Author

Anne Skyvington

The Night of the Barricades

I open my eyes onto a strange world into which I’ve stumbled as if by chance. All is new and filled with an alien radiance, muted colours, greys yet beautiful. Hippies are twanging their guitars along the Seine. Flower sellers and precious bookstall owners hawk their wares along the promenades above. The ancient cobblestones conceal the holographs of those trapped forever in bloodstained revolutions. Seduced at every turn. I think that this must be my spiritual home, on the opposite side of the earth to my birth place.

The Frenchman I meet while travelling across the Channel offers me the use of his apartment for two weeks. Why not? I thought. My tourist’s trip through the Mediterranean countries can wait. Generous and eccentric to a fault, these French — opposite story to what I’ve been told! I find his street in a Michelin Guide book I bought at the Gare du Nord: rue Servandoni, in the sixth arrondissement. One change and out at the metro station near the Seine.

It’s a steep climb up a creaking staircase to the small flat overlooking a courtyard at the back of the building.

Once in the flat, I’m a child released in a magic castle, running to each window and feasting on the Mary Poppins-like scene of rooftop spires and toy-street-scapes at all cardinal points. I’m inside a foreign country in miniature: its smells and furnishings, reflect an exotic old-world charm.

Alain has said to use what I want from the kitchen. The cans of food in the pantry, all are new to me. Chestnut jam, a thick, sweet, strange-tasting substance. Something called cassoulet in a tin. Brands that I’ve never heard of nor seen in the shops back home. I’m touching, prodding at everything. I’m swooning from the newness of it all. I’m a child in a toy shop, like the children in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Jam has coated my mouth that feels like the bottom of a bird cage. I want to brush my teeth, but discover too late that the white-tubed stuff is shaving cream.

I can’t wait to get downstairs once again and wander around the maze of streets and districts, as I once did around the farm as a small child. On the southern side of the street is the immense Luxembourg Gardens. Walking through them I’m still marvelling at the feeling of being in a dream from which I might awake at any moment. Further on I come to the Boulevard Saint Michel. Crowds of fine-featured French walk or sit in bars and in cafés; African and Arabic-looking student types mingle, laughing and talking gaily. Moroccan restaurants are everywhere.

poem-rimbaud-on-wall-paris — A Symbolist Poem by Arthur Rimbaud

I’m in the bustle of the Latin Quarter. I sit in a Moroccan restaurant and order a couscous dish. Sumptuous, unlike anything I’ve ever tasted before. I’m free as a bird and wash the food down with cheap red wine. I look out at the sophisticated, fashionably dressed women. I compare their slight frames and neat coiffures to my ample curves and unschooled locks of long brown hair.

Following the rim of the Jardin back the way I’ve come, I’m able to make my way home to the flat without too much trouble.

For many days I wander, love-struck by difference and by beauty along the streets with their ancient, graceful buildings and perfectly manicured gardens in the classic style. As if in a dream I float up and down the escaliers, past the concierge, and out into the streets, then back inside.

To improve my French I recount over and over the story of my life, where I come from, where I’ve lived, and about my family. They always ask what my father does. How to translate ‘grazier’? Fermier? Propriétaire de ranche?

Through a chance encounter, I find a cheap room that once was servants’ quarters at the back of a doctor’s gracious residence. I live here for a while and sense the ghosts from a thousand years around me as I lie in the dark before sleep overtakes me each night. There’s a shared ‘water cabinet’ that I squat over as I used to do when nature called while mustering cattle in the bush. My savings begin to dwindle, I grow tense with anxiety and find a part-time job cleaning rooms in a hotel not far from my lodgings. I wonder about the lives of the single men whose rooms I clean, but whom I never see; only their musk-like scents I inhale.

One night I feel a dark presence invading my tiny room at the top of the fire escape stairs. It’s time, once again, to move on.

Walking back from Irma La Douce early one evening, as twilight caresses me in its dreamlike tones, I find myself taking on the character from the film. Swaying hips, I become Irma and sway along the boulevard, green stockings highlighting shapely legs underneath a tight-fitting woollen dress. Then I am being followed, and feel a rush of fear mixed with elation that makes me quicken my pace.

