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Get paid for your work

I thought that might get your attention. Fiction Garden have the strange, old-fashioned notion that "writers should be paid for their work", and they will "endeavour to offer a small fee" for each short story published (at least one per month). For that reason if no other the site merits an occasional visit, so that the micro-pence earned by displaying Google adverts can help in building up the funds.

They also offer a list of local writers' groups and a list of current writing competitions. It's a work in progress, but it could grow nicely.

• Fiction Garden

Publish yourself

The bad old days of vanity publishing are a thing of the past (or they can be if you exercise a bit of nous). Print on demand technology can give you a book in the hand in a few days and for a few quid. What you do with that possibility is still up to you - no point in ordering hundreds if you don't know what you're going to with them - but the number of garages across the land with 5863 mouldering hardbacks stacked against the back wall should be approaching zero.

e-books, of course, are easier and cheaper, though most of us will still need a bit of help setting the text up and just about all of us will need one of the distribution channels.

As ever, it's the US multinationals who dominate the one-copy-at-a-time market, but there are other options (far too numerous to mention here). Here are a few places to start with:

• Lulu - probably the front runner, and you can set it all up yourself online.
• Lightning Source - comes recommended by one of our members.
• Choir Press - British, and with an apparently good reputation
• How to publish yourself in the UK - a quirky and very British look at the subject

Resources for playwrights

This is relocated from the home page now that it isn't really news any more.

• Primary Creations run courses in writing for the screen. They also provide a script reading service.
  "I found the sessions very useful and went to three or four over a two year period," says John Waterhouse, who has had a couple of plays performed recently at Salford Arts Theatre.
• John also recommends Scriptworks at the Contact Theatre - have your play read by actors then discussed by the actors and other writers.
• North West Playwrights offer support for playwrights and script reading services.
  "Very good," says Ruth Estevez, and she should know; she's written scripts for Bob the Builder!
• Northern Spirit Creative announces the NSC Theatre Awards in Leeds - an opportunity for writers, actors and directors.

Oddities

And if they don't like the label, they can always write their own pages...

• Chris Wood reviews Ralph Steadman

Why?

In common with many sites, we used to have a long list of links to any site that had anything to do with literature of any kind. Keeping it up to date was hard work, and it rapidly became apparent that not many people were using many of the links. Other people were in business to produce lists of links, so we left them to it.

This page is now an attempt to provide a much more selective view of the world which is useful to the kind of person who happens on this site and the kind of person who contributes to it. So there might be an emphasis on Manchester, and on current interests.

Please, get in touch if you have ideas for links we should use or pursue, but if we don't get any comments on the page - good or bad - then we'll probably go back to the old way of thinking.