Part One

As you may know I have been sending out a collection of short stories (the snappily titled, In The Future Everyone Will Be World Famous For Fifteen Minutes) to agents and publishers for some time now. I wrote about the frustrations this involves in an earlier blog post. In short, agents don’t want collections because publishers won’t even look at them. This isn’t the case for all agents and publishers but those willing to take on a collection from a new writer are few and far between. There is space for genre fiction and literary fiction but hardly any room for short stories. Most agents and publishers seem to be obsessed with crime and cookery books or ghost written celebrity ‘novels’ and autobiographies. This is ironic given the subject matter of In The Future Everyone Will Be World Famous For Fifteen Minutes, which features stories on the nature of fame and the effect of celebrity culture on ordinary people. For my next book I’m doing Gone Girl Cooks In Hollywood.

I began to look for new ways of getting my collection published. It took a long time to write I don’t want to just give up on it. Someone suggested crowd-funding. I have heard a lot of good things about Unbound, a British crowd-funding publisher, they have a great philosophy, an impressive list of authors and a high success rate. I sent my collection to them a little over six weeks ago. Last Thursday they came back to me offering to digitally host my book. This is very exciting news but it is also a little daunting. They emailed me a contract and wanted a synopsis, a biography, a photograph, a strap line, an extract and a promotional video. They wanted it yesterday, so it could be launched by the end of February. Their promotional video says,

Authors get to write the books they want to write and you get to read real books that, in a crowded, celebrity obsessed market place might never see the light of day.’

Anyway, I managed to get everything together except the video (whic is under construction!) and In The Future Everyone Will Be World Famous For Fifteen Minutes has been soft launched on the Unbound website. The proper launch will be very very soon. I am going to blog about the experience of crowd-funding a book every Thursday right here. In the meantime, if you like short stories please consider pledging – lets prove the naysayers wrong.

Unbound

Happy World Book Day Everyone!