Initial Comments on the Bridge House Short Story Competition

The first round of judging has been completed and we’ll soon be issuing a shortlist. We’ll also then consider whether we have enough suitable material to release another anthology and then whether that anthology will be hard copy, electronic or both.
The brief was rather tricky this time: participants had to write a story that happened at the same time as a world-stopping event.
The judges put the stories into three piles, thinking not just of the winners but also about stories that would be good enough to go into an anthology. There were the yeses, the maybes and the nos. We also put the stories into rank order within each category. Now we have to line them up and establish our winners. Then we have to see whether we have enough stories that are good enough.
Some of the nos became nos because of problems we meet with all sorts of submissions:
- The story wasn’t story enough.
- The characters didn’t work.
- Point of view shifted too often.
- There was too much telling and not enough showing.
-There was a good story but the writing itself might need too much editing.
There were also some very specific problems relating to the content this time:
- The event wasn’t really world-stopping.
- The story was about the event rather than having the event as a background.
-And the really tricky one – you could take the event out and the story would still work, so why have it there at all? In other words, we’d be rejecting some very good stories simply because they don’t match the brief.

Another consideration will be, if we go ahead with the anthology, that we don’t have too many stories about the same event. The book mustn’t be all 9/11, 7/7 or the day that John Kennedy was shot. I have been pleasantly surprised in the sample I’ve read that that has not been the case.
More news soon. Watch this space, follow me and Bridge House on Twitter, keep an eyes on our web site and if you entered, keep checking your email.

Meeting a New Author

When I was an unpublished writer I used to dream of being invited to meet my editor or agent. I’d be wined and dined and perhaps be invited to eat spaghetti as a character test. I am now published and have worked for a dozen or so publishers and have only met two editors. In retrospect, I’m rather glad I didn’t meet the others. For the most part, I’ve worked with them on-line, in many cases even receiving my contract electronically. Certainly less embarrassing than eating spaghetti.
So, we at Bridge House recognised that we were doing very well when we met our novel competition winner at the Blue Sky café in Bangor North Wales. There is a sort of symmetry here: one partner lives there and had a convenient birthday, the novel is set in a possible future North Wales … and the café belongs to a relation of mine. Plenty of good excuses for a meet.
We didn’t make our new author eat spaghetti. We did shout her a modest lunch, though. And we did discuss a lot of marketing / publicity ideas: national and local press releases, use of social networking, review copies and literary festivals.
We, like all publishers, only have a small marketing budget. A tiny budget. Even with a competition prize. Of course, there is a lot we can do for free – e.g. all the social networking. But it takes time and effort and there’s even only so much of that available per book.
We’re lucky in having a proactive author this time. Even the big presses love proactive authors. From that whole list of marketing ideas we wouldn’t expect any one author to do every single thing. We would ask, though, that they do what they feel comfortable with and do it to extreme.

Professional Formatting

Professional Formatting
There is a standard, acceptable way of formatting work. Advice is given about this in the Writers’ and Artists’ yearbooks. It is relatively easy to get right. At Bridge House and The Red Telephone we spell it out.
Not that we ever reject people because they format incorrectly. However, it is noteworthy that many of our “maybe” texts are poorly formatted and at this point those that are correctly formatted tend to be put ahead of those that are not. It is certainly the case that the writer who has not followed the industry standard will also be less experienced in their writing and less able to handle and react positively to editorial comment.
It can be tedious, getting this right, but a professional will take the time to do so. Occasionally we may need to use something slightly different if layout and general appearance are important. However, even in the latter case it’s a good idea to submit a conventionally formatted text alongside the visual version.
Here is what I suggest:
Formatting Fiction
It is normal practice, when submitting fiction for publication, to double space work. It is also normal to start the first paragraph “full out” i.e. right up to the margin. Notice also that we generally use “ragged right”. Rumour has it that this is to enable hard-pressed London-based editors to keep their place when they read in bed or on the Tube.
         Second and subsequent paragraphs are indented. Note that you do not double double-space. This and what is described above are not Word defaults but can easily be set up in Word. Use the Paragraph function.
Note also that publishers prefer standard fonts. The two most widely accepted are Times New Roman 12 and Arial 10.
      It is also helpful to include your title and your name on each page. It is also useful to include a page number and an indication of the number of pages. Again, this is very easy to set up, using the Header and Footer functions in Word – found under View in older versions and under Insert in the 2010 version.
     Come on folks, get it right. It’s easy if you try.

