Submitting at last.

 All three novels of the series , 'Land of Broken Promises, completed
so - Time to submit the first novel - Maftur which in its final version spans 1933-1948, (although a reader who is a bit squeamish and wants a Happy Ending can choose not to read the last chapter but finish in 1944).
 I want an agent interested in the Middle East so  googled  'literary agents uk middle east'
Amidst all the non-fiction stuff  I found a fiction agent who had been brought up in Israel.  He only took submissions by snailmail  but  welcomed queries by email.
 The Agency had a doggy sort of name which sounded very British and there was an Abbey in the address line which sounded cosier still.
It was only after sending off the email that I looked at the snailmail address more closely and realised  it was actually New York - so much for google accuracy.
 I envisaged a log cabin office set in a wooded area of New York State close to the River Hudson near the Canadian Border, and sharing the autumnal glory of Vermont until I received an automated reply saying sorry the office was currently shut because of power failure due to Sandy,   and then felt embarrassed at the insensitivity of sending a query letter during a time of catastrophe.
The power cut finally over,  I received  a response.  The agent was pessimistic about American Publishers being interested in a tale of an Arab woman living in the British Mandate of Palestine in the thirties and forties of the last century, however, he himself would be interested in reading it, so would I send the manuscript by snailmail.
After a last final polish I lugged the manuscript up to our local post office and found it would cost £33.60 to send  by air mail (four days travel time) or £25 to send  by sea (56 days travel time, - would posties row it over?)
 I chose the airmail option but instead of sending return postage I emailed the agent asking him to recycle the manuscript when he had finished with it and so save airmiles.
I guess,  I won't be trying any more foreign agents unless they allow email submissions.

 I'll probably give myself a year of  submissions and then start rejigging to make the series suitable for Kindle.

One Job Accomplished now for the Big One

I am not a natural leader.  At every management course I've attended when we  fill in questionaires to discover our best team functions,everyone else has finished up with a self-defining function such as co-ordinator or shaper or implementer. I, on the other hand always  end up as a plant!
Whenever I've asked course leaders to define the function of  a plant  they've looked embarrassed.
One said a team would be in a pretty bad way if there were two plants on it but sometimes it might be useful to have just one, another said it wasn't altogether a bad thing to be a plant, another said just act normal and it would be all right, but no one ever defined the role.
Realising then my leadership skills are obviously a bit dodgy, I was somewhat apprehensive last year when elected as the annual president of our local Writers Club last year. I sat down and created a list of targets.I had wanted to accomplish for a long time

• Getting readers and writers to discuss at an open meeting what each expects from the other.
• Raising the profile of SF within the club. Most members claimed never to have read any!
• Having an open meeting with  a panel of authors, technicians and librarians to discuss where epublishing is now and how best to do it

and  hardest of all

• Getting a consensus on the revision of our 50+ year old constitution.

  My term of office is now over. To my amazement  every target was achieved. This had nothing to do with my non-existent leadership skills but  was due entirely to our multi-talented club members' unique blend of loudly assertive, argumentative co-operation and their ability to make last ditch compromises. Leicester Writers Club I am so grateful to you.

Now, having at last finished two years of copy editing I can concentrate on trying to market my trilogy Land of Broken Promises

Anyone know an agent interested in novels set in the British Mandate of Palestine between 1933 and 1948?

A Garden Poetry Workshop

 When Mark Goodwin spoke to Leicester Writers Club in March, one forty-something business man, completely sober, left the meeting so elated he danced in the street outside.  Other members were equally impressed although in a more subdued  manner and invited Mark to give us a workshop.  Location  proved a problem. Suitable rooms in Leicester are expensive, especially on a Saturday,  so we decided to hold it outside in a member's garden.  The weather should be warm enough at that time of the year, shouldn't it?

Mark settled on Gardens as the workshop theme. and sent members  this message

 I am hoping that it will be like May, so we can actually work out in the garden. However, it of course might rain! If it does, then we would largely work indoors, but it would be good, whatever the weather, if we actually go out into the garden, if only briefly. So, it'd be useful for  writers to bring waterproof jackets and sensible shoes, should the weather forecast threaten something thoroughly British! 

In the event the weather was Arctic rather than British. We had to switch on an electric fire in addition to having the central heating on full blast, and that was before we ventured into the garden.

Despite that the workshop was a great success, mainly due to Mark being a compassionate poet as well as a skillful tutor.  He dug out nuggets of gold from even the the most unpromising of matrices. I would recommend Mark as a resident writer to any school or institution and am looking forward to reading the conglomerate poem he recorded on his state-of-the art voice recorder. 

A Writing Retreat

Last weekend along with 15 other members of Leicester Writers Club,  I enjoyed a writing retreat  in a secluded 16th Century farmhouse in the Cotswolds.  This is the eighth year the retreat has taken place.
We enter the secret world of Middle Stanley by a farm track that tunnels through a causeway carrying the Gloucester/Warwickshire steam railway.  The track lined with ancient apple trees, usually in full blossom during our visits, continues uphill to the farmhouse and outbuildings that make up the small conference centre. The estate, cut off from the world  by the causeway at the front is also cut off at the rear by the curving slope of a wooded hill.   A large pond, home to moorhens, coots and geese, lies in a hollow between the farm buildings and the hill.
We workshop in a room with enormous floor to ceiling windows that has been created from a former pigsty. We collaborate in a farmhouse kitchen, complete with temperamental Aga,  to produce superior meals which we eat in a dining room equipped with an elliptical table large enough to seat all in comfort.

