feel heard and to support one another in an online space that is genuinely co-creative, which can respond to the changing demands of the writing community and at a time when writers need this service most. As retreat centres, creative writing groups and other bricks and mortar spaces for these kind of dialogues between writers may be closed or in restricted use for some time to come, ‘Being a Writer’ is one provision which serves to address this emergent gap, albeit one which the team never could have predicted at the outset of the project.

The impact that Coronavirus will have on every sector of society will be far-reaching and profound; the interactive aspect of ‘Being a Writer’ means that the writing community can co-engineer a service which is responsive to their needs from the safety of their own homes. We might not know what comes next, but we’re really excited to find out, shoulder to shoulder with the writers we serve.

Being A Writer is available on a low-cost subscription basis to writers at all levels (£12/month or £99 annual fee) and has a 30-day free trial, as well as offering discounts on services from TLC and select partners.

The Writing Platform offers a unique environment to publish writing that focuses on non-traditional.

We publish at the intersection between technology and writing and support sharing knowledge that is underrepresented in traditional academic publishing.  TWP connects you with your community of artists, scholars, and publishers and provides the capacity for high impact publishing.

Contributors include well-known writers and thinkers such as Margaret Atwood, Philip Hensher, and Naomi Alderman, and industry heavyweights like Porter Anderson and Richard Nash.

Take a look at this short video with our editors who explain who we are, what we are doing and what we would like to achieve.

We welcome pitches for articles, with a word length between 1000 and 2500.  If you are interested in submitting a paper for us to consider for our ‘Experience’ section, please contact hello at thewritingplatform.com with a short description or abstract. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

The Space together with tumblr have today announced an open call for artists. They are looking for for original, groundbreaking ideas to commission for audiences to experience on mobiles and tablets.

The call is open to any artist over 18 from anywhere in the world. Winning artists will receive substantial commissioning funding, their work published on The Space online platform, plus training & mentoring to help develop their skills and career.

Artists can apply on the website . The deadline is 5pm (GMT) Friday 14 November 2014.

The Space is a website for artists and audiences to create and explore exciting new digital art. They commission projects from artists working across a range of art forms and creative and digital industries, technology and coding, art and culture. Find out more and explore here.

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” said Ernest Hemingway, whose idea of a great social life involved a remote cabin, dead animals, and the bottom of a brandy glass. “Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing.”

Isaac Asimov – a self-confessed claustrophile whose greatest childhood wish, according to his autobiography, was to live in a magazine stand in the New York subway so that he could listen to the trains and read – agreed. “Writing is a lonely job”, he wrote. “Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his typewriter or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.”

The writer as maverick loner, doomed to exhaust their emotional energy in the dazzling salon of make-believe inside their brain, has become a romantic cliché; and it is one that writers themselves particularly love. Certainly, to write well, we must, well, write, which requires hermit-like stretches of solo graft. But we’re also prone to using our creative introversion as an excuse for perfectionism and pride. In our day jobs we evangelise teamwork, but at night we obsess over our manuscripts like a host of literary Gollums, snarling at the idea of ‘feedback’.

By we, of course, I mean me. As a child of social media, I have long been a vocal champion of open mental API. But up until two years ago, while I over-shared in every other area of my life, I couldn’t bring myself to expose a single sentence of my fiction to someone else’s scrutiny. ‘Writing groups’ were herds of passive-aggressive women firing off thinly veiled invective about each other’s historical murder mysteries in community centres, and if I couldn’t pour out the prose with the sole support of a Moleskine and a martini, I simply wasn’t fit to write.

Everything changed one balmy August day in 2010, when my mother emailed me a link to (the pre-S.J. Watson, little-known) Faber Academy. “I don’t need a bloody course.” I snapped, contemplating the glittering string of adjectives occasionally bumping into a plot on my laptop. “I just need to write. I certainly don’t need the bastardised highlights of Steven King’s On Writing flogged to me by some consumptive publishing house reduced to whoring out its name to would-be soft-porn self-published housewives with more money than sense.”

At the other end of the phone, there was a dignified pause. “Darling,” my mother said, “It was just a thought.”

But it was a thought that lingered. Perhaps I was being a little rigid. Perhaps writing was more of a craft than a trait. Perhaps, just perhaps, a tiny bit of mentorship might not go amiss. In any case, it would be a good excuse to buy new stationary. So, two days later, I sent out the first ever extract of my book, and two months later, found myself in a room in Bloomsbury with fourteen other tense-looking weirdos who had obliterated their ISAs in order to secure a place on a six-month novel-writing course.

