Autumn days…what better time to either curl up with a good book or – better still – write something creative of your own. Here are a few competitions to spur you on.
Grindstone International Novel Prize 2023 for unpublished, previously published or self-published writers who are not represented by a literary agent. The winner will receive £1,500. There is a runner-up prize of £500 and four shortlist prizes of £100. All the long-listed entries will be forwarded to agents affiliated to Grindstone Literary. Include an elevator pitch and a brief synopsis (300-400 words) with the first 5,000 words. Entry is £20. Closing date: 1 October. Details: http://www.grindstoneliterary.com
Bath Flash Fiction Award. Thrice yearly competition for flash fiction up to 300 words. Prizes: £1,000, £300, £100, 2x£30. Entry fee: ££9. Closing date: 1 October. Details: http;//bathflashfictionaward.com
Tom Gallon Trust Awards for short stories up to 5,000 words by authors who have had at least one story accepted for publication. Prizes: £2,00, £1,000, £500. FREE ENTRY. Deadline: 31 October. Details: http://www.societyofauthors.org
The Bedford Competition for short stories up to 3,000 words or poetry up to 40 lines. Prizes: £1,500, £300, £200. Entry £7.50 for one or £15 for three. Deadline 31 October. Details: https://bedfordwritingcompetition.co.uk
Fiction Factory Short Story Competition for stories up to 3,000 words. Deadline 31 October. Prizes: £500. Entry fee: £7. Details: http://fiction-factory.biz
Retreat West Prize for short stories (1,500-2,500 words) flash fiction (150-500 words), and micro-flash (up to 150 words). Prizes: £400, £250, £150, £20 each shortlisted for short stories; £350, £200, £100 and £15 for flash; £200, £100, £50 and £10 for micro. Entry fee: ££10 for short stories, £8 for flash, £5 for micro. Closing date: 31 October. Details: http://www.retreatwest.co.uk
Virginia Prize for Fiction for unpublished novels, at least 45,000 words, by women. Prizes: Development and publication of the winning novel. Closing date: 31 October. Details: https://aurorametro.,com/virginia-prize-for-fiction/
McKitterick Prize for the best first novel, published or unpublished, by an author over the age of 40. Prizes: £2,000, 4x£1,000. FREE ENTRY. Closing date: 31 October. Details: http://www.societyofauthors.org
Competitions are a tremendous way of honing your writing skills and even being long-listed for something is a worthwhile achievement. Think of it like the Olympic medals. Everyone hopes for a Gold Medal, but nobody scorns receiving the Bronze Medal.
Please check details before entry in case of last-minute cancellations or alterations.
With little spare money for books when I was growing up, I haunted the local library (using my mother’s ticket) and begged for book tokens as presents.
An early birthday treasure was Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, with its introduction to the moody, broody Fairfax Rochester and his collision (I use the word advisedly) with a disadvantaged young governess who astonishes him by considering herself his spiritual equal.
Jane had a hard life, being orphaned, then taken in unwillingly by an aunt lacking the charity to care for her who sent her to a harsh school run by a clerical hypocrite. Daunted, but not crushed, she emerges as an educated young woman eager to explore the outside world. Advertising for a position, she finds herself in a grand house that conceals a secret of gothic proportions. She also finds herself presented with almost irresistible physical temptation.
The story of Jane Eyre is widely known, from films as well as from the book, but for those who have somehow missed it, I will refrain from further spoilers – except to say that this novel, written in a Yorkshire parsonage in the days of Victoria, has much to say to a modern reader.
The book was the first one to teach me about strong women. That they didn’t have to be Boudicca or Elizabeth Tudor, capable of leading men into battle. That they could be seemingly ‘ordinary’ creatures who made something significant of often narrow lives.
‘Miss Eyre, are you ill,’ says Bessie, highlighting the child’s awkward place in her aunt’s house: she is not a servant, yet nor is she mistress of anything except herself. Young women ‘of the middling sort’ in Victorian England had few opportunities other than marriage, teaching someone else’s (often spoiled) children, or becoming companion to a demanding dowager. Yet Jane Eyre uses her experience of cruelty and loneliness to strengthen her natural independence of spirit.
The book takes the reader from a harsh, even cruel, charity school for girls, to the frustrations of a woman yearning for more than society will allow her.
Its language is exceptional, almost poetic:
“Jane, be still; don’t struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.”
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will…”
Jane’s strength of character helps her make a heart-wrenching decision after falling in love with someone beyond her reach, finding that love returned, but discovering that it is forbidden. Her courage, principles and aspirations remain an example even in the 21st century.
While Jane’s creator, Charlotte Bronte, sounds happy with her own eventual marriage to the Rev. Arthur Nicholls, she discovers it has a cost: her husband may be loving, but turns a disapproving eye on her confiding correspondence with a female friend:
“Arthur has been glancing over this note,” she writes. “He thinks I have written too freely…”
If I am left with one sadness about the book, it is because I cannot imagine the spirited Jane allowing Rochester to censor her correspondence.
