Navaselva, The Call of the Wild Valley

 

How we came to publish this one

Author Georgina Wright was originally a client of Debz Hobbs-Wyatt and Debz recommended this book for The Red Telephone. I agreed that the writing is beautiful and the theme very pertinent to our life today.     

The title

Navaselva is Georgina’s own invention. It is based on her a ‘not quite so wild’ region in Spain. You can read more about it here.  

Some notes about the process

Georgina had pretty well gone through a full structural edit with Debz, so our team only needed to do the copy edit, and the five usual proof-reads.  

The cover

The book is illustrated throughout by Ruth Koeningsberger, We’ve given a special  finish to the cover picture so that it looks textured.  

Some notes about style

Georgina uses a very lyrical voice. She give us a very strong sense of time and place.

Who we think the reader is

As we have published through The Red Telephone we’re primarily seeing this as a Young Adult novel. One of the main characters Jo Ray is in fact a young adult. The story could also comfortably be read by younger teens. Certainly an adult readership that is interested in ecology would also enjoy the novel.     

What else

Georgina has arranged a series of events and we’re even thinking of including one that involves a choir. This is a hot topic so is of interest to many.

Review copies

It’s always great if you can buy the book and give us a review. Just click on the link to be taken to our bookshop. If you would like to review and you are strapped for cash, just get in touch for a free PDF.

 

Grab your copy here.       

Soft Lauch, Hard Launch?

 

Three people have asked about this recently so I thought it would be useful to go over it here. You may find it interesting that in our work patterns and on tracking sheets we also name these “Pre-market” and “Post production”.

The soft launch happens as soon as the book is ready to go. Note it generally won’t really be out in the world for about four to six weeks. This is why I often suggest a launch for the final Thursday of the month in which we “hard launch”.  Thursday, early evening, is a traditional time for book launches. The last Thursday in the month is a safe bet.

By “soft launch” time the book has had two proof reads, we have seen a hard copy and the Kindle book is up and running. We’ve put it into our online bookshop. We’ve registered it with Nielsen’s – a really important step in making it available.

They used to reckon that from registration with Nielsen’s it would take up to fifteen days for the book to reach all databases. Post-Covid that has become six weeks. You may now appreciate why there is a gap.

At the point of soft launch we provide you with four different copies of the cover – small, medium, full and 3D, two files for e-readers, a PDF, an order form so that you can buy author copies and an updated version of our marketing plan for authors.

The soft launch period is an ideal time to start getting reviews and persuading friends, family, fans and followers to buy.

By the time of “hard launch” the book should be widely available on all online platforms – Amazon, Waterstones, Tesco and all book shops can order it through their normal distributor / wholesaler.  Hopefully it will already have several reviews.   

The failsafe is that customers can always order directly from us.    

Good News ...?

 

This was quite a tricky one this year. We were kind of asking you to write about good news that wasn’t perhaps good news after all. In any case, here is the final list.

Anna's Secret Mission                                    Sara Knapp

Cinderella Rising                                               Penny Rogers

Doc's Last Trip                                                    Ian Inglis

Far from the Poppy Fields                            Gillian Brown

Floored                                                                Fiona Ritchie Walker

Fran's Birthday Party                                      Veronica Robinson

Helping Angel                                                    Peter Collins

Hero                                                                      Mike Wilson

Impossible Promise                                        Barrington Gordon

Janet, More Than a Friend                           Lynne English

Mistaken Identity                                            Liz Cox

Ms Tidy                                                                Keith Willson

Once Upon a Time in America                    Nick Padron

The Changing Pool                                           Mark Tulin

The Day IInternet Died                                  Boris Glikman

The End of the Beginning                             S. Nadja Zajdman

The Hymn of the Bees                                   Andrea Stephenson

The Liberations of Cassie Youmans          Norman Thomson

The Litter                                                             Jeanne Davies

The Pursuit                                                         Michael Noonan

The Silver Card                                                  Seth Pilevsky

Time to say goodbye                                      Karítas Hrundar Pálsdóttir

Where the Land Ends                                     Clare Dean

White Elephant                                                 Tom Kirkbright

 

 Read more here about how we selected the stories.

 

Debz and I separately awarded each text points for the story, how well the story fitted the theme, the quality of writing and professionalism. The writers’ identities were hidden from us at the time.

Story: This must have a beginning, a good story arc and a satisfying ending. Is there tension and pace?  Are characters well developed? 

Theme: As many of you know we take a vaguely Christmassy theme and hope that you will subvert it. Yes, this was a little tricky this time.

Quality of writing: Does the writing flow? Is there a strong voice? Is there a good balance of longer and shorter sentences? Is there overall a good narrative balance? Does sentence structure work well?

Professionalism: We often find that writers who present their work professionally are easy to work with. Have you followed the instructions on formatting? Is dialogue set out correctly? Are there no or very few typos, grammatical mistakes and spelling mistakes? Is the paragraphing  correct?      

 

We then both did a rank order. Every story that appeared in both of our top twenty-four made it into the anthology. That was fourteen in total. Then we took the next off mine, then the next off Debz’s and so on. All of these stories were in our top forty-eight. When we deanonymised the texts we found we had two stories by one writer so we picked the next one in the list to replace the lower ranked one.

And there we have it. We are now into editing the texts and a handful of stories have already been filed in the “Final” box.