Sunday 13 February 2011

Changes

It's notoriously difficult to sell short story collections, as those of you that have tried to will know. Bridge House is a partnership- an alliance of three writers and an admin person and we started out with a dream. We were well aware that there were not enough opportunities for short stories to be published in books and we wanted to give new writers a voice.

It went from strength to strength with 12 titles in less than 2 years. But sales are not as we'd hoped. It's not only hard to sell short stories but also to compete with the big publishing houses. But we love what we're doing so we plan to keep going.

Our most successful book was Gentle Footprints our charity collection, we managed to get that on TV and launched at Hay!

So, while none of us have been able to take a wage, and wonder if that will ever change, we are still carrying on but with changes.

The Bridge House partners met last week and looked at how we can keep going but without making a loss. Less titles, all charity and maybe in the future all competition anthologies which means there will be a small submission fee. It's a shame but since we work for free and we love the books we produce it's a way to still continue.

So do keep following us and let's make this Blog more interactive- authors- if you want to Blog please let me know and I will invite you to post. Let us know what you think!

Another change, starting with the new charity book for children we will be 'going direct' with the printer which we hope will widen our distribution channels and increase sales. It will also make less work for our great admin person who does not have the creative buzz Gill, Ollie and I have and we can't expect her to keep doing all that admin for free. She has been with us for 2 years and has done a fab job- but it's a lot of work and not the exciting stuff.

I hope this clarifies things- we are still here but with differences.

If any of you have any ideas we want to hear from you!

So we'll keep you posted!

Debz :)

3 comments:

Paula RC said...

Hi Bridgehouse Team, I'm sorry to hear that you're having to make changes, but it is understandable in the times we live. Most competitions have a small submission fee, if not some are quite large fees.
I would be quite happy to pay a medium fee to enter your competitions just to know you can all keep up the good work you are doing.

Best wishes,
Jarmara

Gill James said...

As well as being a Bridge House partner, I am a lecturer in creative writing at a university and part of my role there is to vet calls to submission and competitions before flagging them up for my students.
I think the fees we've charge so far for competition are very reasonable - I tend to judge the reasonableness of other copmetitions against ours and have to assume that others work as ethically as we do. In many cases, I actually know that they do.

suzy doodling said...

Hi Bridgehouse team.
I'm sure writers' don't mind a small submission fee. Your books look great, and I'd love to have a story published in one of them one day. I'm not sure if you can do it, but I support the lifeboats. That would be a good charity to have an anthology on. Good luck and hope you can carry on with the publishing.

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