Where have we been?

The summer months swamped us for a while. Between staff vacations, printing two books, and securing distribution, we have neglected our website. Now, with our head above water, we'll try to regain our focus here and provide an overview of what has been going on.

Printing is complete for Angels Fall and Anatomy Lesson. The books are actually in the warehouse! We used Malloy Inc. (www.malloy.com) as our printer. We drove our typesetter, cover designer, and Malloy rep crazy, but we are really happy with the result. Lots of lessons learned about not rushing and about getting each step exactly right before proceeding. At least we only had one round of changes in the proofs. You'll see the finished covers on the website soon.

Our third book, Borrowed Lives, was put on hold so we could finish the first two. Just too much to do at once. It is going to be released with our fourth book, In The Face (our contest winner).

We signed a distribution contract with IPG in early September. Although we looked at several options, the PMA distribution program with IPG seemed to be our best bet. Unfortunately, our release dates are now tied to those of IPG. In short, they need about eight months lead time. So, our first two books will be released in April, 2008. They're gonna sit in that warehouse for nearly nine months. Our second two books will be release later in 2008. There is still some possibility that we'll be able to add a third book to the second pair. In any case, we'll have another group of books for early 2009.

Website Domain Move

That was exciting. It took us nearly 72 hours to accomplish what was to be a ten-minute change to our web site. We still don't know what went wrong, but the engineers at the ISP had to get involved twice to unravel it. We apologize for having the website down for so long, but it was out of our hands. As we grow, backup and redundant systems will have to come into consideration.

Meanwhile, we are working with the manuscripts of our contest finalists to hone their work into publishable form. We've been considering a second writing contest in the fall. We think this one would be less restrictive about the geographic connection. If you'd like to see such a contest, please email us or post a comment here. Thanks.

Writing Contest Finalist Profiles

Our writing contest finalists now have brief profiles on our web page. We hope you'll give them a look (see Author Profiles). They have three very different tales. We hope to make a few pages available on our website so you can see a sample of what they wrote. The announcement of our winner is expected on Friday, June 8th.

Writing Contest Thoughts

With the announcement of our writing contest finalists, it’s time to reflect on the contest itself. The website was our most difficult challenge with the contest. Without some patience on the part of the submitting authors, we’d still be wresting with problems. We certainly appreciate your assistance in working out the kinks. Next year, we’ll probably expand the geographic ‘limits.’ We had lots of complaints from those who didn’t meet our geography criterion.

About the submissions: An estimated seventy percent of the submissions read our submission guidelines and followed them. The other thirty percent went their own way, to one degree or another. There’s nothing that discourages a manuscript evaluation reader more than getting a manuscript in some fancy font, single spaced in a PDF file. We can’t even reformat it so it is readable. Margins and double spacing seemed foreign to these authors. You also must spell-check your manuscript. One submitter even asked that we forgive the numerous spelling errors in the submitted manuscript! If the author doesn’t take the effort to fix his/her own spelling, punctuation, and grammar then we likely won’t take the effort to read the manuscript.

We also received several short stories, a smattering of non-fiction and off-genre submissions. It’s not clear why these authors pay the ten dollar submission fee when they know they’ll be rejected.

There were also two non-finalist submissions that were routed to our regular submission readers for publishing consideration.

Writing Contest Finalists

We'll be announcing the three finalists on the web page this weekend. The details for announding the winning manuscript will be forthcoming shortly thereafter.

Writing Contest Status and Fallout

We've identified two candidate manuscripts as finalist in our contests. There are about a dozen that have not yet been reviewed. It would be really nice if we had a staff of twenty to read all the manuscripts, but we don't. We're getting through them as fast as possible. Should be complete in ten days and off to the judges for selection.

We've also been getting some negative email and web posts for no apparent reason (at least that we know of). Fifty rejections are bound to annoy a few authors. On the other hand, we are inching along, slower than we anticipated, but still moving forward. We hope to be able to post the covers for the first two books, maybe even a third, in a few weeks. Copy editing, cover development, and life in general seems to thwart our best efforts to hurry up.

Writing Contest Comments

Some of you who have submitted to the novel writing contest might be intersted in how it is going. So far, we have about twenty manuscripts that seem to be worth a full read. In our estimation, that's a lot out of 100 or so that were submitted. We're a little swamped with all of the reading so our planned website update is on hold for the moment until we catch up. Thanks for your patience.