Month: September 2012
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A New Beginning.
September 26, 2012We are closing … our [untitled] website.
That’s right, the [untitled] website will be expiring at the end of the month, (give or take a day or two).
Instead of being scattered across the net, we’ll be consolidating [untitled] into the Busybird Publishing website. So you can now find the [untitled] page here and submissions page here. All the other [untitled] stuff is also there – the FAQ, the Competition page, and the Contact page. (Keep in mind that our email address has changed to untitled.at.busybird.com – obviously substituting ‘@’ for ‘at’). We’ll also be adding stuff, like actual stories that have won or archived in our competitions.
Ultimately, you can find [untitled] and all of Busybird’s products in the Our Books menu.
As an aside (albeit an important one), please be aware that page seventeen is also following suit.
Having spruiked all that, please keep in mind that we are actively seeking submissions for issue six, which is due out (hopefully) in March or April of next year. So if you’ve got a story you think is right, feel free to fire away.
If you’re (still) wondering what we’re looking for, well, we’ve banged on about this ad nauseam, but we just want a good story. If you go back over previous issues, we’ve published drama, romance, satire, experimental, horror, and the list goes on. What they all have in common, though, is that they’re all great stories, stories you can lose yourself in whilst reading – the best sort.
We don’t have any real deadline. Anything which doesn’t make it into consideration for any given issue is rolled over into the next. However, at the moment, issue six is an open slate.
So get writing.
Get submitting!
LZ.
The Power of Self-Publishing
September 15, 2012
Self-publishing a book is very empowering. With less than ten percent of work that is submitted to traditional publishers being published, it’s any wonder that writers keep going. We find that for the average 200 submissions that we get for each issue of [untitled], that we only publish about a dozen. This isn’t because what we receive is bad writing, it just isn’t of the standard that we can work with.
This is why we are very passionate about helping people to realise their dream of being published and to eradicate that 80s stigma of ‘vanity’ publishing. Any writing has an element of vanity or ego. Why else would a person spend so much time working at it and suffering the rejection that essentially is the life of a writer? (remember there’s 90 percent-ish being rejected). But there is also an element of wanting to find the truth in the writing and sharing it with the world, whether it is fact or fiction.
For us, there is great satisfaction of working through a project with a writer, helping with the editing or putting it together in preparation for printing, and being there with them when they realise their dream. For us, the aha moment is when we’re at the launch and the author is sitting at the ‘signing’ table with a stack of their books and a huge grin on their faces.