He starts to quicken his pace too. The man will catch up with me and know where I live. I imagine allowing him to follow me upstairs to my tiny room. He kisses me on the lips. Undresses me: ‘Vous-êtes la vedette américaine, Shirley Maclaine?’ An Anglo-Saxon body attracts attention here if you allow it to, contrasting with the delicate, petite lines of the French women all around me.

Fate intervenes and takes the decision out of my hands. There’s a fracas going on up ahead on the boulevard Saint Michel that throws me into history, like Stendhal’s Fabrice caught up in The Battle of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme. (Not nearly so romantic sounding as The Charterhouse of Parma).

I soon find myself in the midst of a revolution, young people, students, tearing up paving stones and setting cars alight.

Tear gas is thick in the air and some of the students are crying uncontrollably. There’s talk of the military being brought in by De Gaulle and blood in the streets.

La Sorbonne in May 68, in *Le Monde* newspaper, photo by Bruno Barbey

The police start to move towards the Sorbonne, on the opposite side of the street. Pictures of Marx, Lenin, and Mao decorate the old pillars surrounding the front square. Red and black flags hang alongside the Vietcong flag. Trotsky, Castro and Che Guevara pictures are plastered on walls alongside slogans such as ‘Everything is Possible’ and ‘It is Forbidden to Forbid.’

I’m afraid I’ll be arrested and deported. I slink back towards the apartment blocks and stand inside a doorway. Residents are hanging out of windows. They shower debris on the police and spray soothing water over the students to minimise the effect of the chlorine gas grenades.

A young man with scraggy red hair jumps up on a wall in front of the Sorbonne and cried out to the students to carry on.

‘Qui est-ce?’ I ask a young woman standing smoking Gitanes next to me.

‘On l’appelle Danny le Rouge; c’est l’un des leaders.’

I understand immediately that he is the leader of the student rebellion. And this is how I meet Ellie, who’s unafraid of being sent back to Germany. She’s handing out lemon-soaked handkerchiefs smeared with bicarbonate of soda for around the eyes, as well as leaflets on how to protect oneself against tear gas. Ellie is the antithesis of every stereotype I’ve heard about Germans: short with thick dark hair, cerulean blue eyes and pure white skin. She’s a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and works part-time as an artist’s model.

At that moment the police move into the Sorbonne and arrest the red-haired man. Students start pulling up paving stones from the streets and hurling them at the police. Then others join in. The police are flailing their batons, demonstrators fall to the ground, police clubbing them, blood streaming from their faces as they lie on the pavement. The youths throw stones, and kick gas grenades at the police, who protect their faces with masks that look like fencing ones.

‘What we are afraid: le Géneral de Gaulle will set the army on to us,’ whispers Ellie who is pale yet determined.

The students have made bonfires like the cracker night ones back home, only from cars and anything they can lay their hands on, and set them alight. I start to join in, already in too deep, terror and elation mixing in equal measure. I’ve met a sort of soul mate in Ellie, and a potential flat mate. ‘Meet me tomorrow in the Père Lachaise Cemetery,’ she says in between her revolutionary duties. ‘We will talk then.’ I feel like I’ve come home.

But for now … it’s the night of the barricades.

February 15, 2021 0 comment

Novel Writing Writing

How I Created My Debut Novel

The Story of the Novel

Those in the know say Write about what you know. This could be my parents’ love story, with the boring bits left out.

My story takes place in a raw and natural setting called Karrana, where a stunningly attractive young woman is ready to break out of her universe and demand more from life. She’s clever and, like a bright chrysalis, just knows that she deserves more — like the cows know when it’s time to come home for milking. She meets the love of her life, or is it her polar opposite (?), at a victory dance. This novel takes place in an Australian country setting at the end of the Second World War in the Pacific. She falls pregnant in a moment of raw passion and rebellion. This throws her back into the very environment she is trying to break free from. This is a women’s story, so it’s about love, nature, pregnancies, child nurturing and dissatisfaction. And for those men who would understand and appreciate these themes. An accident to her first ‘golden child’ sends the young woman into a spin — a bit like a depression — followed by something akin to enlightenment, wherein passion leads her into a forbidden liaison with a sophisticated, refugee doctor in Sydney.

I won’t tell you the ending, but suffice it to say that it’s a bit complicated.

