How we came to publish this one
This is the third of our Waterloo Festival Writing Competition books. This contains the stories by the winners of the 2020 competition. In December, we’re publishing a paperback of all three e-books.
The title
The title is the theme of the 2020 Waterloo Festival. Every story we have in the collection gives a different interpretation of the title. All are valid.
The cover
As ever, our clever designer has come up with the goods. We often find a concept by putting the title of the book or something to do with the title into the search field on Pixabay or Unsplash . Then we look for an image that will work as a standalone front cover or will wrap around to cover the spine. We tend to prefer the latter. However, for e-books we only need to worry about the front. We also need to make sure there is enough room for the title and author on the front and the blurb on the back. We avoid too much blue: getting it to print the same as you see it on even a correctly tuned screen is very difficult. But again, not so crucial for an e-book. .
Some notes about style
There are a variety of styles here but each piece has a strong voice. Voice is one of our criteria for accepting stories. We looked for:
- An interesting interpretation of the theme
- A well-structured story
- A convincing ending - and that can include a very subtle or even an open ending
- A strong voice
Who we think the reader is
Naturally readers will include friends, family, fans and flowers of all of the writers involved and of course of all who are associated with the Waterloo Festival. Other readers will be those who like a more literary text, a more thought-provoking read. Perhaps we may even say those people who like the sort of work we publish.
Finances
The book continues to sell steadily though has not yet covered all of its set-up costs. We could do with a few more sales, however. If you’d like a copy, click on the image and you’ll be taken straight to Amazon. The book was edited and designed in-house so there has been very little outlay but so far the editor and designer of the project has earned very little from this title and we would like to pay them retrospectively.
What else
Most of the writers supplied a video about their book or an article. You can find these here. You can also see some of them on my blog:
