Doll Face by Dianne Stadhams

 

How we came to publish this one

Author Dianne Stadhams is a regular contributor to our annual anthologies and we encourage people we have published to submit more of their work to us. We were delighted to find that Doll Face fits in really well with what our visions for The Red Telephone.     

 

The title

The reason for this title soon becomes evident as the reader gets into the story.

 

Some notes about the process

We went through the normal three stages of editing with this, followed by three proof-reads. Dianne was on our Red Telephone mentorship scheme and we worked on this book with her before it went through the normal editorial process. However, this meant that there was slightly less to do when we came to editing.   

 

The cover

Dianne designed the cover herself though we had to make a few technical tweaks.  

Some notes about style

The style is spot on for the older young adult. It’s not always an easy read, There are several different voices in the story but that of the protagonist and her doll shine out clearly.  

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Who we think the reader is

This is suitable for the adults and older young adults. Fourteen-year-old Tilly Henderson-Smythe is articulate with attitude, and was born with Mosaic Down's Syndrome. But she's not sleeping. Her parents and school are worried. She is sent for PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) assessment after being taken hostage on holiday by a local group disgruntled over land rights and tourism development. With a secret passion for dodgy websites, and an appetite for just retribution, Tilly's view of complex issues goes viral.

What else

This book will make you think. It is a demanding read.  

Review copies

It’s always great if you can buy the book, or download it if you have a plan, and give us a review. Just click here to be taken to our online bookshop. If you would like to review and you are strapped for cash, just get in touch for a free review copy.       

 

 

 

See in our online bookshop

The Fortune Teller of Philippi

 

How we came to publish this one

This is one of our Red Telephone books. Author Jenny Robertson is already in our author network. We have published her before and she has been in our community of writers for quite a while.   

 

The title

This so aptly identifies the story. This is a total no-brainer.  

 

Some notes about the process

We went through the normal three stages of editing with this, followed by three proof-reads. This was a very smooth process; Jenny is a total professional.

 

The cover

It took a little while to find the right concept. It may have been reasonably easy to get one designed with the figure of a young girl on it as the protagonist is female. However, we shy away from having representations of characters in our fiction. We are a little unusual in this. We prefer that the reader decides what people look like. We do have “every person” figures on some of our books.    

 

Some notes about style

The style is spot on for the young adult / teen reader. It is quite pragmatic and uses plain English.  

Who we think the reader is

This is suitable for the younger end of YA. There is romance but no overt sexual scenes. There is a strong Christian message here. This includes miracles and some supernatural evil both of which raise the stakes a little.

 

What else

Jenny is well established in her world and has been quite influential with the marketing.  

 

Review copies

It’s always great if you can buy the book, or download it if you have a plan, and give us a review. Just click here to be taken to our online bookshop. If you would like to review and you are strapped for cash, just get in touch for a free review copy.      

  

Some Thoughts on the Legal Deposit Libraries

It is a legal requirement that we deposit one copy of every book we publish with the British Library. The other five Legal Deposit Libraries may then request copies.  This is usually done by the agent for the Legal Deposit Libraries who requests them on behalf of all five libraries. We deposit the one to the British Library as matter of course, within a few days of the book’s release. We wait for the request from the Legal Deposit libraries as they are always at least six months behind in their processing and if we deposit before they ask they have a tendency to lose books.

At the beginning of the pandemic it as impossible to deliver to the British Library and we had several books returned. So we put our practice on hold. They have now requested the books we didn’t send; we have now sent them and so we are up to date. This week I received a receipt for a book we deposited eight months ago.

A visit to one of the Legal Deposit Libraries will shock you. You will see stock-piled books.  Will anyone actually ever access those copies?

We’re in queue for being allowed to submit electronically.  This will save us money and will save the planet paper and transport costs.

However, there is one thing to consider. Maybe it’s important to still have hard copies even if they are stock-piled in a way that makes it difficult to access them. At least you can always read a hard copy. If we have digital copies only we may run out of the technology to read them. Remember what happened with the BBC Doomsday Project. In one of my own works a far future civilisation cannot access a recording on audio cassette.     

And here's  funny thing,  The British Library chased  a book we had already deposited. I sent them proof, they replied that they were behind with their cataloguing. Why chases if it's their own fault?     

