Sunday 30 April 2023

The Crispin Chronicles by Dawn Knox

 

How we came to publish this one

This is a CaféLit serial. These consist of episodes that stand alone well enough but also have a story arc that spans all episodes. This is in fact the third by one of our regular writers Dawn Knox.    

The title

Dawn’s first serial with us was The Basilwade Chrionicles. In fact I suggested this title. Dawn has named her town as Basilwade. I thought “chronicles” had a nice ring about it. Dawn now refers to this series as the Chronicles’ Chronicles. The second is called The Macaroon Chronicles.       

Some notes about the process

Just as with every CaféLit story each episode is given a short copy edit before it goes on to the site. I also did another copy edit / proof read as the book was put together. Once the camera-ready design was finished it was passed back to Dawn to check. Before it was released there was a final proof read by two of us in-house. It’s a slightly shorter process than with many of our books but this is in part because much of the work is done as we publish each episode.     

The cover

The cover was designed by Neill C. Woods who in fact designed the covers for all three books, at Dawn’s request. The style of the picture really picks up the style of the stories themselves.  

Some notes about style

These stories are quirky and fun. Dawn is getting quite a following for these stories.  She is a prolific writer and covers a variety of styles. I’m curious as to whether her readers follow her in all of her styles.

Who we think the reader is

These stories will appeal to readers with a certain sense of humour. Somewhere between The Vicar of Dibley and Blackadder.

What else

We are using Amazon KDP for this book. It makes distribution to other countries a lot easier. It seems the appropriate choice for this book.  

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 Amazon. If you would like to review and you are strapped for cash, just get in touch for a free PDF or Kindle file.         

 

 

 

Tuesday 4 April 2023

Royalties 2023

 

Emails have now been sent out to everybody who has earned this year, with the exception of those who had just a few stories on CafeLit and have not passed the £10.00 threshold.  Each story on CafeLit earned 59p.

I have had a lot of emails bounce back. Then sometimes my client told me a person didn’t exist but I have evidence that the email did go through. But if you think you should have had a royalty statement and you haven’t, please get in touch.

People have been generous in donating to the charities we’re supporting this year. I did say the cut-off date for donation was the 31 March but I’ll leave it open a few more days. I’ll let you all know the final figures in the next newsletter.

Some of you have said you can’t quite figure out the royalties and I think for some of you the figures in green don’t show up.  So, here is snapshot of mine and I’ll try and explain how they work:

Column A shows where the royalty came from, column B the date and column C the number.  Attfield bought one copy of the book (A61), 1.604938 pages were read in the UK(A62), one e-book was bought in Germany (A65) and 1 paperback in the US (A70)  Attfield bought the book form my stock. Had she bought it via the bookshop, £12 would have appeared in column (A 70) E61 would have shown the print cost, say £7.50 and then £2.50 is gross minus print cost in column J61. The profit share royalties appear in column K, the profit to the company in column L and what is stashed away into our royalty account in column N.

I also had a story in the Best of CafeLit 2010. The net amount was 1.20. Therefore to be shared between 46 authors was 60p: 0.01303478 per author. All of these amounts are transferred to column P and then added up.  Note, you are only seeing a few rows of this statement.

Also note that some spreadsheets use different columns but look at the header of each column.

It’s clear that the people who earn the most are those who submit often. These same people have learnt our house style and are building on their success. So, keep on submitting and don’t let the odd “decline” put you off.

A reminder: You may wish to pay part or all of your royalties to one of this year’s charities, which are:

Outward Bound

Whizz Kids

DEC – Ukraine

DEC – Earthquake

Please specify which charity or how you might like to divide the amount between one or more. Let me know.

Any royalties from Covid 19 or Aftermath you may wish to donate to MEDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRE.    

You can also just let your royalties roll over to next year. 

If you earned £10.00 or more in royalties we can make a payment via:  

1.      Bank transfer (Please let us know your bank details). We can make international payments and will need your IBAN number and the postal address of your bank. However, PayPal is more favourable for amounts under £20.00

2.      PayPal (Please let us know your PayPal email / ID)

Your details will be destroyed once we have scheduled the payment.  

You can also use your royalties to buy more books and you don’t need to pass the £10.00 threshold to do that. Please remember to claim them though; a few authors have opted for this but haven’t remembered to claim them when they’ve put in an order. This option is really good for you and for us; we sell more books, whose printing costs come from money we already have, and you build up even more royalties .

If you don’t let us know what you wish to do, we automatically roll over your royalties to next year.

Manchester City of Literature


 

Some exciting news: Bridge House and her imprints are now partnered with Manchester City of Literature.  You may have seen their logo appearing on our various sites. You can read all about them here. https://www.manchestercityofliterature.com/ We are listed as a partner: https://www.manchestercityofliterature.com/about/partners/ . We’re rubbing shoulders now with the great and good literary people of Manchester.

We have Christopher Bowles to thank for putting in a good word. Thank you, that man. Christopher has had work in many of our anthologies, and has his own flash fiction collection with Chapeltown, Spectrum.

It will also get us involved in networking event plus there is a whole directory of really interesting things going on that would be welcomed by all writers. Do have a good browse.