And we're off!

We delayed the start of our trip as long as we could, in the hopes of getting the office sorted before we left home. Unfortunately that wasn't possible, so it will have to wait until we get back. That's not ideal, but it is good to be off on our adventures.

Our first couple of stops were to gardens. I took a great many photos, which I've hardly even looked at yet, so the pictures will be trailing behind us. (If you'd like to see even more pictures from our trip, have a look at the blog on my website.)

Free entry writing competitions

Here's a monthly short story competition. The prize is $100 plus 50% of the subscription revenue from your story. Reprints are accepted – provided of course that you've not given up the rights.

A reminder about the Creative Futures competition. The theme is 'material', the competition is for under represented authors, entries of fiction, poetry and creative non fiction accepted. The prize is publication and '£25,000 worth of cash and professional development prizes'.

Womag news

Thanks to Suzan Lindsay for the details of the People's Friend poetry competition. They want - "a poem on the theme of 'reconciliation'. The poem has to have three verses of four lines. The competition closes at noon on 9th May. Email your poem with your name and address to pfeditor@dcthomson.co.uk with 'Poetry Competition' in the subject line. First prize is £150 with three runner-up prizes of £50 plus publication in the magazine."

If you've had a big batch of rejections from TAB, don't panic! Lots of people have (mine are in double figures and some go back to stories I submitted EIGHT years ago!). 

From Vivienne Moles

How do you find what publications you might have been in when they have the rights to place them elsewhere? (Something it's useful to know for various reasons, including claiming ALCS.)

I trawled through a few month's worth of Woman's Weeklys, just to see if any of my BOWW had appeared, as happened with Alyson this month. (I did it the long way 😩 and went through individual ones looking at the 'text preview). Then I had an idea: Haha! If you type your name in Pressreader (My library no longer subscribes, so this is as a non-user), preferably in inverted commas because it narrows the field, snippets of your work pop up and you can see where they've come from, and dates. 🙂

I suspect that might be useful for the Woman's Weekly family? Like Australia, NZ, Woman etc...,? You'd have to have someone with more of a repertoire than me to check that out. I work pretty much exclusively on a laptop and think this might not be so easy with an app (Hate apps! 😠 ) on a tablet. It will NOT find publications that are not in Pressreader. I found a variety of bits, including shortlisted from WM, a letter in the TV times from 2019, Best win and letters to WM.

Vivienne adds that at one time Yours didn't attribute stories, so although some show up, they don't all.

Thanks for this, Vivienne. My library also stopped subscribing to Pressreader and I hadn't realised it was still possible to still search for works, so this is potentially very useful.

The saga continues

The progress of our office installation has been so complicated, changeable and stressful that I daren't give you all the details in case I get a reputation for writing totally incomprehensible and unbelievable bleak nonsense. Let's just say I recommend using Sharps - but only if you want inspiration for unfathomable horror stories.

I'm hoping these flowers will stop me feeling blue about it all!

Womag news

Alyson tells me that Tracey at The People's Friend is looking for more pocket novels. The latest requirements I can find are here – I believe they're up to date.

Free entry writing competitions

On the Premises have a short story competition with the theme of 'Less' which can be interpreted in lots of ways. Maximum word count 3,000. Prizes from $250 for first place.

Thanks to Fiona for this flash fiction competition from Gooseberry Pie. There's $1,100 in prize money and they only want 400 words, so it already felt worth a try. After yet another snag with our office fitting reading the prompt was a bad day getting worse, it felt like a sign! I hope the bit about it all ending up better than expected comes true. 

A note about rights

You probably know that when a magazine buys a story, they don't generally just buy the right to print it once, even when they don't take all rights. Generally they'll require the right to reuse it, often in different formats. For example, they might decide to use it online, in an ebook, or in another magazine owned by the same company. 

It's because of this, that a story which I never submitted to Yours magazine is in the current issue. I wouldn't have known about that, without the combined efforts of Sharon Boothroyd and Sharon Haston. Thank you ladies – now that I know I can claim ALCS.

Btw, one of the flower photos in this post is a reprint from a previous post. Points to anyone who deduces which one!

Not going to plan

The photo is of our lovely new office which was fitted by Sharps in March – except obviously it wasn't. We've had several cancellations and a lot of stress. The problem was that they couldn't get the bubble wrapped pieces you can see, until two days ago. Unfortunately, they don't fit with our order, so the saga continues...

I'm still working on the next book in my crime series, and mostly resisting the urge to change it from cosy to grisly with a massive body count!

Free to enter writing competitions

Thanks to Vivienne for sending me the link to this competition from Toasted Cheese. The theme is festivals. You can submit fiction (as long as it's not in any genre) or creative non fiction. There are Amazon vouchers on offer for 1st, 2nd and 3rd placed entries.

Here's a competition to pitch a children's book. As well as the free competition, there's also the option to pay quite a lot of money to have your work assessed. It might, possibly, be worth it if you're certain you want a career from writing children's books and this is your publisher of choice.

Other publication opportunities

If you have a 'swoonworthy' romance novella of 10,000 to 40,000 words, you might like to consider submitting it to Spotify Audiobooks. Thanks to Liz for telling us about this one.

They only want audio rights, so you can still submit if the book has been published in other formats (as long as you hold the rights), or you'd like to do that yourself. I'm thinking of giving this a try.

Also from Vivienne is the info that Crowvus are looking for memoir submissions in prose, poetry or commentary.

Submission updates

Oh dear - another week when I've got the alert that the blog post is live before I'd finished writing it! I rather suspect that might happen quite often in the months ahead. Still, my cunning plan of posting stuff whenever I can, and scheduling the post is working. I'll keep on with that in the hope that a scrappy, unfinished post with a bit of info is better than nothing.

Photos are from last week's mini literary crime festival. One of the attendees said he uswd to find the blog useful, but hadn't seen it lately. I assured him it's still going, so hope he's found this post. If so - Hello! It was nice to meet you. Have you started editing that book yet?

Free entry writing competitions

Thanks to Alyson for this short story competition from the Jane Austen society.  The prize is to have your story recorded as an audiobook. It all sounds a bit complicated, so please check the website for more details.

Womag news

With Woman's Weekly we're now to assume a rejection if we've not heard back within 16 weeks, rather than 12 as was previously the case. Stories can still be 'placed on file' for possible use in future. If that happens, it's OK to try them elsewhere and withdraw them fro WW if you get a sale.

The People's Friend have again asked for no formatting at all on submissions - incliding not double line spacing, and no page numbers. This is to save them time and they will now not consider any submissions with any kind of formatting at all. This was announced on Twitter. If, like me, you don't use that platform, you can find the deails in my previous post.

New The People's Friend guidelines?

I've heard reports of new, and slightly confusing, guidelines for The People's Friend having been posted on Twitter yesterday. Given the date, and the fact they didn't seem clear, a couple of people have asked me if these are genuine.

I'm not on Twitter, so rely on their website for submission requirements. The 'latest guidelines' there are dated September last year. They don't match what has been seen, by some, on Twitter, and apparently the tweets didn't have the tone of a joke, so I'm not sure. 

When I know more, I'll post an update.

And here's the update, from Alan at TPF.

Hello! Everyone on the "Friend" is very busy, as you know, so from today onwards we won't be accepting submissions that have double line spacing or have formatting.

We also need double quotes for direct speech.

Please DO NOT have headers, footers or page numbers on your document. You must adhere to our word counts. 10% UNDER is OK, but not over.

It's taking up more and more time to get documents ready for our publishing system and that's why we're asking! Thank you!