Basilwade – a new experience

click on image to see on Amazon

We’re very pleased that The Basilwade Chronicles covered its costs within a few weeks of being published. We were helped by the fact that the author provided the cover herself. We’ve used Amazon’s own print-on-demand service for the paperback and they charge no set up costs. So the only charge incurred so far is:

IPG contribution £3.09 (this is the payment we make to be member of a the Impendent  Publishers’ Guild divided by the number of books we’ve published).

There’s bit of a cheat here as well in that we’ve not yet sent the copies to the British Library and the Agents for The Legal Deposit Libraries. Those fees will come out of 2020 performance but I think they’ll clear fairly quickly.

The Basilwwade Chronicles first appeared in serial form on CafeLit.   The episodes  were such a good read that I suggested we turn them into a book.

We now have three other authors serialising stories in CafeLit. Because of the success of Basilwade I shall also offer to turn their posts into a book if the authors are willing.

We have copies of Basilwade now and I’ll be forwarding them on to the British Library and ALDL shortly. We’re satisfied with the quality.

Using Amazon’s own service has the advantage that Amazon will fulfil orders quickly. A disadvantage is that we can’t easily get them into bookshops. But we think we’ll use this for The Best of CafeLit in the future. This means we can still keep these volumes at a reasonable price. We can still order at “cost” from Amazon – they have their own in-built profit on printing prices – and send on to customers.

A satisfying experience to date.              

A New Collection

Thank you to Allison, my next editing work is her wonderful story collection. I will be starting the first edit tomorrow and knowing her quirky, interesting style I am really looking forward to it. On a writing note I have started using the prompts from Gill’s new book for this year and my first two flash fiction pieces have been created from Allison’s starting lines.

Locally in Okehampton I run a writing group which meet on the third Monday of the month with Kate from Dogberry and Finch Books so our next session will soon be here. We had an interesting theme selection to write on!

Working on A Place to Be by Jesse Falzoi

We first published Jesse in one of our early collections and she’s followed our progress ever since. I was delighted when she approached us to consider her collection of short stories.

I generally take the view that if we’ve published one or more stories by an author we’ve already established that their work is fundamentally good and that we can work with them. I wasn’t disappointed.

Jesse’s collection here is superb. There is a very strong voice in each piece and indeed an equally strong sense of place – and time as well. I was certainly transported to Germany - a place I know well as I used to teach German and I’ve spent quite a bit of time there. But I haven’t been there for some time. It was good to be reminded.

Jesse’s English is very good indeed but nevertheless there were one or two oddities here and there. The upside of this is that sometimes these brought a freshness to the language.

This is something I’ve noted in my work on creative writing in other languages. If you have a reasonable command of another language writing in it can be a liberation You write with more restriction and become more creative. What is a cliché in your own language can be very effective in your second language. You tend to write more simply anyway. Less becomes more.    

Not that Jesse was conducting any sort of experiment here. There are many other reasons why someone who is not English might want to write in English.

We did debate whether to use UK English or American English. What should a Euorpean use? In the end we settled for a modified American English. It worked.

A Place to Be is one of our more literary titles.

It has been a pleasure working on this collection.