The strictly members-only work-shopping week-end has been an annual event for eight years, and each year all who attend have voted to keep it on.
With no external work shop leaders, the Middle Stanley retreat could easily have become introverted and, with places for only 16 out of an average membership of 40, divisive.  Due to diligent planning on the organisers’ part, however, it hasn’t turned out that way.

The workshops far from being introverted actually open a window onto national best practice. Although the club contains several professional writing class tutors they usually take a back seat at Middle Stanley,  leaving  the running of workshops to members who have recently attended reputable writing courses and conferences elsewhere. These leaders  replicate the workshops they themselves have found most valuable, thus disseminating expertise gained from the outside world amongst the rest of us.
An important benefit that accrues  from confining workshop leadership to club members is that no one feel bound to attend the workshops. Members with approaching dead lines or with young families are free to use the time for long periods of uninterrupted writing, while still being enjoying the advantages of literary conversation during meal times.
Our efficient organisers avoid elitism by advertising the booking date and starting time  in advance with the assurance to newcomers that it is open to all regardless of length of membership. The bookings are taken on a strictly, first come, first served basis.  Old stagers tend to hang back to make sure newcomers have the best chance of a place. Miraculously, so far, all people, who have had to start off on the waiting list, have found places when other people have had to drop out. The majority of club members have managed to attend at least one weekend so it strengthens club unity rather than proving divisive.  For those with commitments which mean they can never get away for a whole weekend, the club runs a workshop day later in the year on similar lines to Middle Stanley which also helps with inclusivity.
I found the workshops this year extremely useful. They more than made up for the weather and the disappointment of not being able to climb up the hill and sit meditating on a log near the peak.
I came away realising once again how lucky I am to have such a vibrant club within easy travelling distance from home.

PS Thank you to Liz Ringrose for allowing me to use her photos. I only found my camera when I unpackedback home!

Cold porridge

On Good Friday I thought I had completed the third draft of the fourth novel in the series 'Land of Broken Promises' and all I had left to do was the boring job of checking grammar, spelling and format word by word.

I intended to spend today (bank holiday Monday) sending off three chapters and the synopsis of the completed second novel to an agent. and was all set meanwhile to give my undivided attention to hostessing yesterday's family Easter Egg Hunt and lunch.

At 11 am yesterday, in a state of panic, I was replacing three eggs, and reprinting three muddied clues that I had hidden well from anyone searching the garden, but all too visible, apparently, to light fingered passers by. As I took the clues from the printer, it suddenly struck me that I needed an extra chapter in the first third of the fourth novel and would have to erase the pieces of back story I had carefully dropped into the second third of the novel. My instinct was to sit down and work on the rewriting immediately but of course one can't do that when one is a hostess, so here I am on the bank holiday faced with a task that has grown cold overnight and instead of buckling down to rewriting, I am finding all sorts of displacement activities such as washing up and writing neglected blogs. I won't even deserve my cold porridge at the end of the day.

Peeling the e-onion

As part of my presidential duties for Leicester Writers' Club, in conjunction with Creative Leicestershire, I am trying to organise a panel discussion on e-publishing, with the focus on mono-media ebooks that may or may not be published alongside their paper back counterparts. I would have preferred a discussion on multimedia productions for tablets but realised that is a subject too large for a single evening.

For this event I wanted an e-novelist, an epoet, an elibrarian and a British epublisher.

During the past fortnight I have wasted a great deal of time trying to find a British e-publisher, i.e. a firm that selects and edits mono-media books for free, publishes them online, markets them, takes the profits and pays the authors a small royalty.

I thought the task would be easy - I would just have to put the words British epublisher or perhaps UK epublisher into Google and up would pop a list. I would then be able to trawl through it, and send out an invitation to the firm I thought most idealistic, most successful and/or most local.

The first obstacle I came across was that the word epublisher often refers to a piece of software enabling authors to format their works; the second, authors who use that software to upload their books are often called epublishers .

After filtering out both software and software users I found lists of firms who claimed to epublish authors' work.

Most firms turned out to be ones offering commercial assistance to self-publishers, where authors pay for services like copy editing, formatting, marketing. Many of the firms also offered to produce a limited run of paper copies in conjunction with each eformat book.

Having paid the firm to produce the books and ebooks, the authors then takes all profits from sales, except where they sell their work through e-retail shops such as Amazon, ibooks or kobo, when they have to pay the retailers a percentage of the sale price.

Once I'd filtered out firms enabling self-publishing, I was left with lists of firms claiming to publish authors' works and to pay royalties.

A few of these firms turned out to be vanity publishing, basically firms retaining the copyright but asking authors to pay a contribution to publishing costs and offering small royalties on the sales. They tended to employ a good measure of flattery to make authors feel as if they were being published by a reputable firm who admired their work. Often these ' author contributions ' were higher than the charges made by genuine self-publishing firms.

I filtered the vanity publishers out to leave the firms that offered to publish for free and pay royalties. However I discovered that although I had included the word British in my Google search the lists did not consist of British epublishers. Most epublishers' websites gave no indication of the owners physical location. I only found out after contacting them, that the firms were based either in the States or in Canada. Admittedly this wouldn't make much difference to an author publishing an ebook but makes an awful lot of difference for someone wanting to bring a member of a publishing team to Welligton Street on March 22nd to take part in a panel discussion.

Having trawled through the lists without finding a single reputable British firm I feel as if I have finished peeling an onion and have found nothing at the centre.

Have I overlooked an obvious text-only only British epublisher because all along I wanted to be looking for a multi-media proponent or are there no real British epublishers in existence?