A busy, busy few weeks for Fiction Feedback. As well as
helping our friends over at Open Circle, (www.opencirclebooks.com), most especially by editing the second
book they’ve published, Proceeds of Crime
by DJ Harrison, we’re also seeing our first customer novel through to ebook production.
Book cover design has gone extremely well, and the final proof-read is now in
hand.
Currently, we’re only providing our ebook service to Fiction
Feedback customers – writers who’ve received critiques and particularly copy-editing
from us. We recognise this might disappoint some would-be customers. After all,
Fiction Feedback is about encouraging writers to write and to help get quality
work out there for readers to read.
Yet the key word here is quality.
So much writing that is self-published today has patently not been
professionally edited and while very occasionally that might not present a
problem, we believe that it often has the effect of lowering expectations from
readers of what to expect from a self-published novel. And this has a knock-on
effect for every novel which is self-published. It tarnishes everyone’s efforts
and turns readers off, which is so very unfair.
We don’t want to be associated with any work which makes it
harder for good self-published authors to get their work taken seriously. So we’ll
look at a manuscript that’s submitted for ebook production and check that it
only needs proof-reading (and if that’s already been professionally done, then great).
But if it needs editing rather than proofing, or if perhaps it’s not even ready
for that, then we will decline to produce the work as an ebook and it’s up to
the author what steps they take next.
Inevitably this will mean our ebook production arm won’t be as
commercially successful as it might be. But if commercial success were our only
aim, then Fiction Feedback’s critiquing prices would be much higher, and the personal
service we provide to any customer who wants it would be compromised.