How I Wrote the First Draft

I wrote it chapter by chapter over a period of 18 months in 2013 – 2014, meeting in a group of four every fortnight, Randwick Writers, convened by Dina Davis. My first mistake was to engage an editor to do a structural edit when I had written the first draft. It was not ready to be assessed at this stage. After this, I put the manuscript away for some time and concentrated on blogging. I was also attending a larger writers’ group, and focusing on memoir writing. Later on, I worked some more on the story, while attending the Waverley Writers at the local library.

The Question of Structure

I had discovered that one of the hardest things about writing a novel is accessing knowledge and skills to do with structuring a longer work. That is, with the overall storytelling aspect. It begs the question of how to hold the whole novel in your sights, in order to appreciate or critique the structure and add significant bits and sacrifice others that might be scaffolding or padding.

Writers’ groups, unless there are novelists within who are aware of textuality, cannot usually help you with this aspect. Participants often focus on the smaller aspects to do with punctuation, words and grammar, all at the level of the sentence or the chapter.

It’s even harder to remember previous scenes or chapters of your colleagues’ novel manuscripts in a group. And, if you are writing a modern work, you need to consider recent changes that have taken place in this art form.

The Bigger Picture

I thought for a long while that it’s all about understanding Voice, Viewpoint, Point of View, Scenes and other issues, such as pace and narrative arc. And about writing a segment or a chapter from go to woe, that is, from the beginning to the end. But, after getting a grasp on such elements, and finishing the first draft, I was still searching for that elusive missing link, that was how to discover the overarching theme or rationale? for the novel I was writing. This became my next quest.

A Manuscript Assessment

A talented manuscript assessor at Writing New South Wales, requested, for a moderate sum, a couple of chapters of my manuscript, together with a synopsis, and then offered an hour-long Q&A session, where we worked together, asking and answering questions. That was what got me over the hump towards completion. After that, I knew where I was coming from and where I was headed. This was important for structural cohesion of the whole work; it enabled a final culling—and/or perfecting—of relevant motifs and metaphors. Within a relatively short period of time, I felt ready to publish the novel, so that it all hangs together. The missing link for myself, was knowing the right questions in relation to overall novelistic structure, to discover the ‘meaning’ of the work. After all, the novel is about many things, but this needs to be distilled into one or two sentences. Of course, if you plan the novel beforehand, you may not need this process, but there will be other different issues to confront.

Creating a Logline

I came across Jeff Lyons through Reedsy. Jeff is an expert in the art of storytelling. He states that you need a ‘logline’, which is a summary or premise, in one or two sentences, even before you start to write your novel. Of course, most people, and I am one of them, don’t work in this way. However, I have found that it is important to be able to do this, at some stage during the creative process. According to Lyons, the logline should include 7 parts: (i) a mention of the World of the novel (ii) the main Protagonist (iii) the Problem faced (iv) the Goal or Challenge for the protagonist (v) the personalised Opponent (vi) Choices or Decisions (vii) the Action taken by the protagonist.

The Logline or Premise of Karrana

In post-World War Two Australia, Bridie, a spirited young woman brought up on a dairy farm, surrounded by beauty and rawness, seeks romance and ultimate fulfilment. She hopes her choice of a mate, who she meets at the Karrana Victory Dance, will lead to a different future than that her mother, and, later on, her husband, want to keep her cosseted in. Her passionate nature, aided by fateful irony, deems that she demands more from life than nature alone; a family accident takes a hand in ensuring this.

July 4, 2020 0 comment

Writing

Randwick Writers’ Group: Sharing Writing Skills

A book about writing groups

Joining a writing group is very popular these days, at least in Anglo speaking countries. There are many different types of writing groups, just as there are various types of writers. Some writers simply wish to record memories for their family, children and friends to read. Writing correctly and clearly will be a main push for them. Others want to hone their skills towards the goal of writing a short story, or a longer genre, such as a novel or a modern memoir. They will need different skills, for example, knowledge of how to structure a particular genre.

I have been a member of three writing groups over the years, and most participants, when asked, expressed a wish to be published. One of the groups I was a part of was Randwick Writers Group, which has recently published a book that showcases work from six members in search of writing excellence. Each of the six participants found that being part of this group brought their writing up to a new level.

This book is unique in that it has followed members from the initial phase of setting up the group, until this point, five years later, when three members have published novels, and the rest are on the point of doing so.

