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Authors used to serve apprenticeships, not making it big until their third or fourth books. Now first-timers land huge deals. Áine McCarthy reports on a brave new world.

What do the following books have in common: PS, I Love You, which has earned Cecelia Ahern a small fortune; The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, winner of this year's Whitbread Award; Vernon God Little, by D. B. C. Pierre, winner of this year's Man Booker Prize; and The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, which has sold two million copies in hardback in the US and is now conquering the rest of the world? All are first books and thus front runners in a new publishing trend.

Once upon a time the path to publishing success was to be tried and tested. If you were lucky a sympathetic editor spotted potential in your tyro manuscript, took you on and nurtured your fledgling talent. Expectations were modest: the idea was to get you into print, guide you through your apprenticeship and, with luck, recoup the investment on your second, third or fourth book.

Now publishers are all on the lookout for the next fresh new voice, with many cutting back on mid-list authors in order to lavish astronomical sums on promising unknowns.

This is just one feature of a seismic shift in publishing over the past decade, a shift that has had significant implications for readers and writers. About a decade ago new technologies, global economics and the rise of literary agents combined to rock this world, whose procedures had barely budged since the advent of the typewriter.

Word processors cut out an entire editorial layer and a new emphasis on bottom line and marketing methods emerged. Independent booksellers were taken over by chain stores and small- and medium-sized publishing houses were swallowed by multinationals, so that now six conglomerates - TimeWarner, Bertelsmann, News Corporation, Pearson, Viacom and the Georg von Holtzbrinck group - dominate English-language publishing.

Agents began selling from proposals, earning advance fees for their clients - and the publicity potential of the advance was soon recognised. What was once the most staid and sedate of businesses - the gentleman's profession - mutated into what can sometimes seems to disgruntled writers (and readers) like a marketing morass of cyberbooks and hyperauthors.

What does all this mean for an aspiring writer? On the plus side, publishers have never been so open to newcomers. For the first time in publishing history, a writer is better off with no track record at all than with a poor or even modest sales showing. On the other hand, standards have risen, so few first authors get past the publishing post today without expending a great deal of time, effort and sometimes money (unless, of course, your name happens to be David Beckham).

The once strongly held belief that writing cannot be taught has been smothered under the bulk of services now on offer to the aspiring writer prepared to invest in success: festivals and conferences, social and critique groups, workshops and seminars, university MAs and MFAs, manuscript assessments and edits, writing mentors and "book doctors" (see panel below). The latest addition is Wexford Book Festival, which will run from March 25th to 28th, offering a range of readings and workshops that aim to build on Wexford's "internationally renowned reputation for producing great writers".

So should an aspiring writer hotfoot it to Wexford? That depends. Writers have to learn what they need and where to get it, choosing carefully from the myriad of events and services on offer. Also essential is to recognise that courses or events can become displacement activities. "I call them the perpetually perplexed," says Elizabeth Lyon, author of The Sell Your Novel Toolkit, "those who keep attending writing classes and critique groups but avoid undertaking the hard work of change: improving their writing and changing their behaviour. Secretly, they want to be publishing exceptions, to put in a quarter and win $1 million. It's self-deception."

So: writer, know thyself. This is also a maxim to hold if tempted by another growing trend: self-publication. Not to be confused with vanity publishing, producing and selling one's own writing has a long and respected history: Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce all self-published. More recently, James Redfield sold 90,000 copies of The Celestine Prophecy out of his car before it was bought by Joann Davis, an editor at Warner Books, for $800,000. Jill Paton Walsh's Knowledge Of Angels was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Although the new technologies mean self-publishing has never been easier, the difficulty lies not in printing the books but in distributing and promoting them. Writers who employ a company to do the work - for a hefty fee - usually find they are still required to do the bulk of the selling and marketing themselves.

Those who find that prospect too daunting might do well to note the attention that established publishing houses are paying to non-fiction, particularly to what has come to be termed creative non-fiction. Fiction, once the major commercial genre, has shrunk: only 10 per cent of published books today are novels (and the vast majority of those are genre novels in categories such as romance or sci-fi). In contrast, creative non-fiction - a hybrid genre in which techniques more commonly associated with fiction, such as characterisation, scenes, point of view and narrative structure, are applied to real-life reporting - has never been more popular.

"Creative non-fiction is not just a genre," says Prof Lee Gutkind, director of the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, founding editor of the pioneering journal Creative Nonfiction and author of eight creative-non-fiction titles. "It is a literary, cultural and political movement." Dubbed the godfather of creative non-fiction by Vanity Fair magazine and to the forefront of the wave of such writing that is sweeping the US, Gutkind is to give one of his writing workshops at the Irish Writers' Centre next Sunday.