There are many reasons why I am now grateful for that decision, from the warmth, wisdom and wit of our brilliant tutor, Richard Skinner, to the generous guidance of guest speakers such as Helen Dunmore. But the fourteen most important reasons were undoubtedly those fourteen fellow weirdos. I didn’t know it on that first day, but thanks to Faber, I’d found my writing group.

Now, over two years later, ten people from our original class still meet every month. A fortnight before each session, two of us still email round 5,000 words for the others to discuss – just like Richard taught us – with a chairman to keep conversations on track. This spring, we even organised a four-day writing holiday in Italy, complete with exercises, readings, one-to-ones and private writing time.

We are friends now, proper friends. We meet each other’s partners, we cook each other dinner, we sing awful karaoke while drunk on cheap wine. But, in that room above a pub, our shared commitment to getting those damned novels finished comes first. It’s a unique relationship, necessarily different from those we have with our families and our regular mates.

Our group is the place where we can bang on about the stuff that would quite rightly be esoteric and irritating to anyone who has never tried to write a book. Did I get away with that exposition? Do my semi-colons drive you nuts? Have you discovered the snapshots on Scrivener? These people care. More importantly, they understand. They might not always have the answers, but you can be sure that their questions will force you to face up to all those sneaky little obfuscations and evasions that you’ve been trying to repress.

So what makes a good writing group? Without a doubt, diversity. We are recent graduates, we are working mothers, we are globetrotting businessmen, we are retired. We even, God forbid, live outside London. We all share a certain ballpark of skill, but it would be difficult to imagine a more eclectic mix of personalities and writing styles. Our collective life experiences and expertise (including that of a lawyer, a doctor and a wonderfully pedantic architect) help inject fresh perspectives, catch factual anomalies, and prevent any whiff of echo-chamber. Somewhere in the class, each one of us has our natural first reader, but we also have our natural critic, too. And reading others’ work is just as valuable as having yours read.

“To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light,” explains Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer. “Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.”

What else matters? Commitment – you have to be willing to consistently put in the time if you expect others to do the same for you. Kindness – you’re dealing with the raw underbelly of our identity and dreams, and it is easily flayed. Honesty – because a true desire to help each other succeed sometimes requires harsh truths, albeit tactfully delivered. And humility – fighting your corner can help you understand what you’re trying to write, but learning to shut up, sit back and listen is even better.

There’s a lot of luck involved in corralling a compatible group. But now I’ve experienced the benefits – benefits which have helped turn my novel from an egotistical outpouring into a almost-better-than-rubbish third draft – I would urge every aspiring writer out there to trawl writing courses, networking events, bookshops, libraries, social media and friends of friends until, by trial and error, they build their own magic circle of trust. And finally, remember that one old cliché still works; unfortunately, your mother is always right.

Discussion forums or “chat rooms” are online websites where people engage in conversations around particular topics in the form of a question and answer style thread. A chat room is similar, except the conversation happens in real time. The principles are broadly the same for both forums and chatrooms so this article should give you a general overview for both. For the sake of economy we will refer to them as forums here.

Many people associate online forums with advice as the most common type are those that allow people to seek help relating to a particular issue. For example, health forums are very popular (and a little scary!) for advice about symptoms and health worries, techie forums are invaluable for answering questions about web development or any kind of technical need, and of course websites like Mumsnet offer forums for parents to discuss the highs and lows of family life. The personal nature of forums is very appealing to people and if you can find the right one it can be a great opportunity for you to connect with your readers, or other like-minded writers, and maybe even make some new friends.

Top tips for using online forums:

• Follow the rules. Forums generally have ‘rules’ that set the tone for how people engage with each other. When you first visit the forum be sure to look for the topic called ‘Forum rules’ (or something similar) to get a sense of what you can and can’t post.
• Use forums to ask for information and advice from others but also offer your expertise in return, and answer requests for information. The more you give, the more you get back.
• Proactively engage with discussions and build relationships with members.
• If you can, add photos and information to your personal profile, including links to your website, twitter profile or any other work online. However, some forums don’t allow members to link to other websites, so make sure you are aware of the rules and respect them.
• Some forums arrange real-life meet-ups. Don’t be afraid to leave the safety of your computer to attend but remember to stay safe and make sure you attend group meetings in public places only. Trust your instincts.
• Don’t engage in online arguments or slanging matches (the online term for such escalations is “flame wars”)! It’s good to take part in discussions and present your views, but remember this is about building a positive reputation. A good rule of thumb is to not type something you wouldn’t say outright in a personal conversation.
• It is OK to occasionally mention your work as long as the way you do it is sensitive and respectful to the community. People don’t like to be sold to so sometimes just being seen as a thoughtful, positive and friendly person is enough to sell a few copies of your book.
• View online spaces just like real life settings – because they are.
• Have fun!

