Update from Allison

Just a short post to say I've recently completed Edit 1 on a flash fiction collection.

I thoroughly enjoyed the process. It is a question of looking at the stories individually and then how they work as a whole, of course.

As a reader, I love spotting themes in books anyway. There is also the added enjoyment, for me anyway, when each story builds on that theme and runs it with it until the end. It has a powerful impact and that is always a good thing.

Am looking forward to the next stage in due course.

Writing is re-writing, as they say.  Pixabay image.

Enjoyable Editing Enticing

How much am I enjoying editing? Now I’m really stuck in I am enjoying it immensely. The digestion of words weaving different perspectives and narratives entice me into thoughts of writing. After a long slog before my new editing role my works in progress (WIPs) are finally seeing the light of day. My dining table is unusually clear as writing takes up less space than crafting. Painting, editing audio interviews in a voluntary living history project I’m working on, and writing new stories have surfaced from beneath a sea of lists.

Having just returned from a relaxing (yes, relaxing) holiday I was somewhat flabbergasted to find my table still clear. As if the lists might have multiplied by themselves when I wasn’t looking. Normally my holidays combine volunteering but not this one! The highlight was a cruise from the Isle of Mull where the houses are made of ticky, tacky?

Anyway, I will prioritise editing this week between my normal routine of ups and downs in levels of wellbeing. Just 🤔 of the lovely Scottish landscape then returning to gorgeous Dartmoor makes me feel forever alive and grateful.

Transforming Being

This is the second e-book we have produced for the Waterloo Festival. 

"Transforming Being" is the theme of the 2019 Waterloo Festival Writing Competition. It is also the title of the e-book, which contains the fifteen winning entries. We chose these because they tell a good story, have a strong voice, and are imaginative in their interpretation of the theme. The writers present us with characters that are believable and rounded. The stories all contain a pleasing narrative balance.

Entrants were asked to produce a short story or a monologue. Style is diverse and each story is completely different from the others.  

We had  a few hundred entries to choose from and it was difficult. We awarded points for how well the stories adhered to the theme, how dynamic the story was and how strong the writing was.  The theme was interpreted in many different ways. Just focussing on these three criteria didn't create enough clear winners so we carried on and looked further at narrative balance, characterization and presentation.     

This is the second year of the competition and the second year of producing an e-book. Next year there will be a third e-book and the winning entries form all three years will be published as a paperback as well.     

See more here.   

On Having My Mind Boggled...

I went on the Bridge House Publishing editing course back in May and it was an eye-opening experience.

Bridge House carry out not one or two but three edits of work. Naturally this takes time. The course showed what each edit did. By the time all three edits are carried out, writer and publisher know they have a polished piece of work to be proud of but this was also enlightening from a writing viewpoint.

What all good writing has!  Pixabay image

The more you can do on your own work before submission, the greater your chances of having your work accepted. Seeing the different editing stages really brought that home. It was also awe inspiring to see the work behind each edit and understand why every stage is crucial.

As a flash fiction writer (From Light to Dark and Back Again, Chapeltown Books), I’ve learned to develop editing skills given I’m writing in a form where every word must punch its weight if it is to stay in the tale. But seeing how much good editing matters to a publisher was enlightening. It really can turn a promising story into a great one.

Good writing is re-writing. There is no such thing as the perfect first draft. Pixabay image

It was also mind boggling to discover the different ways stories are formatted, even though Bridge House do set out clear guidelines.

It was clear how much time can be saved from the editor’s viewpoint if the preferred formatting is followed. It is very much in our own interests as writers to follow these things then! So regardless of anything else, I took home a great deal to apply to my writing, particularly the thought what can I do to save my publisher and editor time?

We could all do with more time to write, to edit, to submit work etc. Pixabay image.

Now I’m going to be on the other side of the fence as well and looking forward to this immensely. I am glad to say I am one of Bridge House’s new editors and I look forward to working with them and with the author whose work I will be editing soon.

I learned not to be afraid of editing when I finally grasped the point that this was going to make the difference to whether I would be published or not. What writer does not want to get their work to as a good a standard as possible?

A good publisher will want to bring their writers’ work up to the best it can be.

A good editor then is the publisher’s and the writer’s best friend.

A good writer will recognise what an editor and publisher can do in helping to hone work to as high a standard a possible.

There is a challenge to us all there, I think!

