andrew lownie literary agency

Articles

Andrew Lownie uses his expert knowledge in the publishing field to maximise the potential of his clients and build up their careers. Here Andrew Lownie, and some of his clients and guest columnists, share advice on a variety of topics to writers. Elsewhere on the site you can find a Frequently Asked Questions list on literary agents, as well as advice for submitting work to agents.

  • What a difference a tweet makes

    27 Jul 2015

    David McClure, author of “Royal Legacy”, recounts how Twitter helped him break a global news story with unintended results At the end of July last year I tweeted that the Queen’s private income from the Duchy of Lancaster had hit a record high. No newspaper picked up the story. In a way this was understandable since at the time I only had a handful of twitter followers (including one who claimed to be related to God) and after a long wait the information only found its way into the public domain via the publication of my book on the royal finances (“Royal Legacy” Thistle Publishing 20...Read more

  • How to promote your book with Facebook advertising

    02 Jul 2015

    Chris Woodford, whose Atoms Under the Floorboards: The Secret Science Hidden in Your Home, has just been published , draws from his own recent experience to show how Facebook advertising can boost sales. It's all very well if you're Russell Brand. With 10 million followers on Twitter, 1.1 million YouTube subscribers, and a couple of hundred thousand podcast listeners, the love-him, loathe-him political comedian certainly knows a thing or two about social media. Numbers like that are music to a publisher's ears, and partly explain why Brand's books command seven-figure advances. New media ...Read more

  • Using YouTube to promote your books

    01 May 2015

    David Craig draws on his own experiences to explain how You Tube can be used to promote books. We all know that the Internet gives us many new ways of promoting our books. One of these is YouTube. I had been thinking for some time about producing a short video for YouTube, but didn’t know how to do it myself and couldn’t possibly afford to pay for a professional production. So, one day, I asked readers of my daily blog www.snouts-in-the-trough.com if they knew some young computer whizzkid who might be able to help out for a modest payment. I was immediately contacted by someone who...Read more

  • Pinterest: a tool for writers?

    31 Mar 2015

    Piu Eatwell, author of the true-life historical mystery thriller The Dead Duke, his Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse (Head of Zeus/WW Norton), explores an under-utilized but potentially exciting social media tool for authors… Even the most technophobic and recalcitrant dinosaurs of the writing world these days will – at the very least – have an author website. Most writers nowadays will also have a Facebook page, Goodreads and LinkedIn entries, and likely a Twitter handle. Writers of young adult and teen fiction will almost certainly post to Instagram. But what of that final, per...Read more

  • Ten years of writing history

    12 Mar 2015

    I’ve been sitting at a desk writing history books for something over ten years . It’s been engrossing, demanding and occasionally exhausting. This is a good moment to take stock. What does it add up to? Four books in various languages (the last still in proof), thousands of pages of handwritten notes: Despite the impressive number of different language versions it’s been a modest living not a handsome one – I’m still waiting for the film rights. People come by and take out options but I’ve become realistic. I spent three unpaid months writing outlines ...Read more

  • Getting PR for your Book

    24 Feb 2015

    Katy Weitz , who with her colleague at Press My Book Emma Donnan runs one-day training courses on publicity for authors, gives her 5 TOP TIPS ON HOW TO THINK LIKE A JOURNALIST So you’ve written a book – the next step is getting people to buy it. But how do you do that? Well, unless you have a whopping great marketing budget, the quickest and cheapest way forward is publicity. Whether you are self-published, working with a small publisher or are lucky enough to have a deal with a major player, all authors should be concerned with the question of publicity. And the reason i...Read more