If you would like to find out more about the workings of writing groups, this book is what you are looking for. As well as informational content, it also showcases the writings of the authors. It can be purchased through the publisher, Ginninderra Press or through online book stores, such as Amazon and other online bookstores. Enjoy!

Click on this link to have a peep inside the online digital version of the book.

https://www.book2look.com/book/TPULpSvFiE&bibletformat=epub

Purchase the digital book at Amazon Australia

May 7, 2020 0 comment

Publishing

5 Further Publishing Facts

NIELSEN BOOKSCAN

In December 2000 the situation for publishers began to change a little with the establishment of Nielsen BookScan, a local affiliate of US polling company A.C. Nielsen. Nielsen tracks book sales by barcode from around eighty-five per cent of all retail outlets selling books in Australia. Its main customers are publishing houses which, for an annual subscription fee of up to $100,000, are regularly emailed spreadsheets showing the best-selling books. These include details such as actual copies sold, average selling price and publisher across 140 genre categories and sub-categories.

Of the top 132 best-selling titles listed in the first two pages of the Nielsen top 5000 list for the five weeks ending 1 January 2005, 65 originated from Australia. Of these only four were literary novels: Tim Winton’s The Turning at number 9, Cloud Street at number 65, and Dirt Music at number 104. Winton is unique in Australian publishing, having both a literary and a large popular audience.

This is another problem for writers such as myself whose work might straddle the literary and commercial fields.

THE RISE OF THE GENRE PARADIGM

The appearance of genre fiction in bestseller lists with the advent of BookScan also granted it a new cultural and economic respectability. Genre fiction is highly author-and formula-driven and attracts reader loyalty, while its authors tend to generate new titles on a regular, often annual, basis, making genre fiction far more reliable than literary fiction from a publisher’s list-building point of view. The authors of popular fiction are also more likely to be granted celebrity status than literary authors, maximising their promotional potential.

The availability of data from companies such as BookScan means that publishers, for the first time, have access to accurate, up-to-the-minute sales figures that are transparent across the industry. No longer is it possible to fudge sales.

THE DECLINE OF LITERARY

Of the recent changes in Australian book publishing, among the most striking is the decline of the literary paradigm.

By the early 2000s almost no major Australian publisher was aggressively seeking or promoting new literary fiction at the forefront of their lists, and literary fiction was no longer the cornerstone of the industry’s self-perception. In the late 1990s Penguin Books, which had been at the forefront of the ‘cultural renaissance’ of the 1960s to 1980s period, first dropped its poetry list.

Literary fiction will otherwise become the preserve of independent or small publishers and self-publishing. The consolidation of publishing has resulted in a counter-movement from established independent publishers such as Text Publishing and Scribe, who have sought to exploit the potential of niche-audience mid-list titles as profit-making prospects with ‘a long tail’. Midlist is a term in the publishing industry which refers to books which are not bestsellers but are strong enough to economically justify their publication and likely, further purchases of future books from the same author.

In 2004 Text formed a partnership with Scottish publisher Canongate to maximise the value of both lists. New small presses such as Vulgar and Giramondo attempt to offer a home and space for aesthetic freedom an experimentation for mid-list authors disenchanted with mainstream publishers, such as Brian Castro now at Giramondo.

Confronted by the new market conditions, literary writers have begun to look at ways of reinventing themselves, either turning to a commercial model or else looking overseas.

The increasing difficulty of getting published has fostered an underground push for change and a search for new paradigms, reflected in the rise of alternative literary festivals, a live reading circuit, and self-publishing through make-your-own imprints such as Vandal Press and Cardigan Press both collectives that publish short story collections. Such developments point to how literature might become a do-it-yourself culture that will operate, for the time being, at least partly outside mainstream publishing culture, having cleared itself a space for experimentation and the development of new paradigms.

But publishers say there is no harder sell in the world of books these days than literary fiction.

OTHER OUTLETS

Meanwhile, writers around the world can bypass the traditional publishing process if they wish, and self-publish their work, enjoying unprecedented freedom and autonomy in delivering their work directly to readers.

You create an account with KDP and upload your manuscript, cover images and other required details onto Amazon’s KDP platform. https://kdp.amazon.com/ where you will find all the information you require for setting up and proceeding.

