Join us for some Friday Flash Fiction. Every Friday we publish new stories on the Friday flash fiction website, our sister site.

The website has been going for more than two years now and it continues to attract new writers. The basic premises is very simple - write an original, 100-word story, upload it and we'll publish it if we think it's good. 

Obviously, we don't want stories that are offensive or racist, and we'd rather you didn't plagarise anything. 

You can submit stories here. 

Macmillan Publishers in the US has acquired the self-publishing platform, Pronoun.

Founded as Vook in 2009, Pronoun was relaunched with the new name in May 2015. The platform provides digital book publishing services and authors can publish for free. The books are distributed to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google Play and Kobo. It has published books in partnership with the New York Times and Forbes.

Speaking about the acquisition, Pronoun said the move would allow it to create better services for authors.

“Macmillan shares our philosophy that publishing exists to serve the full spectrum of authors. By joining forces, we’ll be able to invest even more in improving and growing Pronoun’s self-publishing platform, all while giving successful independent authors a path towards more opportunity.”
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Macmillan Publishers said they had been impressed with the team’s data, analytics and technology capabilities, which they believed would be of benefit to their publishers and authors. 

Comely Bank Publishing is delighted to announce the publication of Weekender, due out later this year. 

Roland Tye's début novel tells the story of a weekend in Edinburgh, through the point of view of an array of different characters. 

Roland came up with the idea of the novel 16 years ago. He likes stories of people overcoming adversity and in the book, several characters do overcome difficult circumstances.

Keep checking back here for news of the official launch.

Editing is the most important step when it comes to self-publishing – so says Jonathan Kyle, writing for Tampa Bay’s Creative Loafing website this week.

Kyle, whose first novel The Grandfather Clock, is published on Amazon is currently working on his second and third novels.

Done right, editing will make your book indistinguishable from any of those published by the Big Five* according to Kyle. Done wrong – or not at all – and it only confirms the prejudices against self-published novels.

Kyle describes editing as “the art of identifying, measuring and eliminating the bad writing”. He advises on rewriting. While it can be tempting to delete the first draft after critical feedback from your beta readers, that draft is the outline for your new, improved version. Editing is difficult because one little edit at the beginning can set off a chain reaction of changes so it’s vital to keep notes as you go.

Kyle hired a content editor for his first novel. A content editor checks the content for discrepancies in the plot, character or dialogue and if the theme has been developed properly. He or she also looks at the integration of sub-plots. Kyle recommends the hire as a very worthwhile investment.

Kyle’s final piece of advice is to save hiring a copy editor until you are completely finished making changes.
 
 
Jonathan Kyle blogs at Well Oiled Writer.

*In the US, the Big Five publishing houses are Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.

Two different organisations are calling for entries to their literary competitions.

Verbivoracious Press, based in Glasgow and Singapore, is seeking submissions for two projects – essays and manuscript submissions and the closing date is 31 May 2016.

Describing itself as a publisher of “exploratory fiction from around the world”, the essays can be scholarly or creative non-fiction.

The manuscript submission is for publication in Verbivoracious Press’s new fiction series and they state their preference for “ambitious, off-beat playful fiction informed or inspired by the avant garde”.

See the Verbivoracious website for more information.

Carers UK – the national organisation for unpaid family carers – is also organising a writing competition with a first prize of £150 in high street vouchers. The charity is seeking poems and short stores on all aspects of caring – the joys, challenges and complex emotions that come with looking after a loved one.

The closing date is 31 July and the charity will be producing an anthology of the winning and commended poems and stories.

​See the Carers UK website for further details.
 

By Donna Weller

What was once considered a somewhat alternative form of publishing has gone mainstream, and self publishing is more popular than ever.

While traditional publishing houses continue to close the door on many hopeful authors by selecting only a few into their realm, thanks to the boom in digital and print publishing, anyone can see his or her book in print. The generation of the self-published author has arrived.

If you’re a self-published author, marketing your own book is a given, but before you can sell your book, you need to market it – and for a self-published author, marketing your book can be more important than actually writing it.