Jane Eyre changed my life in that my own story – The Servant – was inspired by a visit to London’s Foundling Museum and the stories I discovered there about other disadvantaged young women of education in the 18th century.
Set in 1765, young Hannah may be the granddaughter of a French merchant and the daughter of a Spitalfields silk weaver, but she has come down in the world. Sent as maidservant to a disgraced aristocrat, she finds herself in a house of mysteries, with auctions being held behind closed doors. Unknown to her employers, she can read. But when she uses her education to uncover the secrets of the house, she finds herself in danger…
The award-winning historical thriller, The Servant, by Maggie Richell-Davies is on special 99p offer until the end of September, or £1.99 thereafter. Or it is free to read on Kindle Unlimited.
Liam Stirling – a successful self-published writer of our acquaintance – kindly agreed to treat us to a few words about using Amazon to go it alone. Check him out at http://www.herculesleek.com, or buy his first novel here: The-God-Particle
Liam Stirling
Not every story starts “Once upon a time…”
In the Hungarian tradition, for example, custom dictates that a fairytale begins “Once there was, and now there is not…” This is not a fairytale, but the opening is appropriate. I can’t promise a “happily until always”. So…
Once there was, and now there is not, a time when the only way for a writer to get their book to an audience was through traditional publishing. Mind you, go back further in history and you needed a whole roomful of monks to finish just one book, with each finished volume automatically becoming simultaneously a best-seller and well beyond the price-range of the average man-in-the-street. Which didn’t matter overly much, since the average man-in-the-street couldn’t read. Times change.
With the advent of the internet and the digitisation of the publication process the industry has, in many ways, become hugely democratised. Traditional publishing houses no longer hold the monopoly on what gets published, and the world of the independent author is thriving, but how do you go about self-publishing?
Let’s start by saying this is a huge topic, and one short article is barely going to scratch the surface. The first thing to establish, before we get to any of the practical details, is why do you want to publish? If it is simply for your book to be available, that’s great and you can plough on. But if you have any ambitions to create and grow an audience, you have to realise that publication is only one part of the process, and without effort put into marketing (which is not something that comes naturally to many authors), it is likely that beyond initial copies to friends and family, you will not see much activity on the sales dashboards. Unless you are a tier one star, even traditional publishers expect authors to take on the burden of promotional work. This could just be seen as part of the job of being an author, indie or otherwise. The point is, you need to be prepared mentally for your no-doubt wonderful literary creation not to fly off the shelf, and not to be disheartened if this is the case. The average number of sales for a book pre-self-publishing was about 500. Now it is closer to 150. Consider that there are some authors who shift books by the million, and you will understand that any sales can be considered a result! There are hundreds of thousands of books published each year and you are competing with them for readers. If you are hoping for sales, you will need a well worked out launch strategy. That starts at least six months out from the publication date.
If I haven’t put you off, let’s consider some simple steps of the how-tos of self-publishing. The first thing to decide is where you are going to publish. There are lots of avenues, but the biggest is Amazon, and that is where most people start.
There are certain givens. You have your book in great condition – it has been well-edited and formatted in Word or pdf format. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But people do and it quite literally pays to have a cover that fits with the genre expectations of your audience. A lot of advice suggests that if you are going to spend money on anything in self-publishing, editing and cover design are the places to do so. There are freelancers on sites like Fiverr if you don’t have skills yourself.
Once you have your edited manuscript and cover, you’ll need an account on Amazon’s Kindle Desktop Publishing (KDP) platform. If you are publishing printed versions of your book, you can upload a formatted word or pdf document. If you want to publish as an ebook (and many readers these days read digitally), you will need to upload a different format – either .mobi, .epub or .kfp (Amazon’s bespoke version). Amazon provide desktop software called Kindle Create which will convert your original into an acceptable format.
There are three screens to work through on KDP. The first is where you upload book title, description and search terms. You will need an ISBN for printed books, but Amazon can provide these. If you want to publish elsewhere, you will need to buy your own (easy enough to find online). The second screen is where you upload your manuscript and cover. The final screen is for setting pricing and distribution. You can chose between exclusive publishing with Amazon and a higher royalty, or retain more control for a lower percentage of sales.
That’s it as far as creating something that can be published. But it’s only the start as far as being a self-published author.
Liam Stirling is the author of The God Particle, the first Hercules Leek adventure which mixes fantasy, science-fiction and philosophy with a liberal sprinkling of laugh-out-loud humour. Liam is currently working on the follow-up The Ivory Tower and has a number of other titles planned for the series.
Liam began life as a baby, but professionally soon outgrew this calling and eventually moved on to study Zoology at Oxford University. Following a few years as a research scientist, he was subsequently a saxophonist in an marvelously unsuccessful reggae band, before the gravity of adult life sucked him into a career in IT.
When not doing the day job, he can be found doing the things that take up all the waking hours of a self-published indie author. But somehow he still finds time to play his saxophone and keep bees.
Liam’s short story “What About the Farmers?” retells the encounter of the demons Legion with Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. But you shouldn’t buy this, because if you visit his website www.herculesleek.com, he is giving away copies of the audiobook, narrated by the fantastic James Macnaughton, FREE.