The Writer's Handbook 2002 [Paperback]

People start writing for a variety of reasons - fun, love, therapy. It's a progressive illness. At some stage, you decide you'd like to improve your skills ... or come to the conclusion that other people might benefit from hearing your words! You join a writers' group, take classes, or start sending your poems, short stories, manuscripts, or articles to publishers. It's before this stage you have to get serious. If you want to improve your writing and have at least the ambition to get published, then I'd suggest you invest in at least one of these titles and learn a little about marketing before you start sending out material on spec.

The "Yearbook" contains a generous helping of useful articles which might just stimulate you and inspire you with the confidence to share your writings with others. The quality of its articles tends to give it a bit of an edge over the "Handbook". If you're serious enough to believe that you'd like to push your writing to the ultimate conclusion and try to earn money (if not a living) from it, then you will need both books.

If you were to compare the two, "Writers' and Artists' Yearbook" is probably the better value. Both contain page after page of addresses - UK newspapers and magazines, publishers, agents, competitions, etc., etc., etc., complete with pen portraits of these. Both books offer a number of articles on the subject of writing and publication. The "Handbook" might just have greater clarity in the presentation of its material, but that's a subjective judgement which tells you my eyesight isn't what it used to be. The two do not entirely overlap - they have a number of different listings, they offer a slightly different perspective, and it's worth having both on your bookshelf - and if you want to break in to American markets, you should also consider "Writer's Market".

The "Handbook" is well laid out. Editor Barry Turner has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the publishing industry. The material he presents is concise, easily digested, and his information is accurate, timely, and accessible. If you're serious about writing, it will become a good friend, to be cherished and handled with due care.

The only criticism I would make is that there could be more articles with advice on the various aspects of publishing. These articles help to personalise this large volume and I would have liked to read articles on every section of the book, and not just selected ones.

Overall, this is a must-buy for aspiring authors, and if you can only afford one writer's guide, make this the one!

Where this volume wins hands-down is in organisation. With the others (and WM in particular), you find yourself flicking back and forward, hunting for an entry - and when you find it, you'd better flag it with a post-it note or it might disappear forever :-) With this one, you just look in the index - which runs to maybe 15% of the total page count, and is broken down into company and subject sections, and then further subdivided along functional (Agent, Publisher, etc) and geographical (Commonwealth, Irish, UK, US, etc) lines. This leads to a wonderfully "granular" index where you can instantly find the chunk on (for example) Irish Agents dealing with travel books, or UK publishers of science fiction.

The competitors may devote more space to general "publishing business" articles, but these books are essentially directories of current market information , and I'd rather see the effort spent - as it is here - on an excellent index. The business side doesn't change much, so why pay for it to be reprinted every year?