I’ve just been reading about one of our students, Maxine Morrey, who has secured a two-book deal with Carina UK, the digital printing arm of publishing giant HarperCollins.

I must admit that I hadn’t come across them before, but do go and have a look at their site as they are open to new writers, and you don’t need an agent to approach them. Plus there’s a really clear Question and Answer section on anything you want to know about them.

Something else I learned while looking into this is that Harlequin Mills and Boon is now also part of HarperCollins, so they’re teamed up with Carina too. Each month, Mills & Boon publish 120 new titles, with manuscripts from 200 authors living in the UK and a further 1,300 worldwide. Every five seconds there’s a new Mills & Boon book sold in the UK! (Watch that exclamation mark – we’ll be coming back to it later.) Read the rest of this entry »