A Few Words from a New Editor

I am delighted to be welcomed by Gill James as an editor for Chapeltown Books and Bridge House Publishing. After enjoying a course with Gill I have begun on my first edit for an author and look forward to working with them.

http://bridgehousepublishing.co.uk/ http://www.chapeltownpublishing.uk/ http://cafelit.co.uk/ http://trtpublishing.co.uk 
http://www.creativecafeproject.org/

In another role I am volunteer editor for Reverberations, the national handbell magazine, and I am just finishing the Autumn/Winter 2019 edition. Then I will be enjoying a holiday in Scotland as my best friend and I celebrate our 40th birthday year; a dream we are fulfilling since our school days!

So, with my work plan in my diary and future editing, writing, art, crafting and music in my life, let’s do this!

Dianne Stadham’s Links

Click on image to view at Amazon

It has been a great privilege to work with Dianne on this book. Dianne already has stories in several of our anthologies. She has established a distinctive quirky style.

Links is in three parts:

• Lucky Links, describing a chain of events starting with a crocodile
• Dramatic Links, centring on village amateur dramatics and having a macabre twist
• Literary Links, containing as Dianne herself says, ‘a mixture of biography with recipes for life, love and laughter’.

There are a lot of illustrations in this volume and also several examples of other sorts of text. It’s quite a challenge avoiding copyright issues and producing text that will format well in both the printed book and in Kindle but we managed it and have also got the book out for a reasonable price. Like many of our collections it retails at £9.00 for the paperback and £2.35 for the Kindle editions.   

Dianne adores black humour and challenges conventional genres and perspectives. Worth a look?           

Post-production

 If you’re following our workflow (https://apublishersperspective.blogspot.com/p/work-flow_18.html) you will notice that we put our book though a “post-production” routine. This includes the following activities:

Registering with Nielsen's  

To understand Nielesn’s look at our previous post. We do this for Bridge House and The Red Telephone. For Chapeltown books our distributer does this. We can tailor the information a little if we put the book there ourselves but of course this takes more time. However, I’ve noticed that one Bridge House book recently appeared on Amazon before we’d completed the registration.  

Informing the author

It may seem obvious but we actually have to remember to do this. Even though we know the book is available we don’t inform the author until we’ve completed the above registration. It can take up to fifteen days for the title to appear on a retailer web sites. Amazon UK is over-cautious. It will often claim the book is difficult to source. No it isn’t; it has a print run from our printer every few days and will claim a long delivery time that it actually usually beats by a lot – again, because there is a print run every few days.

We supply authors with three sizes of cover images that they can use for their own promotional activities and a mobi-file (for Kindle) . They may use the mobi-file to obtain reviews but we ask that once 50 reviews on Amazon and Good Reads are achieved that they give out no more free copies.         

Sending books to the British Library and the Legal Deposit Libraries

The British Library and the other five Legal Deposit libraries each require a copy of the book. That makes six books that we have to give away. We also have to send the British Library one under separate cover. We’re hoping soon to go over to supplying a digital version only. It seems a good idea that copies of all books are kept. However, they are difficult to access as there are so many.  

Updating the publisher web site

We list the books twice on the web site: on the latest news page and in the book catalogue.     

Going through the Publication List

This is a list that every author should also go through. Certain aspects of it are also useful for the publisher. I’ll talk about that in more detail next time.                            

Including news of the book in newsletters

We’ll put news of the book into the appropriate monthly newsletters.

 

Including the book on mailing lists 

We put news about the book on to the appropriate mailing list. This will include our Scribblers’ Books, Books, Books list, published every Friday with offers on it. We feature new books on this as they come out, usually combining it with an offer on similar titles.      

Dream Team 

The books will be offered to my Dream Team reviewers. This may help us on our way to getting those all-important 50 reviews. Would you be interested in joining my Dream Team?   

What happens?

You sign up to a mailing list and every time a request comes in we mail it out to you or the enquirer contacts you directly via my web site. The conversation then carries on between you and the person making the request. You may also have a page set up on my blog and you may update that once a year. 

Interested? You may sign up for more than one category. 

Beta readers sign up here.

Reviewers sign up here.

Editors sign up here.

Illustrators sign up here.

Designers sign up here.

Proof-readers sing up here.   

DO REMEMBER THAT AT ANY TIME YOU’RE APPROACHED AND YOU’RE BUSY IT’S PERFECTLY FINE TO SAY NO.

So, that’s post-production for you.