ONE SECRET IS the amount Amazon reports paying out in 2019 to indie publishers and authors through its Kindle Unlimited subscription program. That brings Amazon’s total payout for self-published authors up to $2.2 billion since 2012 when it launched this “pay as you read” program that’s much loved by readers around the world.

KINDLE UNLIMITED

Very few indie authors know what Kindle Unlimited is all about!

Kindle Unlimited is a ‘lending library’ that helps readers discover your books in dozens of countries, including the US, UK, Germany, Canada, Mexico, and beyond. Authors are paid by the number of pages read instead of outright eBook purchases.

Kindle Unlimited is just one of many great sales and marketing opportunities available at Amazon, and self-published authors have found great success using them to launch and promote their eBooks.

Establish a price for your book and list your book’s genre and categories. Choose keywords so readers can find your book, and supply more information, called metadata, about your book.

Your book, digital or printed, will go live on Amazon just a few hours after you’ve uploaded it correctly. Millions of potential readers can now find your book. It’s part of a relatively new distribution process called Print on Demand or POD. Amazon sends out royalty payments to authors each month of 12 to 20 percent of the sales price for the physical POD books and 70% for the eBook sales.

You need an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) to distribute your book through retailers globally. Amazon can provide one for you, or you can purchase your own from Thorpe-Bowker Identifier Services https://www.myidentifiers.com/

KBoards is a website devoted to all things Kindle. They’re a small family operation, but they’ve become the largest independent Kindle user site on the web.

April 1, 2020 0 comment

Publishing

5 Facts I Learnt About Self/Publishing

Someone said it takes a village to bring up a child; it’s the same for writing a novel. This was certainly true for me.

Experts say you should write about what you know, so I wrote about my parents’ love story, set in country New South Wales, as Australia was exiting from the Second World War. This was a time when big changes were happening in this part of the world.

I probably showed my work too soon, and to the wrong person/people early on. However, I found an excellent manuscript assessor, and finalised the novel, utilising skills I’d developed over years of creative writing practice and research. I’d also learnt, after long hours in feedback groups, how to self edit my work, both at the macro level and at the micro and middle levels.

I then taught myself how to upload an ebook to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform. [KDP]. It proved to be tricky at first.

Going Back to the 2000s

As Amazon released its first eReader, the kindle, in 2007, I became increasingly interested in the slowly emerging ‘Internet’, and the opportunities it brought to writers everywhere. Just as I was experimenting with all things digital, I joined a writers’ group at Waverley Library and ended up volunteering as a creative writing convenor in 2009. My first step was to create a list of guidelines for giving and receiving feedback; I’ve found that it’s essential for the happy functioning of a group and many others have caught on now.

I had completed Creative Writing Studies at The University Of Technology, Sydney in 2005. And gradually I’d become fascinated with the concept of ‘blogging’, digital marketing and self-publishing. My own blog The Craft of Writing, journals the past ten years of my educational experience, beginning as a complete Internet newbie, to a digital expert in the field of publishing and creative writing.

What I learnt about Traditional Publishers

A Definition: To greatly simplify matters, a traditional publisher acts as a gatekeeper and pays an advance to authors.

It wasn’t long ago that if you wanted to be published, there was only one route: submitting to a publisher. A traditional publisher, if you are lucky enough to have your manuscript accepted, will pay you an upfront amount of between $5 and $10, 000 or anything up to $50 000. Obamas, the former first couple of the United States, received $60 million for two books. There are exceptions. The catch is that royalties gained are deducted from the cash payment.

Most of the large publishing houses require an agent to represent you. It’s almost impossible for a new writer or author to get published in Australia by the big 5 unless an agent is involved. And it is just as difficult to gain an agent as it is a publisher. Pan Macmillan, Penguin Australia, Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins and Simon and Schuster are busy representing established authors, or taking on famous people such as presidents, sports stars and politicians.

With the onset of digital publishing, printing a book has become cheap. In fact, you can use POD (Print-On-Demand), which prints and mails books out as they’re ordered. To order one of my own books from Ingram, I pay about $25, of which half is the printing and half the shipping costs.

In the US fewer than one percent of submitted manuscripts are published. Without counting self-published titles that makes upwards of 300,000 new titles a year. (If you count self published works, it’s 600, 000 – 1,000, 000 books. Publishers nowadays are positively swamped with submissions. There is so much material to choose from that naturally publishers have become more selective. Queries outline ‘the bones of the story structurally and thematically’ and are written by the author. The competition is intense. 90% are culled just from a query letter. (Source: Jane Friedman).