Hosting a forum
If you are hosting a discussion forum, be aware that you have a responsibility to monitor the discussion and to take action should there be problems. You could, for example, be held responsible for defamatory remarks made against someone if you don’t remove them promptly.
These days it is easiest not to host a public discussion forum: social networks cover this ground really well. However, you may want to create a members’ password-protected discussion area where supporters can exchange ideas, or as a one-off event. You will still need to monitor this but the responsibility may be easier.
Many web content management systems (such as WordPress) come with a password-protected discussion forum option, so it is easy to set one up from a website created in this way.

Get started by visiting some of these popular forums for writers: 

figment.com
www.publishedauthors.org
www.writingforums.com
www.writersbeat.com
www.kuforum.co.uk/kindleusersforum/forum-35.html
www.mywriterscircle.com
www.youngwritersonline.net
www.makeliterature.com/forums

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A Quick Guide To Facebook

Website Or Social Media: The Modern Writer’s Conundrum

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites globally, with a little over a billion users worldwide (as of September 2012). If used properly, Facebook can be an invaluable marketing tool for authors.

What kind of Facebook Account do I need?

There are two main types of Facebook presence:

1) Personal Profiles
A Facebook “Profile” is a personal profile and is usually used as a means to connecting with family and friends. At it’s core, Facebook is a network of individuals’ “profile pages”, where photos and personal information are uploaded and displayed. Individuals then add other people as “friends” and can provide status updates, send messages and write on friends’ “walls”. Once you have a profile, you can choose whether information and activity is displayed publicly, to friends only, or to specific people. Most people keep their profile pages private which means that only your Facebook friends can see the content of your profile, and therefore it is not indexed by search engines.

2) Facebook Page
A Facebook “Page” is different to a “Profile”. Facebook pages help businesses, organisations and brands share their stories and connect with people. Pages contain information that is public and open to anyone and therefore Facebook pages are indexed by search engines. This is one reason why we recommend that authors use this option – a Facebook page – for promotion. It is commonly understood that Facebook pages represent companies, concepts or professionals, and not a private person’s life so this is the most appropriate way to present your book or yourself as an author.

Once your page is set up, users then choose to “like” your page and they will then be notified of any new changes or status updates from you. You can update your page with news, upload photos and videos, send messages to your followers and set up events. Tip: You may already have a website or blog and if you are having trouble keeping up with all the updates consider using a Facebook page as your blogging platform and put all of your updates and articles there.

Note: As of March 2012, profiles and pages are also referred to as “timelines”, to reflect the new Facebook layout based on a chronological timeline.

How to set up a Facebook personal profile
The most common way to set up a Facebook page is to first create a personal profile, and then create a page from there. This does not mean that people who “like” your page can see your personal information, it simply helps Facebook to create a connection between you and your page. You can then maintain your professional appearance while still staying connected with family and friends and you can also use your network of friends to build “likes” on your Facebook page.

Create a Personal Profile
Go to www.facebook.com.
On the homepage, you’ll see a form which you’ll need to fill in to sign up. Facebook will then take you through the process of setting up your personal profile step by step. Be sure to go through each area of the privacy settings and carefully select the level of privacy you want. This is an important step, to ensure your personal information is not visible to the public (unless you want it to be).
Once you have your personal profile set up, follow the steps below to set up your page.

Facebook page

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com/pages/browser.php and log in.
2. Click the green ‘Create a Page’ button on the top right.
3. You will see various categories:
   • If your page is for you as an author, select Artists, Band or Public Figure, then select ‘Author’ from the drop down menu.
   • If your page is for your book, select Entertainment, then select ‘Book’ from the drop down menu.
4. Give your page a name, eg. Book Title or Your Name, then check the terms and conditions box and press ‘Get Started’.
5. You will be guided through three steps to set up your page (you can skip some of these steps if you want to return to them later):
   • Add a profile image. This should be 180 x 180 pixels (square). See the ‘How to resize image for the web’ article. [HYPERLINK]
   • Add ‘About’ text. This is either your bio or the blurb or marketing copy for your book. Make sure it’s interesting and enticing and that it includes your Twitter handle and web address.
   • Add a URL or web address for your Facebook page, for example www.facebook.com/titleofyourbook or www.facebook.com/yourpenname.
6. That’s it! You’re up and running. You will now be on your new Facebook page so you an add a background image, invite your friends to like your page, start posting updates and begin to build your audience.

Top Tips for Using Pages

• Keep your pages regularly updated. If you don’t have any new news, try commenting on something topical, post up a video, song or image that has inspired you or even recycle older news (if it’s still relevant!).
• “Like” related pages, such as those by other authors or publishing houses. Consider sharing their news on your page. This can help encourage others to “like” your page and share your news in return.
• Use visuals. You can post a variety of multimedia to a Facebook page – e.g. pictures, audio and video. Using visual content like this is a great way to get people’s attention and engage your audiences.
• As a general rule, keep your tone personal and informal to engage users and create a sense of community – if this is appropriate for your brand/identity.
• Make sure you respond to your fans’ queries and comments.
• Try posting status updates as questions to prompt responses. Interaction is key.
• Try to link to your website and other online profiles as much as possible in your status updates. This helps with search engine optimization and ensures that people can easily find our more about you.

If you need a helping hand with your Facebook page come to one of our one-to-one web and social media sessions run regularly throughout the year. Contact kristen(at)thecurvedhouse(dot)com for more info.

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Website Or Social Media: The Modern Writer’s Conundrum

In advance of the launch of The Writing Platform, we have been surveying the digital needs of writers; this article highlights some of our findings.

We had over 500 respondents; 67% female, 33% male; 45% between the ages of 35 and 55; 75% of respondents live in the UK, 9% in the US, 5% in Australia, 3% in Canada, and the rest spread around the world, including the Philippines, Lithuania and Venezuela.

35% are aspiring writers, 33% traditionally published writers, 15% both traditionally and self-published; and 9% self-published only.

By far the greatest number of people agree with the statement ‘I want my work to be read by lots of people’ (39%), with only 20% agreeing that the statement that most accurately describes their aspirations as a writer is ‘I want to make money from my writing’.

We had a good mix of genre and non-genre writers, and 74% of writers said they have a website or blog. 52% of respondents said they actively keep abreast of developments and new opportunities in writing and publishing, while 41% of people said they try to keep abreast, but find it difficult because the landscape changes so rapidly.

Digital transformation affects all writers and readers; the pace of it can be bewildering, and this is part of the reason we wanted to set up The Writing Platform, and hope that it will become a place you return to for clear and neutral information about how our industries are changing.

Another interesting trend revealed by the survey is that while 85% of writers find out about developments and opportunities in writing and publishing via a large range of websites, less than 10% state that they get this kind of information from their publishers, while 7% get this information from their agents.

This reflects a current disconnect between some publishers and writers on the digital front; while publishers focus on digital workflows, ebooks, and digital marketing, some need to work further with writers to develop what digital transformation might offer to writers and readers. Agents also need to continue to think about new opportunities for their writers, beyond the crucial, but seemingly endless, arguments about ebook rights and royalties.

As we moved on to questions regarding how writers publish and promote their work online, we found that 41% of respondents showcase their work on Good Reads, with the rest spread across a large range of platforms, including blogging platforms like Wattpad, Authonomy, WordPress and Tumblr.

Facebook and Twitter were the most popular social media sites with ‘connecting with other writers and relevant organisations’ listed by 77% as one of the main reasons for using social media. Not surprisingly, when surveying those who have self-published their work, 52% had done so via Amazon, with 19% using Smashwords.

When it comes to thinking about how digital platforms can afford new possibilities for writers, we asked ‘Have you worked on any multimedia or cross-platform projects?’ 42% of respondents said they hadn’t done any work of this kind but would like to, while 27% admitted they didn’t know what the question meant. However, 22% told us they were already involved in projects of this nature, and 19% of these writers citing their main aspiration is ‘to push the boundaries of creative practice i.e. to experiment with new forms’.

68% of all respondents said they were interested in working collaboratively. These figures show us that a new type of writer, a hybrid who works across multiple platforms, formats, and genres, is emerging.

The survey has given us a good idea of what kinds of information writers are looking for currently, and we’ll be doing our best to find ways to address the broad range of concerns and issues raised. Thanks to everyone who took the time to complete it. We’ll be keeping the survey running and will reassess the needs of writers as we go along.

Writers can fill in the survey here.