Covid 19: An extraordinary time

How we came to publish this one

We are most certainly living through an extraordinary time. It’s important that we writers document this some way or other. So, we invited writers we knew and their trusted friends to contribute writing to this volume. Any type of script was welcome; articles, essays, musings, poems scripts, short stories or flash fiction. There was no limit except of time. Texts could be as long or as short as they needed to be. People  could submit as many pieces as they liked. Everything had to be submitted by a certain date and everything would be accepted. We would make more than one volume if need be. It just all happened to fit into one reasonably sized volume.     

The title

We asked contributors to suggest titles and then all the suggested titles were presented to all of the contributors in a survey that also asked about whether we should produce a hardback or paperback, what the cover should be like and whether we should donate revenue to a charity and if so which one? “You’re always saying that this is an extraordinary time,” suggested one contributor “so one title might be Covid 19: an extraordinary time’.” That was the one that stuck.     

Some notes about the process

All of the contributions were gathered in and ordered chronologically into the book. It was then given the lightest of copy-edits by one of our experienced editors. It is supposed to be snapshot in time.         

The cover

Both yellow and red were suggested for the cover. Red for danger, yellow for poison. There was a lot of call for the popular image of the virus to be on there. So that is what we did. We have a red cover with a yellow image of the virus on it. We reversed this for sister publication Aftermath.  

Some notes about style

We have a mixture of short poems, short stories, glimpses of life, diary entries, swatches of script. All represent a response to the virus.   

Who we think the reader is

Maybe the readers are the children and grandchildren of the writer and indeed anyone else who has lived through this strange time. That was partly the rationale in going for a hardback. We wanted something that would endure. Hopefully it will be of interest for future generations.     

What else

Contributes can opt to have their profit share of net sales revenue donated to Médecins sans Frontières. We will organise that, otherwise they can take the normal profit share and either keep it for themselves or donate to another charity of their  choice.  

Review copies

It’s always great if you can buy the book, or download it if you have a plan, and give us a review. Just click here to be taken to our online bookshop. If you would like to review and you are strapped for cash, just get in touch for a free review copy.        

Putting Together a Book

 

So, your text has gone through three or so edits, the last one being almost like a proof-read and we move on to the next stage.

 

This is the design of the inside of the book. We have to get that right before we can finalise the cover; the number of pages in the book determines the size of the spine.

 

So we take the raw Word document and convert it into what you will see in the book.  Hopefully this Word document is double-spaced with indented paragraphs and no extra line between paragraphs. We turn it into single-spaced document, the pages of which are the same size they would be the eventual paperback book.     

 

We apply a set of styles. There is one for the chapter heading. Another is used for the subheading – the same one is used for the by-line in a collection of short stories by multiple authors. A third is used for the opening paragraph of each section – the paragraph isn’t indented here. Then there is the normal one for the rest. In addition, we have a style for emails and another for letters. Note also that we use slightly different sets of styles for our various imprints.

 

Some problems arise if the writer has formatted their text “manually” i.e. typed in spaces or used the tab key rather than the paragraph tool. This creates odd code and we can never be sure whether the code is what the writer wanted or if they want their text to look the way it appeared when they sent it.

 

It’s worth remembering as well that we block text for both e-books and print books.  This is convention. The text used to run to the edge of the page to stop ink pooling  at the side of pages. We don’t really need to worry about that anymore. Ragged right is useful for all sorts of reader – young readers, publishers and academics. So it would certainly be useful to the ordinary reader. However, we stick to convention.

 

In order to block text, the programme spreads the word out along the line. Unfortunately this emphasises any extra gap the author has left in. So, a good strategy is to remove all of those extra gaps before the book gets to this stage. We have software that does this but it saves quite a bit of time if the author already presents a pristine text. Incidentally there should not be a double gap between sentences. That was to do with the way typewriters worked; that practice actually feel out of favour in the late 1950s but many writers persist.   

 

It’s good for the writer to see their text in this form. It looks substantially different form the double spaced A4 sheet. This change in appearance can encourage a closer reading.

 

We present this first stage of design to the author who rereads it and can rectify any misunderstanding about the layout plus find some odd typos no one has spotted yet.   This sometimes leads to several conversations between the author, editor and designer.  We then take all of the changes on board and hand it to another proof reader. This is usually not the first editor although if the text has a distinctive style we may hand the work back to the first editor. And more conversations follow.

 

The cleaner a text is, the less time we have to spend on it, which means in turn that  the book will recover its set-up costs more quickly  - and we’ll have the time and money to publish more books.