Large commercial publishers receive hundreds and even thousands of unsolicited manuscripts each year. Some, such as HarperCollins, read only half of them and of those that are read, only about five end up on the shelves of a bookstore. In 1998, Penguin publisher Julie Gibbs noted that her company received an average of 70 unsolicited manuscripts per week – that is, some 3,640 a year – of which only three or four were considered worthy of publication.

The Truth Will Set You Free

First the bad news: Most people who write a book will never get it published; half the writers who are published won’t see a second book in print; and most books published are never reprinted. What’s more, half the titles in any given bookshop won’t sell a single copy there, and most published writers won’t earn anything from their book apart from the advance.

The truth is that you and I will still go on writing and enjoying writing because of the passion involved. And you might find that your writing improves greatly, when you are freed from the pressure of seeking a publisher. Plus, there are nowadays other options to the traditional approach.

For a long while, I decided not to expect anything from my writing apart from the personal fulfilment of having learned my craft and believing that I would, maybe, one day create a work that hadn’t existed before.

Authors seeking traditional publication undergo a tortuous procedure that involves identifying appropriate publishers, querying, pitching, contract negotiation…. I went through the hoops, even though I was already published on my own creative writing blog, where I’d learnt how to be correct and dot all the I’s before I ever pushed the publish button.

A blogging mentor suggested that I go through the ropes of being published traditionally and trial the ‘literary speed dating’ event held by the Australian Society of Authors (ASA). All six of the publishers and an agent I met at this event expressed glowing interest in my pitches for Karrana, and gave me their cards. I tried about seven or eight in the Independent Publishers stream. Nothing much followed my queries and written approaches.

One of the problems for me was that learning how to write these written pitches involved using the left (logical) side of my brain, and took me away from creative writing, which had become my passion.

For a new writer, especially, this process is intimidating and scary as they try to navigate the competitive, unfamiliar territory of the publishing world. It’s exhausting and, at times, disheartening. No one likes rejection. It’s your baby, for goodness sakes!

Reputable Independent Traditional Publishers in Australia, such as Text Publishing, Scribe Publications, Ventura, Allen&Unwin, Affirm Press, and Black Inc are also often unwilling to accept a writer’s unsolicited manuscript without an agent’s referral, even though they may advertise to the contrary.

There are Small Presses and Small Presses…

Small presses are an important alternative for writers who don’t want to go the agent-to-big-publisher route, but prefer to avoid the DIY work of self-publishing. Most reputable small presses cannot afford to pay advances, but nor do they charge you an upfront fee.

Respected Small Presses, such as Pantera, Giramondo, Cordite, and Transit Lounge, usually cannot afford to pay advances or assist authors greatly in having their books placed in large bricks-and-mortar bookstores.

These smaller publishers are often under-staffed and not always able to provide complete editing or distribution facilities for new writers. But they’re a good option for a writer starting out.

If a small press requests payment for services, this should be a red light to a writer. Legitimate publishers do not charge an author to publish their book. Important side note: If the small press makes you pay upfront for their in-house editing, design, or production—or makes you pay for copies of your book—they’re not a traditional publisher, but a hybrid publisher or a publishing service. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with utilising these services if you choose to. And you may finish up with a book, or a publishable manuscript, of which you can be proud.

Hybrid publishers combine certain aspects of traditional publishing and self-publishing.

In the case of assisted self-publishing or publishing services (called ‘vanity presses’ in the old days), these companies sometimes adopt the moniker of ‘hybrid publisher’ to look more innovative or attractive to authors. You can’t blame them for doing this. But know that they’re not really a hybrid publisher, unless they can offer value and/or distribution and marketing muscle that can’t be secured on your own as a self-publisher, or with a small publishing press.

The best hybrid publishers conduct some level of gatekeeping, offer value that the author would have a hard time securing on her own, and should also pay better royalties than a traditional publishing deal. (Fifty percent is common). If the hybrid publisher presents itself as little more than ‘Here’s a package of services you can buy’, then it’s most likely a dressed-up self-publishing firm.

Keep in mind that…

Traditional Publishers get a lot of manuscripts, and may take a while to respond — preferring to work on the basis of ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’.

March 23, 2020 0 comment