"The creative-non-fiction writer is poised to present reality in such a way that it cannot be avoided," he says. "Creative-non-fiction writing is provocative and it has teeth because it is true. Because it is true it can change lives and shape opinion in ways that fiction has hardly ever been able to do."

Yet non-fiction does not attract the same literary kudos as other genres. The Arts Council does not give bursaries to non-fiction writers, for example, and the Guardian First Book Award is almost unique in its recognition of non-fiction's literary potential.

Ironically, such sniffiness could be a sign of the genre's growing significance. In Elizabethan England, drama was despised by most members of the literary establishment, while audiences swelled. In the 19th century, now recognised as the great age of the novel, many literary pundits dismissed fiction as frivolous and superficial while readers lapped it up.

Whether or not non-fiction turns out to be the central literary genre of the 21st century, it is material for which publishers are increasingly hungry. In the US Penguin recently launched its eighth non-fiction imprint, and publishers report a shortage of non-fiction writers. This, combined with the myriad outlets for short pieces - features journalism, travel-writing, memoir, commentary - makes non-fiction a good choice for the aspiring writer.

Whether writing non-fiction or fiction, aiming for self- or conventional publication, the advice to those aspiring to see their name on a book spine remains constant: sift events and books and magazines about writing for what is useful to you; learn not only to accept criticism but also to welcome it; hone your voice in short formats - feature articles and short stories - before attempting a magnum opus.

Above all, don't give up. All writers begin by learning craft, developing techniques, practising skills. Persistence is the name of the publishing game - and perseverance as much as talent determines which writers crack the literary lottery.

Áine McCarthy is a writer and director of the Font International writer-services organisation. Her first novel, written under the name Orna Ross, is due to be published next year by Penguin Ireland

What four successful writers say about getting started

Hugo Hamilton

"I wrote short stories and would send them to The Irish Times and The Irish Press, as they were really the only places to get short stories printed at the time. I got picked up by Faber & Faber after having a short story in a thing called First Fictions, which they used to publish. Then they took a novel of mine in 1990, Surrogate City. The route has certainly changed a little since then. There is less of a longing for short stories. Now, you usually have to write a novel before you'll get picked up. I never thought about the money and I still think it's the case for writers that get published - the money is secondary."

Sarah Webb

"It's getting harder and harder for aspiring writers," says Webb, whose new book, Some Kind Of Wonderful, is out in April. "I would say that there is no point in even submitting directly to a publisher now, as few British or international publishers will even look at you now without an agent. They haven't got the time or the manpower to go through the slush pile. And the standard they are looking for has gone up, not just in terms of the writing but also in terms of the presentation and what they call market awareness. You're expected to be ahead of fashion before it even breaks - a pretty tall order."

Eoin Colfer

Eoin Colfer, who made his name with Artemis Fowl, submitted on spec to publishers listed in Writers' & Artists' Yearbook. "The mere act of purchasing the fat volume made me feel like a legitimate writer: the yearbook was not just a list of publishers. Every possible scrap of information needed by the upcoming or established writer was included. What I needed to know was detailed under the heading Submitting Material . . . . So I finally wrote an introductory letter and an interesting summary of the book and included the first 50 pages, double-spaced. It worked. Two weeks later I had a publisher." Perhaps returning the favour, he contributed the foreword to the yearbook's 2004 edition.

Maeve Binchy

"Publishing today is both more difficult and more easy than when I started out. The hills now are alive with the voices of writers - writers are much more confident that they have something to say than they used to be. On the other hand there is more competition, and publishers are all chasing the big sellers. They are dying to be the first to find a brand new voice - the writer is going to be successful right from the off."

Where to begin

Prof Lee Gutkind's workshop on writing creative non-fiction is at the Irish Writers' Centre, in Dublin, on Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tickets, which cost 150, are limited. It will be followed by a public reading and question-and-answer session (10). Call 01-8532356 for more details.

Trinity College in Dublin runs a master of fine arts course in creative writing. Call 01-6772941. The Irish Writers' Centre runs weekend and longer-term writing courses. Details from 01-8721302.

Wexford Book Festival runs from March 25th to 28th; featured writers are due to include Colm Tóibín, Eoin Colfer, Sheila O'Flanagan and Marita Conlon-McKenna. Call 053-22226 or visit www.wexfordbook. com. For advice on self-publishing, see Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2004.

A good Internet resource is www.askaboutwriting.net. Also, Font International, the Dublin-based organisation of which Áine McCarthy

is a director, offers weekend writing seminars in Dublin, London and New York, along with manuscript assessments, writer mentoring and other consultation services, for writers and aspiring writers. Call 01-8532356 or visit www.fontwriters.com for more information.