Take Care about Who You’re Calling Careless

As a publisher who is also a writer and a creative writing teacher, I do often find myself reading a book published by a big, respected house and thinking to myself What the heck was the editor thinking? I also review books and recently refused to write a review as I had been given an uncorrected proof and in my mind this book was not ready to go: an important plot point had been edited out and the writer had talked of “coals” from a wood fire! What was the editor thinking?
Yet as a writer I think “Woah!” when I read a reviewer of my own work mention in an otherwise friendly review that one more edit would have benefited the work. The clever reviewer had found a couple of avoidable mistakes. Now, that particular work had had eighteen edits by myself, two general edits by readers and two copy-edits. Something similar has been done to its sequel and now as I put the finishing touches to a final (?) edit after the feed-back from the second copy-editor, I find a few more mistakes that no-one had noticed. In fact the first copy-editor prides herself on finding, on average, fifteen typos and at least a couple of punctuation mistakes in every published book she reads. And that’s without trying. If she actually did another copy-edit…
I’ve recently looked at a piece of academic work. A colleague second-marked it and said that the writer should have edited it once more. Though I agreed with my colleague about the types of style weaknesses, the poor expression in places and the common typos and punctuation problems, I disagreed that we can make any judgement about how conscientious or not a student has been. Only they can know that.
The types of mistakes that occur despite the extreme care of everyone involved are a nuisance. Some may make your eyebrows rise. But never, ever do we have the right to judge about the efficiency of or the intention behind another’s editing process. Possibly where mistakes still exist it’s a matter of editing smarter, not more.

Launch of Calling for Angels at Caffe Yum, Hertford

This was a truly fantastic occasion. I think I counted 45 guests in total. 50 were invited. Not bad. Every party that came bought a copy of the book. We had just one left at the end of the evening.
The author, Alex Smith, signed copies of the book and read a passage from it. I made a little speech about how good it was, how it had stood out a mile in the competition, and about how page 143 always gets me, even though I’ve read the book four times. But if you buy the book, don’t go there yet. It may spoil the plot for you.
Alex is just 17 but actually wrote the book when she was 14 – which may explain why she got the 14-year-old voice so right. On the back of this, she is now a reviewer for the Guardian.
It’s amazing that our publicist / second editor, a young man and our designer, second editor, an older man, also really enjoyed the story. Even though Calling for Angels is definitely a girlie book. So, it’s impressive that she impressed them.
Caffe Yum was an excellent venue. It has everything you’d expect in a café – the full range offered at the giant high street coffee shops and juice bars – and some. And so much fresher and more individual. All guests were treated by Alex’s parents to a smoothie and a pink or chocolate angel cake. They were decorated with tiny rice paper angels.
Book available from The Red Telephone.
Caffe Yum

Exciting book launch coming up

I’m really looking forward to Friday. That is when Alex Smith launches her first novel, Calling For Angels. Roll over Daniel Radcliffe and co. Alex Smith is much more important. She is the winner of The Red Telephone’s novel competition and is just 17. She was 16 when she entered and completed the first draft when she was 14. No wonder she has the voice of the 14-year-old protagonist so beautifully presented.
When I read The Red Telephone’s competition entries, I had no idea I was looking at the work of such a young writer. Alex’s novel stood out as a clear winner. We had three other very good novels and it was difficult to decide amongst those which should be second and third. In the end, we went for second, third and highly commended.
I’ve now read Calling For Angels four times. Every time page 143 brings a lump to my throat. No way am I telling you what happens on that page though. I’m rather hoping you will buy the book. It is available from The Red Telephone’s web site and all good bookshops.
Calling for Angels is a romance but it’s not chicklet-lit. It’s a jolly good read for any young girl. And another editor at The Red Telephone, a youngish male, and the quite middle-aged male designer have also made remarks along the lines of “blooming good” and “better than the stuff by most of the experienced writers we publish”.
The launch is at 7.00 p.m. on Friday 19th November from Hertford’s Café Yum. I’ll be there. So will Alex. And so will multiple copies of Calling for Angels and order forms in case we run out of books. If you’d like to join us, contact me and I’ll get you an invite.

A Dreary Book Fair

The Book Fair at Crosby’s Civic Hall yesterday was actually much as I’d feared it might be: not enough footfall through the building, no need for the ridiculously early start and not a book sold. Having got there just after 8.30 we were not able to set-up until 10.300 for an 11.00 o’clock start. As normal, it only took ten minutes to set up. Ironically, we were long gone by the time the most promising crowd arrived. There was a children’s show on at 4.00, our finishing time. The audience would have been more likely to buy books on the way out that on the way in when there was too much anxiety about getting their seats.
I used to do craft fairs a lot and had similar experiences there.
There were some other irritations as well. We gave away a lot of free information, yet those people who were prepared to stop and chat for ages were not willing to buy a book and support an industry they claimed they wanted to be part of. Several people asked us how much we charged out authors for publishing their books. We are not vanity press. We do not help people to self-publish.
However, I still found it enjoyable. It’s possible that a book fair for independent publisher isn’t just about selling books. There was the opportunity to network with other publishers, put a few names to faces and actually make a few more connections with the general public. We pointed several people to our web site. Who knows what that might lead to. And we gained a fair number of new ideas from our competitors.
It also had one great advantage over the craft fairs I used to do: we didn’t have to pay a penny for having a stall there.