With a few key actions, you can build a loyal following, get the word out about your work and more importantly, get people to buy it.

Here are my three top tips to help you promote your next book;
1.Create a media kit. This PR tool will allow you to have your materials well organised. Before you can gain attention for your book, you should compile information about it that you can send out to the media. But you'll need to make sure you STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD to stand a chance at attracting attention..

2.Enter your book in competitions. Winning a competition is a major endorsement for your book; awards help with book publicity by verifying that your book is of great quality. Start by looking for contests that don't require steep entry fees.

3. Use Social Media. If you can’t afford much, do social media – It's FREE! Each social media platform offers a way to connect with others and share your ideas but choosing the right one or ones to meet your goals is important. Use Hashtags - It makes your content more searchable on the social networks. Hashtags can also be carried across social media platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and have the potential to reach a wide audience. Increasing your author visibility through different online channels allows you to meet readers, cultivate an audience, and increase your discoverability to sell more books. The internet has created an environment in which authors can compete on a much more level playing field.

Donna Weller is the director and owner of DWD-igital, an integrated marketing organisation which offers a wide range of digital and offline marketing services. She also provides business blogging services for SMEs - via The Business Blogger. 

It’s never been easier to self-publish – according to Hugh Howey.

Writing on his website, Howey, a self-publishing success, discredits the publishing meme which claims that publishing under your own steam is much harder now than it was six years ago when his first book came out.

Whether your book sells in vast quantities or not, Howey reckons, is little to do with the publishing route you choose. Self-publishing, he says, is incredibly simple now. As an aspiring author in 2009, he received plenty of advice – most of which was “dead wrong and overly confident”. He was told that the best way to get his book in front of readers was through querying and traditional publishing – a route that he had questioned at the time. His doubts were shouted down and he was told that self-publishing would destroy his career and that readers would never give him a chance.  

Those telling him not to self-publish often pointed to the publishing successes of the likes of JK Rowling. They weren't talking about the piles of rejected manuscripts or the “vast delays of getting the work to the market”, Howey writes.

Through his work in a book store, Howey says, he met plenty of New York Times best-selling writers who were writing as a hobby or as a second job, Writing wasn't earning them a living. He himself had never wanted to be a Rowling – he just wanted to make enough money to pay the rent or even the power bill. Self-publishing seemed like the best way to do this.

Howey had got a contract and a contract for this second novel. He decided against this route, putting the second contract back in the drawer, buying back the rights for his first novel and then doing something all the experts had told him not to do.

“Back in 2009, we were told our books would be horribly edited, rather than sharing among us the names of our favorite [sic] freelance editors. We were told the cover art would suck… And we were told success along this route only happened once in a lifetime.”

What he’d had, Howey write, was forums full of outdated advice and bullies shouting down anyone who disagreed with their advice. Competition was less in those days, Howey concedes, but by 2016 self-publishing is often the “first and most preferred route” and there are plenty of forums, companies, blogs, resources and more that make the self-publishing route easier than ever.

​Read the full article here. 

Fan fiction based on the successful Outlander’s series has proved a surprise hit for one former YA author.

An article in this week’s Phoenix New Times focuses on author KC Dyer, who used the Outlander series written by Diana Gabaldon as the basis for her self-published comic romance, Finding Fraser. The book is the story of an unemployed divorcee who is so obsessed with Gabaldon’s book that she runs off to the Highlands of Scotland to try to find her own Jamie Fraser (the hero of Outlander).

Dyer published Finding Fraser in 2015 and the book has since been re-published by Berkley.

Speaking to the Phoenix-based paper, Dyer said she thought her book had tapped into the “cultural zeitgeist” and that readers could relate to her heroine Emma and her quest.

Having had the book re-published through traditional publishing had come as relief as it meant she didn't have to concentrate on the minutiae of self-publishing as she felt that so much of self-publishing success wasn't writing.

​Dyer will be meeting up with the Outlander author Gabaldon at the Poisoned Pen’s independent book store celebration on Thursday 5 May.